Mind Management, Not Time Management: Productivity When Creativity Matters (Getting Art Done Book 2)

by David Kadavy

Open loops give your Passive Genius something to work with.

Once a creative problem is planted in your subconscious, you more easily notice the solution when you happen upon it.

“back burner.” What they mean is they have abandoned the project until further notice.

The key to standardization is to create constraints that will make your production process smoother, without compromising the essence of what you’re trying to achieve.

Author Nassim Nicholas Taleb talks about systems that benefit from chaos. That when something is too rigid, it becomes fragile. If you slam a ceramic coffee mug onto a granite countertop, the mug will shatter. When something benefits from chaos, it’s not only flexible enough to withstand stressors – those stressors trigger growth.

I would need to be able to create, even when there’s chaos. Better yet, I needed to allow that chaos to become a part of the process.

Inboxes store the opportunities that chaos presents, and inboxes save those opportunities until you can use them.

The Doorway Effect is our tendency to forget things when we walk through a doorway.

I personally keep my simmer projects in folders labeled “R&D.” Companies have Research and Development departments, which expend resources on projects that may become something, or that may not become something.

But you can’t rush creative work. Writing a smaller quantity of words each day left some extra energy for my Passive Genius to work with.