Pause Creative

Develop a daily intentional creative rhythm and discover yourself in the process.

Pause is an app to help anyone develop a creative mindset. It presents you with daily prompts to learn and practice creative thinking as well as tracking your creative cycle. For those who don’t believe they have a creative bone in their body, this app will help develop your understanding of your creative mind. For all who use the app, you’ll be able to choose the days when you need to take in beauty, ingest and process things. You’ll also be able to choose the days when you feel ready to create -- to make something or pour out creativity.

The fundamental idea of Pause is taken from “The Creative Pause”, written by Lajos Szekely in 1967 for the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis. Szekely defines the creative pause as:

The time interval beginning from the moment the thinker interrupts his conscious occupation with an unsolved problem, and ends when the solution of the problem or a partial solution or otherwise an insight suddenly and unexpectedly occurs.

The Creative Pause is commonly referred to when people talk about “shower ideas” or those great ideas that come to you when you’re not even thinking about the problem at hand. We want to help you develop those “Aha” moments with guided practice.

Pause helps you develop productive problem solving. Daily prompts intentionally walk you through practicing restructuring thought patterns and embracing the creative pause. There’s beauty in the rhythms of life and we have embraced both seasonal and daily rhythms in this app. The daily prompts to cover each season of the year: Winter, Spring, Summer and Fall. As each season progresses the prompts will walk you through categories such as:

• Introducing the Creative Pause
• Generating Alternatives
• Challenging Assumptions
• Picking Out Dominant Ideas
• Knowing Yourself
• Generating Analogies for Problem Solving
• Identifying Child-Like Patterns From Past
• Enjoying Random Stimulation
• Challenging Labels
• Focusing Attention Area
• Exploring Dream State
• Reversing Challenges
• Observing

Each day when you open the app, you have the option to choose between:

• In
• Out

In: For the days when you’re not feeling especially creative, don’t have the energy or inspiration and instead need to take in art or process thoughts. Out: For the days when you’re wanting to do something, to make something or experience something -- when you’re feeling in the creative mood.

• When you finish the prompt for the day (whether “in” or “out”), mark it as complete. (If you don’t finish a prompt, leave it unmarked.)
• At midnight each night, the app resets to the main “in” and “out” screen and a new set of prompts will be presented.
• As you make selections each day, you will progress chronologically through the season’s prompts, walking you intentionally through categories to develop creative thought patterns.
• On the first day of each new season, an entire new set of prompts will load and the strategic practice will begin again.