11 Ways to Think Outside the Box

1. Study another industry. Go to the library and pick up a trade magazine in an industry other than your own.
2. Learn about another religion. Starting to see the reason in another religion can also help you develop mental flexibility.
3. Take a class. Learning a new topic will not only teach you a new set of facts and figures, it will teach you a new way of looking at and making sense of aspects of your everyday life.
4. Read a novel in an unfamiliar genre. Try reading something you'd never have touched otherwise – if you read literary fiction, try a mystery or science fiction novel.
5. Write a poem. While most problem-solving leans heavily on our brain's logical centers, poetry neatly bridges our more rational left-brain though processes and our more creative right-brain processes. 
6. Draw a picture. Drawing a picture is even more right-brained, and can help break your logical left-brain's hold on a problem the same way a poem can. 
7. Turn it upside down. Turning something upside-down, whether physically by flipping a piece of paper around or metaphorically by re-imagining it can help you see patterns that wouldn't otherwise be apparent.
8. Work backwards. Just like turning a thing upside down, working backwards breaks the brain's normal conception of causality. 
9. Ask a child for advice. Ask a child how they might tackle a problem, or if you don't have a child around think about how you might reformulate a problem so that a child could understand it if one was available.
10. Invite randomness. Embracing mistakes and incorporating them into your projects, developing strategies that allow for random input etc can help to move beyond everyday patterns of thinking into the sublime.
11. Take a shower.There's some kind of weird psychic link between showering and creativity.