When I am low on ideas, I hold white boarding and affinity diagramming sessions with team members when kicking off a project.
Before I boot up my computer, I like to sketch ideas on paper or on the whiteboard.
I have facilitated everything from surveying, to scrappy start-up research, to a usability test held in Microsoft's state of the art lab.
I base my personas on user interviews and demographic information from whatever tracking is available to me.
For multi-page projects, I like to map out the different pages and start to get a sense of where everything needs to go.
I usually like to wireframe in Illustrator, but I am also comfortable with Balsalmiq.
I'm comfortable handing off my wireframes and specs to a web designer or making high fidelity comps on my own.
I have made prototypes both for team communication and for user testing. I am most comfortable with Axure and Marvel but am open to other applications as well.
I detail interactions, flows, and more in spec documents and user stories.