I’d like to share with you something I discovered about an experience every creative professional will be very familiar with – The Deadline.

During the time I ran my own design company in London, I thought I’d cracked the code to coming up with my best ideas.

All I needed was some pressure.

When a new pitch deadline came in, me and my business partner always gave ourselves very little time to work on it, because over the years we’d seen that our best ideas and our increased productivity seemed to happen when we were really up against a deadline.

And this ‘method’ won us a lot of pitches to organisations, such as BMW MINI, the BBC and the Royal Academy of the Arts.

It seems widely accepted that pressure is required to create something great.