No Customers Were Harmed (Or Inconvenienced) During the Making of This Haiku

If your day is so packed that you can't actually sit down at your customary spot - for writers, this might be a home computer; for musicians, a piano - for a serious work session, try carrying a tiny spiral notebook with you and jotting down ideas that pop into your head during the course of the day. You might find yourself getting little one-minute bursts of inspiration that don't directly relate to your current project but still keep the energy going. Or keep your brain awake.

Awhile back, people in the department where I work began writing haiku responses to things that happened during the workday. I can't even remember how it started but it generated some funny poetry. It takes as little as a minute to write a haiku poem - the same amount of time it takes to write down a phone message or scan the email in-box - so you can limit your haiku jottings to random quiet moments. You can even compose haiku in your mind while attending to a rote task like washing dishes or stuffing envelopes. Unless you post your work somewhere (like the door to your office), no one need know about it.

The One-Minute Creative Wake-Up might be the only thing you need to get through an especially dull day...and you never know what might eventually come out of all those snippets.