Do photo challenges actually help with creative ruts?

I’ve been stuck in a bit of a loop lately… go out to shoot, come back with basically the same shots I always take, then don’t even feel like editing half of them. I was thinking of trying more photo challenges just to shake things up. Not for prizes, just to have some kind of direction so I stop defaulting to the same compositions every time.

I came across ViewBug while searching for photo challenges online. They seem to run a lot of themed challenges, and I like that you can see how other people approach the same idea, plus there’s some community feedback and voting. Feels like it could help just by seeing different perspectives.

Do you use photo challenges to get out of a creative rut? Or is there something else that works better for you?