Getting Unstuck With A Little "Spring Cleaning"

I hit a wall with a project I was working on at the office today, and in the hopes of getting unstuck, I went searching for inspiration.  My first stop was a file drawer and my trusty "Idea File" folder.

There must be some inspiration in here somewhere....right?

For the most part, I'm a digital girl in all aspects of my life, but I still have a few tried and true idea generators that are in hard copy form.  However, the longer I flipped through my idea stash, the more I realized how much of it was too dated to be inspiring.  It's easy when you're busy to simply file something away you're sure you'll need later, only to find it wasn't important enough to pull out again, or quickly became out-dated when you did seek it out again.  Such is the nature of the quickly changing business environment we all work in.

Since I have a severe case of organizational OCD, I started throwing away things I didn't need.  Then I started looking at other files, then the other desk drawers, and finally moved to my bookshelves.  By the time I was done, I had two piles of out-dated material the size of this one.

Off to the shredder with you!

And a funny thing happened on the way to the shredder box.  Once my desk had more "space," my brain did too.  And all the stuff I threw out actually gave me some ideas on digital components to enhance my project!

What do YOU do to get fresh inspiration when you're stuck?