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

by David Kadavy

start with a Sloppy Operating Procedure, and, each week, improve upon that procedure. I was able to break down the process into Minimum Creative Doses, and

experiment with how much Incubation I needed to prepare for interviews and write scripts.

Creative Systems are easier to develop and implement on smaller creative works that you repeat frequently.

The first several times you produce a creative work, you need to keep it on the front burner. It requires your best creative energy.

But once you get your Creative Systems set up, you can put that project on the back burner.

Now that I have Creative Systems for my podcast, it’s a back-burner project. I know if I follow the tasks in my task management system, I’ll produce the episode on time, at a high level of quality. I have checklists for setting up my recording equipment, I have checklists for my production team to follow to publish the episodes, I have a spreadsheet to give my team everything they need to take the show live, I have a spreadsheet for generating and scheduling social media updates, and I have an email automation for notifying my email subscribers.

Repeating steps to produce different versions of similar creative works also saves creative energy, because the sequence of actions get stored in your memory.

When you repeat a routine your brain begins the process of “long-term potentiation” in as few as three iterations. Rock calls this process “hardwiring.”

To build Creative Systems, you need to resist the urge to make every creative work perfectly customized. You need to make creative constraints.

Good constraints trade something you only kind of want for something you really want.

When you build Creative Systems, you need to standardize parts of your creative process. Those parts of the process never change.

The compromises you make depend upon the goal of what you’re creating.

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.

To start building a Creative System, I knew there were variables I needed to experiment with: I needed to pick a day of the week, I needed a reliable source of content, and I needed a repeatable format I could use for developing that content.

For the first several editions of my weekly newsletter, I experimented with sharing one interesting highlight, along with my thoughts on the highlight.

As I produced these pilot emails, I was keeping a Sloppy Operating Procedure document, and filling it with my thoughts. I was asking myself questions, such as Can I come up with an interesting highlight each week?, Do I want to share only highlights?, and How can I break apart the components of each newsletter so they fit in a spreadsheet?

On a monthly basis, I collect together highlights or other thoughts I want to share, and fill out a spreadsheet with all the relevant information. My team uses the information in that spreadsheet, along with process and formatting standards, to produce and schedule the newsletter.

When something benefits from chaos, it’s not only flexible enough to withstand stressors – those stressors trigger growth.

If I wanted to live a creative life, I couldn’t be so rigid as to become fragile. My system had to be, as the title of one of Taleb’s books describes, Antifragile

How to Keep Going When Your Life is a Dumpster Fire

The best thing I could do was simply accept that I would get a lot less done than I normally would. I had to ruthlessly prioritize how I would use what little creative energy remained.

I started by clearing away anything that required my front-burner energy.

had my tasks broken down by the Minimum Creative Dose. They were spaced out so my Passive Genius could take care of much of the work. But my tasks were also organized so that whatever mental state I was in, I could find tasks I could do in that mental state.

But when you’re using Creative Systems, there’s no point to viewing your tasks by project.

What matters is that you can do the task. And your ability to do the task depends entirely on your context, in a given moment.

When you’re managing creative energy, contexts aren’t only physical – contexts are also mental. If you have fresh creative energy, you’re best off doing creative work.

Many task management systems have a “tags” or “labels” feature.

In addition to assigning tasks to a project, you can also attach various tags to each

task. You can then view, all at once, all tasks associate...

Tags are useful for organizing tasks according to ...

Tags are also useful for organizing tasks by mental context. Whenever I create a task, I think about which of the Seven Mental States I’ll need to be in to perform that task: Prioritize, Explore, Research, Generate, Polish, Administrate, or Recharge?

any

small amount of time is enough to make a little progress – to not “Inflate the Investment.”

our experiences build up potential energy, which we

transform into kinetic energy in the act of creating things.

I also have inboxes for each of my projects.

My Sloppy Operating Procedure documents are all inboxes – if I have an idea for how to improve a process, I put it at the top of the document.

inboxes let you close the conscious open loop about an idea.

With all these inboxes, you might wonder how I keep track of everything. I have a few different ways of making sure I don’t waste mental energy worrying about what’s in all my inboxes. The first technique, I call the Creative Cascade.

My inboxes work like a cascade. The top of my cascade – the babbling brook – is a tiny pocket notebook I carry around.

When I review my main inbox, I don’t necessarily “do” the item. Usually, I simply push it further down the cascade. For example, I might write in my pocket notebook an idea for improving the Sloppy Operating Procedure for my podcast. When I review my notebook, in the Prioritize mental state, I transfer that idea to my Sloppy Operating Procedure document.

For the Creative Cascade to work – for it to close your conscious loops, while allowing you to open subconscious loops – you need to be able to trust you will attend to all the inboxes, so you’ll get a chance to move each of your ideas further down the cascade. To keep the Creative Cascade working, you need what I call Task Triggers.

So, a Task Trigger is a stimulus that reminds you to do a task. To use Task Triggers effectively, strategically place your triggers. By planting Task Triggers within tasks you already know you’ll do, you can make sure you do tasks you might otherwise forget.

The ideal Task Trigger is reliable, context-specific, easy-to-implement, and attached to the action.

because otherwise you won’t be able to consistently muster the energy to follow the trigger reliably. Finally, a good Task Trigger should be attached to the desired action itself. When the trigger happens, you don’t have to do much to retrieve the object on which you’ll perform the task.

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

Distraction risk is dangerously high when you’re using a smartphone for a Task Trigger.

The Creative Cascade of inboxes is run by Task Triggers. But the Creative Cascade itself also helps Task Triggers run smoothly.

generally follow Getting Things Done rules for the items in my pocket notebook: If something on the list is going to take me two minutes or less, I do it. With longer tasks, I set something up in my task management system. But when the

item on the list is an idea, rather than a task, I simply move it to the next inbox on the Creative Cascade.