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

by David Kadavy

You may be in the right physical context to write – you’re sitting at your desk. You may be in the right temporal context, too – it’s working hours, during the week. But it’s a waste to try to force yourself to do work you aren’t in the right mental state to do.

part of me wondered if it was right to think about my book at a time like this. Another part reminded myself that times like this are exactly the reason to think about whatever you’d like to contribute to the world during your life. We never know when catastrophe will turn our world upside down, or even end our world.

As I sat at my computer, I reasoned that the fifteen minutes I had wasn’t enough. But I reminded myself of my own advice, which I wrote in The Heart to Start, that any small amount of time is enough to make a little progress – to not “Inflate the Investment.”

Just do something today, I told myself. Then do that again tomorrow and the next day. Eventually you’ll get somewhere.

decided I’d try to write 250 words for this book. It didn’t matter if they were good. It didn’t matter if I had to completely rewrite them at some future date. All that mattered was I did something. Because this was what I had decided to do with my life, because life didn’t have guarantees, and because it gave me a sense of meaning. When everything you’re experiencing is senseless, you need all the meaning you can get.

Art is the expression of the chaos of life. In rare cases, chaos presents serendipity. The perfect accident happens at the perfect time.

More often, the moment that chaos occurs is anything but the moment in which you can use the opportunities chaos presents.

Everything we experience in life is an opportunity to learn something, to make meaning out of it, and to maybe teach someone else what we learned along the way. It’s the least we can do before we too part this world.

Writing a smaller quantity of words each day left some extra energy for my Passive Genius to work with.

good systems don’t just take away slack – more than anything, good systems create slack.