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

by David Kadavy

Coming up with ideas requires divergent thinking, but actually producing something with those ideas requires

the opposite of divergent thinking. It requires convergent thinking.

The process of writing starts off with exploring the many different ways you might say something.

Next, you’re narrowing down those options.

So the challenge in doing more and better writing, or the challenge in any creative work, is to balance divergent thinking with convergent thinking. You need to generate ideas, but you’ll move forward with only the best ideas.

Your Creative Sweet Spot is the time and place in which you do your best creative work.

an insight is “a sudden realization, change of perspective, or novel idea, with an emphasis on ‘sudden.’”

Having an insight is like solving a maze that doesn’t have a single exit. Instead, each relevant “dead end” has a sort of “beam-me-up-Scotty” portal in it. To solve the maze, you need to stand in all of these portals at once.

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.

The challenge in finding your Creative Sweet Spot is to find a time and place where less-obvious connections get a chance to shine.

It’s not just the amount of time something takes that is important. It also matters from where that time is taken. Where you choose to take that time will affect not

just that portion of your schedule.

The prefrontal cortex keeps things running, and keeps the paychecks coming. But when it comes to creativity, the prefrontal cortex is a real spoilsport.

The prefrontal cortex is focused on the rules of the game – making sure that each ball bounces only once on the floor before hitting the front wall again.

To do the divergent thinking required to have insights, you need as little interference from the prefrontal cortex as possible.

For most people, this time when the prefrontal cortex isn’t working so well is first thing in the morning.

The First Hour Rule is simply this: Spend the first hour of your day working on your most important project, and your most important project, only

most people’s cognitive peak is in the late morning, a couple hours after waking up. So, you can use the First Hour Rule for a session of divergent thinking, and follow it up with some convergent thinking.

“When sleep deprived, the kind of creativity that would be most productive would be idea generation rather than the kind of detailed analytic work that requires sharpness and alertness.”

Notice that the process of solving a purely analytical problem is different from the process of solving an insightful problem.

To solve a problem through insight, you need to go down many different paths, not knowing when you’ll reach your destination. To solve a problem through analysis, you go down one path, one step at a time. If insightful thinking is a maze, analytical thinking is a jogging path. You can imagine how a clock-time orientation

research on people who think in event-time, versus people who think in clock-time, found that event-time people are better able to savor positive emotions.

The culture in many companies kills creativity.

A Harvard study found that the busier knowledge workers were, the less creative they were. You might think that as time gets filled up with work, you simply do more of the same kind of work. But this study found that as workers became more busy, they did less creative-thinking activities, such as brainstorming. They reported fewer insights and their work was also rated as less creative by their colleagues.

busyness is causing you to constantly take a loan from your future creativity, the effects can be disastrous.

Event-time gives us the space for divergent thinking. Clock-time puts us in a mindset that’s better-suited for convergent thinking.

For creative thinking, time should not be prescriptive, time should be descriptive. Instead of trying to fit a creative project into the bounds of a given unit of time, use units of time as rough guidelines that can move you toward the result you want.

quantity does generally lead to quality.

The first stage is Preparation.

learning everything you can about the problem.

The second stage is Incubation.

Incubation happens any time you aren’t actively working on the problem.

The third stage is Illumination.

Moments of Illumination are the moments that make creativity seem so mysterious, because they are sudden and unpredictable.

Verification is when you evaluate the idea you arrived at during the Illumination stage. You make sure your calculations add up. You check your facts and correct your grammar. You put the finishing touches on your masterpiece.

Four Stages of Creativity – are Preparation, Incubation, Illumination, and Verification.

My research session would be my Preparation, my night’s sleep would provide Incubation, and my morning writing session would bring Illumination. Later – when I edited my writing – I would do my Verification.

The writer starts with a “step outline” – a series of short statements that describe what happens in the story.

an important truth of the Four Stages of Creativity: These stages don’t always progress, one after another, from start to finish.

Don’t push too hard on creative blocks. Instead, soften them through Preparation. Why? The answer lies in the limitations of the human mind. When we come up with a creative idea, we connect seemingly unrelated concepts. But to find connections that work, we need to try many different combinations.

In Your Brain at Work, neuroscientist David Rock compares your short-term and long-term memory capacities to a theater. Your short-term memory is the stage. Your long-term memory is the audience in the theater.

When I tried to research while I was writing, I was bringing new actors onto the stage.

I needed to give new concepts enough space to eventually transition into the audience. I needed to let concepts in my short-term memory sink into my long-term memory.

When you are actively working on a problem, you’re bound to hit blocks – scientists call them impasses.

One way Incubation works is simply by helping us forget bad ideas. When you hit an impasse, it’s often because you’re using too much of your brain power on connections

that won’t lead you to a solution.

When Incubation helps us forget something that’s causing an impasse, scientists call this “fixation forgetting.” Incubation helps you forget bad ideas, which makes room for good ideas.

another way Incubation works is through memory consolidation.

Relational memory – as scientists call it – is essential to making creative works. To make novel and useful connections, you need to connect concepts that seem to be unrelated. It’s the deft arrangement of those concepts into a hierarchy – much like knowing that Tom is taller than Jerry – that makes a creative work evocative and interesting.