Pull on your earlobes.

If you're like most creative people you have a hard time staying awake at work. That's because you work, at most, only about 20-minutes a day. The rest of the time you're probably in a room that's either too warm or too cool and you're listening to people talk about work. You're looking at an ill-formed, un-designed and cliche ridden skein of powerpoint slides that talk about deliverables and next-steps. Chances are, at work you do everything but work. To bastardize Faulkner's Nobel Prize acceptance speech, you don't prevail, you endure. Day after month after year after holding company after meetings you've made.

If you find yourself dozing while you're not working, pull on your earlobes until you begin to feel pain. That will get your pulse rate up. When I started this technique when I was a junior copywriter, I could only get them down to my Adam's apple. By the time I was an ACD, I could stretch my ear lobes down to my clavicle. Now that I am an ECD, I go out to the park now and again and let kids use my lobes to Double Dutch.