Lorenzo Lotto Venus and Cupid painting

Lorenzo Lotto Venus and Cupid paintingLorenzo Lotto Mystic Marriage of St Catherine paintingWilliam Etty Hero and Leander painting
When are you at your creative peak? That is, what time of day do ideas flow most easily for you? What activities bring your best ideas to the surface where you can most easily gather them up?
A recent survey by the Crown Plaza hotel group suggests that certain times and activities are more conducive to creative thinking than others [PDF download]. The most creative time, they found, was late in the evening (around 10 pm), while their respondents were at the least creative in the late afternoon (around 4:30 pm). The survey also found that most respondents were likely to have a lot of ideas either in or just after a shower.
I’ll admit the survey is a little silly – the results were “published” in a press release touting the commission of a designer to create note cards (they call them “Think Notes”) that travelers can use to jot down their ideas – clearly this is part of a intended to promote the Crown Plaza chain as most conducive to innovation for the executives that stay there.
Still, the findings do reinforce something that many of us already know intuitively, though