@Adam Miller -

1. Variety is the spice of life - shake your exercises up to avoid monotony
2. Frequent micro-breaks (e.g. 10 minutes per hour of workshop time) are better than fewer long breaks

Kiron

@Adam Miller

The “when you’ve completed (prompt),” Ex:  “…. if you have time left over come back to this part of the Miro board and do X”… X being a task that is some combo of the following: 

• Fun
• Creative
• Reflective 
• Open-ended or time-stretchable - could be done in 30sec or 5min. 
• Somewhat meaningful and valuable
• Enticing enough to keep participants from mindless opening of email but not so enticing that they rush the primary break task. 
• something unique that they get to do because of today being a rare Miro day
• simply explainable … so that it doesn’t compete with the primary break instructions.
• collaborative - so that it builds up momentum as people begin to join in. 
• not distracting to others (more of an issue in physical spaces.) 
• Immediately indicative of when each participant has completed the quiet personal task (“put a red sticky note next to your name”) then you have an at-a-glance view of overall state of the group on (or if your watching cursors … you can count those.) 
• conducive to invoking the mindset of the next step: if you want divergent thinking in the group next, then use creative ‘lateral thinking’ tasks. If you want convergent thinking… try to make these optional tasks centering, distilling, focusing and synthesizing of the group moment and thought process. 

Or create two options:  - Do creative thing X on your Miro board, or physical thing Y (stand up and stretch, quick dance, find your power pose, most creative pose, ten deep breaths… ). 
 

Quick brainstorm on activities: “once completed...”

• help continue the big drawing we started in the beginning.
• build our ‘inspiration board’ by adding quotes or images 
• paste in a funny cartoon 
• vote for ‘favorite Y’ — Y being something playful. 
• solve this riddle, or answer this obscure trivia question. Pick a math problem from this set off the SATs and see how you do.
• Read this short snippet about _____ and post a response in a sticky note.
• paste in something interesting you learned recently. 
  
  
  I’d caution one thing- once back in the whole group don’t over celebrate or focus too much on the product of this “once you’re done work” as it might incentivize participants in the next break to rush back to take part in the celebrated task. Message it with balance. 

@Adam Miller 

one additional setting that can be used is by using:

wonder.me:

https://www.wonder.me/features

If you scroll down the page you can see that there you can have different areas …

Have fun with it

Michael

I think you are not asking how to keep then engaged in general but during a “brainstorm break” where the participants are expected to work on an activity individually for some amount of time but you are worried they take this time as an actual break and do something else.

One tactic that has worked (though not fool proof) is to make sure the brainstorming is public and, as facilitator, call out results or lack of results.  ie. “Liz, I see you put down ‘xxx’ are you thinking of more?”, “Bob, I’m not seeing any activity, how are you doing?”, “Tim, great point, care to elaborate?”  

Of course, you need to play to the mood and audience and you can’t call out everyone but I find doing that has increased my overall engagement.  I like Miro because I can follow a user and see if they have a stickie or placed emojis. etc.

@Adam Miller 

Keeping individuals focused during a brainstorming session is challenging enough during an in-person activity so I recognize your worry in the virtual space. Below are some facilitation practices I have used where I have found success.

1. Provide a series of brainstorming activities/topics so that when an individual finishes one activity/topic they can continue to the next activity/topic (e.g., brainstorm, group ideas (synthesize), create headlines, etc.)
2. Post a leaderboard of the individuals with the most ideas and keep it updated in real-time. Move names up and down the leaderboard, etc.
3. Peruse the board and read some of the ideas out loud to the entire group. This could serve as a motivation for individuals that want to have their idea highlighted. Highlight the number of ideas someone has generated. Comment on their use of colors or their structure. In some cases, individuals want to be recognized not only for their ideas but for their creativity.

Best of luck to you!