Coaching practices for The Three Bs of Creativity Bed Bath and Bus at Work

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

  • My ideas always seem to land in the shower or on a walk, but I’ve started cramming a podcast into every one of those moments
  • The perfect idea arrives crystal clear and I think "no way I forget this"
  • I’m jammed on a problem and just grinding at it harder, staring at the screen forcing it, when I know my actual breakthroughs always come sideways in the shower or on a walk
  • My ideas are scattered across a dozen apps and dead notes I never open again, so a half-thought from months ago never gets to meet the one I have today
  • I’ve been hammering at this problem for an hour and I’m clearly stuck, but I keep white-knuckling the desk because stepping away feels like giving up

Practices that may help

  1. 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.
  2. Use low-demand movement as incubation time
    Walking, showering, or doing dishes — rhythmic, low-demand activities free up associative thinking.
    The Three Bs of Creativity: Bed, Bath, and Bus
  3. Capture ideas the moment they surface
    Incubation insights are fragile — they must be captured within seconds or they’re gone.
    The Three Bs of Creativity: Bed, Bath, and Bus
  4. 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
  5. Keep an analog idea notebook
    A physical notebook for raw, unfiltered ideas becomes a searchable archive of half-thoughts that later connect.
    The Three Bs of Creativity: Bed, Bath, and Bus
  6. Load the problem then deliberately step away
    Immerse yourself in the problem first, then drop it — incubation requires prior loading.
    The Three Bs of Creativity: Bed, Bath, and Bus
  7. Define your territory: where creative work belongs
    Name the specific space, time, and conditions that constitute your creative work territory and defend them.
    The War of Art, Made Practical
  8. Schedule unstructured mind-wandering time
    Block protected time with no agenda and no screen — let the mind go where it wants.
    The Three Bs of Creativity: Bed, Bath, and Bus
  9. Fill the break with mild mind-wandering
    Do something undemanding — a walk, a shower, dishes — that lets the mind wander.
    Incubation: Why Stepping Away Solves Problems
  10. Sleep on important decisions
    For complex decisions, delay commitment overnight — sleep processing integrates information deliberate thought misses.
    The Three Bs of Creativity: Bed, Bath, and Bus

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