Every summer the music school in my neighborhood has weekly summer camps to teach kids music. Some of the kids are experienced, but most of them are beginners picking up an instrument for the first time.

Unless you’re a musical prodigy,  the first lessons when you’re learning to play are drudgery and repetition. You play the same chords and rhythms over and over until you can do them without thinking. How do you turn that into a fun summer camp experience?

Well, one way is that they have the campers split into bands and do a performance at the end of camp. Part of becoming a band is naming it(So far my favorite name is The Best) and coming up with an image for them. What kind of band is it?  What do we play? Every Wednesday during the summer, we see the posters for these bands go up on telephone poles. It got me thinking about my own projects.

There’s a lot of hard work that goes into a creative project and when you’re in the middle of it, it’s easy to lose sight of the end. What if you designed a poster for your project to remind yourself what it’s eventually going to be? It’s nothing you need to share with anyone else, but it can really be an inspiration for you.

Making a poster for each one of your upcoming projects and hanging them up in your workspace would be a fantastic way to remind yourself of the benefits of the work ahead. (Unless your work is making posters. In that case, write a song or poem about upcoming projects.)

A similar concept I use all the time at my work is keeping a list of product names without ideas attached. If I write “spaghetti mask” in my journal, it may start to collect ideas around itself. The best ideas eventually bubble to the top and the bad ones (like spaghetti mask) fade away as my journal fills with new stuff.

I may start drawing the most promising ideas and hanging them up around the office.