Coaching practices for Side Project Creativity

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Side Project Creativity, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• Everything I make now has to justify itself
• Every new project I start from a blank page as if I’ve never done anything like it, even though I’ve solved half of it before
• I only ever search my notes for the obvious thing right in front of me, so all the unexpected connections between things I’ve saved from different worlds never surface
• I keep choosing projects based on what I think will impress people or do well, and then I stall out halfway through because deep down they never actually moved me
• Every approach I come up with sounds like me, because I keep ruling out anything that doesn’t feel like something I’d do

Practices that may help

1. Keep side projects and play
   Protect a low-stakes project with no goal — the “waste” is where the real ideas surface.
   Steal Like an Artist, in Practice
2. Express work in reusable intermediate packets
   Break your creative output into small, reusable units — outlines, summaries, frameworks — that can be combined and repurposed.
   Building a Second Brain (BASB), Made Practical
3. Actively connect ideas across projects and topics
   When working on a project, deliberately search your notes for ideas from unrelated domains that might apply.
   Building a Second Brain (BASB), Made Practical
4. Follow genuine interest, not strategic interest
   Pursue the thing that genuinely excites you — even if you cannot explain why or see how it fits.
   The Creative Act: Rick Rubin’s Approach to Making
5. Ask what a specific other person would do
   Step into a named other’s perspective to access approaches you would not generate as yourself.
   Oblique Strategies, Made Practical
6. Use a routine physical task to incubate a creative problem
   Assign your stuck creative problem to your mind, then do a boring manual task and let the problem run in the background.
   Boredom and Creativity: Why Your Best Ideas Need Idle Time
7. Choose low-agenda, high-curiosity destinations
   Pick somewhere that interests your inner child, not somewhere impressive — curiosity, not accomplishment, is the fuel.
   The Artist Date, Made Practical
8. The Three Bs of Creativity: Bed, Bath, and Bus
   The "three Bs" — Bed, Bath, and Bus — name the observation that creative breakthroughs often arrive during unfocused, mind-wandering states rather than at the desk. The underlying mechanism (incubation: unconscious associative processing continues after focused effort stops) has real experimental support. You can deliberately engineer conditions that make these moments more productive.
9. Assign project phases to genius-matched people
   Route early ideation to Wonder/Invention geniuses and execution phases to Tenacity geniuses.
   The 6 Types of Working Genius (Patrick Lencioni)
10. SCAMPER: A Systematic Creativity Technique
    SCAMPER is a structured brainstorming checklist that prompts you to Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify/Magnify, Put to other uses, Eliminate, and Reverse/Rearrange elements of an existing product, process, or problem. It is a practitioner-derived tool with no randomized trial evidence but a strong theoretical grounding in divergent thinking research — it works by forcing systematic exploration of an idea space that unguided brainstorming leaves partially uncovered.

Describe your situation in your own words to search the complete practice library.