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

by David Kadavy

The thing that determines whether what you produce does extraordinarily well or extraordinarily poorly is the quality of your ideas.

Just ask opera singer Marian Anderson, who said – when learning a new piece of music – “What has appeared useless labor for days becomes fruitful at an unpredictable moment.”

In creativity, unlike in moving chunks of iron, action and result are hard to connect.

today’s productivity is about creating the conditions within your mind to have valuable thoughts.

If you want to kill creativity: Get five hours of sleep a night, fight traffic for two hours a day, and start each day with a piping hot thermos of a psychoactive drug.

Writing has become the “big rock” around which I’m building everything else in my life. I’ve cleared away all my possessions, and I’ve cleared away as many responsibilities as I can.

“An idea is a feat of association.”

your final product is no good unless your ideas are good, too. As you refine your ideas with convergent thinking, you need to start with good ideas – generated by divergent thinking.

Your Creative Sweet Spot is the time and place in which you do your best creative work. Your Creative Sweet Spot is the “big rock” around which you build the rest of your schedule and routines. The best way to manage your creative energy is to first find your best creative energy, then make the most of that energy.

Having insights and generating novel ideas is part of the divergent thinking process. Whittling those novel ideas down to the best ones and creating something that’s also useful is the job of the convergent thinking process.

Obvious connections are the obstacle to novel ideas.

being extremely busy doesn’t just decrease creativity on the day on which you’re busy. It also reduces your creativity the next day, the day after that, and throughout the project. Compounded over time, you pay a big price for being excessively busy.

it’s useful to know what time it is. It’s useful to know what day it is. It’s useful to know the approximate length of a human life, and to try to plan accordingly. But in measuring time, we’ve lost sight of the point of time. The point of time is not to fill as much life as possible into a given unit of time. The point of time is to use time as a guide to living a fulfilling life.

the four stages of control – which scientists widely refer to as the Four Stages of Creativity – are Preparation, Incubation, Illumination, and Verification.

had tried too many times to sit down and write without doing a deep dive like this, and it had always burned me out.

It’s no mistake that our short-term memory is also called our “working” memory. If we’re trying to store information in our short-term memory, we have less brain power left over to do any other work.

when I spent an evening researching, it gave the information a chance to pass from my short-term memory into my long-term memory. Once new information was in my long-term memory, I no longer had to use my short-term memory to hold onto those concepts. During my morning writing session, I could apply all my brain power toward connecting concepts to form new ideas.

when you choose a mental state, you change the goals you have while producing the work. And the goals you have while producing the work will affect how you use your energy.

The mental state you decide to be in while doing a task is up to you. But be aware that approaching your work in the wrong mental state can cause a creative block.

Switching mental states made the blocks worse in two different ways. One: It made me easily distracted. I didn’t carve neural pathways for focus – I instead carved neural pathways for distraction.

When I began working according to mental state, my productivity improved dramatically. I had deeper focus on the task at hand. By knowing what type of work I was doing, I could better settle into the right mental state. By knowing what type of work I was not doing, I limited the ways I could get off track.

Some tools are “grippy,” meaning they make it easy to stay on task – you can write with a pen and paper without distraction.

Other tools are “slippy,” meaning they make it easy to get off task – you can write faster on a computer than you can with pen and paper, but it’s easy to get distracted.

The grippier the tool, the less likely what you produce with that tool will be...

The upside of slippy tools is that if you can manage to stay on task with a slippy tool, you’ll produce your finished prod...

Every tool you use has a symbiotic relationship with your abilities w...

One way to create your own rituals for getting into the right mental state for the task at hand is to change your environment.

According to Donald, to be more creative, look for open spaces, especially with a view.

To be more analytical, look for c...

So for the Explore, Generate, Prioritize, and Recharge mental states...

For Research, Polish, and Administrate mental states, go ...

Noise level can also affect your ability to t...

when it comes to creativity, studies suggest that a background noise level of about seventy decibels is optimal for idea generatio...

you can clearly understand a conversation happening next to you, tha...

This is one of the benefits I’ve found of living in a country where people don’t speak my native language – unless I make it a point to focus on the cafe c...

Your body position while you’re working can also affect ...

“sitting is probably the least conducive position to being in a divergent mindset. But standing seems to help us not only in terms of cre...

“A second position that’s good is reclining.” Numerous writers and thinkers worked in bed, including René Descartes, Marcel Proust, and Edith Warton. Frida Kahlo began painting seriously while bedridden from a bus accident. Truman Capote proclaimed himself to be “a completely horizontal author,” and Michael Chabon writes laid back in an E...

“creativity and locomotion seem to go hand in hand…. Taking walks, exercising, all of these things that get the blood flowing…are almost alway...

You can also combine a grippy tool with locomotion. Donald suggests that transforming a wall into a whiteboard or chalkboard can get you into an expansive thinking mode. You can use your whole body while drawing on a wall, whi...

“If you want to think big, draw big.”

Once you’ve recreated the right mental state, try to stay within that state, without switching to others. Pay close attention to the task at hand. Do you notice that some aspects of the task cause you to shift out of the mental state? Save those parts for another time.

Remember that generation is different from exploration, that exploration is different from research, and that polishing your work too early can waste valuable creative energy.

Remember that you’ll be more focused if you set aside separate time to think about priorities, that administrative details don’t deserve your best creative energy, and that you need to take time to...

Keep your mental state in mind when you choose your tools, and the level of de...

you’re still trying to think as creatively as possible, choose a grippy tool that won’t t...

If it’s time to execute, choose a...

Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos. —Mary Shelley

What I realized was this: Things don’t go as planned. My parents could plan to enjoy their retirement. I could try to design my life around the effortless creative productivity I so badly wanted, but in the end, plans are only plans.

In the time management world, mental context doesn’t exist. You’re trying to get as many things done in as little time as possible. But in the mind management world, mental context is everything.