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Mind Management, Not Time Management: Productivity When Creativity Matters (Getting Art Done Book 2)
by
David Kadavy
1 Mind Management, Not Time Management
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one day you realize: “There’s only twenty-four hours in a day.” Maybe that doesn’t mean what I thought it meant? I thought it meant I should get the most done in the least amount of time possible. What I’m learning is, if there’s only twenty-four hours in a day, that means there’s a limit. I can only get so much out of my time. “Time management” is like squeezing blood from a stone.
When I graduated and got a job, I constantly experimented with different ways of keeping a to-do list and prioritizing my tasks.
I had discovered that making progress on my first book wasn’t so much about having the time to write. It was about being in the right state of mind to do the work at hand. I had discovered that today’s productivity isn’t so much about time management as it is about mind management.
Which jobs are safe from the reach of AI? According to Lee, it’s the jobs that require creativity. When many people think of “creativity,” they think of watercolor paintings or macramé. But creativity expands way beyond those examples. Scientists who study creativity define it as coming up with something both novel and useful.
Your edge as a human is not in doing something quickly. No matter how fast you move, a computer can move faster. Your edge as a human is in thinking the thoughts behind the doing. As entrepreneur and investor Naval Ravikant has said, “Earn with your mind, not your time.”
Time Worship Time has become our “God value.” Author Mark Manson describes a God value as the “top of our value hierarchy,” and “the lens through which we interpret all other values.” Our God value is the most important factor by which we decide to choose one thing over another.
Here comes a counterintuitive concept, so you might need to read it twice: Time you don’t use now pays dividends in the future. Consider that Bill Gates came to the realization that Microsoft should create its first web browser during one of his “think weeks” in a secluded cabin, or that Google’s greatest products – including Gmail and AdSense – were created during the “20% time” when engineers could work on whatever they wanted.
The Two False Assumptions of Time Management
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The first false assumption time management makes is that time management treats time as a commodity.
Rhythms within our bodies and within the world around us make each hour different from the next. Some hours are better for thinking analytically. Other hours are better for thinking creatively.
The second false assumption that time management makes is that being productive is about producing.
The time you spend on one result versus another may be exactly the same. You can work just as hard on the novel that sells zero copies as the novel that sells a million copies.
The thing that determines whether what you produce does extraordinarily well or extraordinarily poorly is the quality of your ideas.
In creativity, unlike in moving chunks of iron, action and result are hard to connect.
The idea appeared to come randomly, but your past knowledge and experience, mixed with the right mental conditions, set the stage for the idea to happen. As the great sculptor Constantin Brancusi said, “Things are not difficult to make; what is difficult is putting ourselves in the state of mind to make them.”
today’s productivity is about creating the conditions within your mind to have valuable thoughts. Being productive today isn’t about time management, it’s about mind management.
Time management optimizes the resource of time. Mind management optimizes the resource of creative energy.
If you want to immediately get a taste of what it’s like to use mind management, here’s a simple exercise for you: The next time you set out to be productive, ask yourself, What work am I in the mood to do right now? Then, ask yourself, What do I need to do that fits that mood?
when our mental state is aligned with the task at hand, suddenly everything is easier.
To get into flow, you need to go with the flow.
But sometimes, something simply needs to get done now. In these cases, you can ask yourself, What mood would be most conducive to doing this work? Then, ask yourself, When was the last time I felt that way? Finally, see if you can replicate the conditions that put you in that mood.
If I wanted any chance at a happy life, and if I wanted any chance at doing better work, I needed to change something about my how.
2 Creative Sweet Spot
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that big rock. Divergent/Convergent
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Coming up with ideas requires divergent thinking, but actually producing something with those ideas requires the opposite of divergent thinking.
Divergent thinking is a shotgun spray. Convergent thinking is a sniper shot.
So, how do I design this new life around having good ideas? I need to find my “Creative Sweet Spot.” 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.
Obvious connections are the obstacle to novel ideas.
We already keep rough mental accounts of time. We know that if we want to put more time into the “work” account, that time has to come out of some other account – maybe the “sleep” account, or the “family” account. But how many of us keep track of time’s relationship with energy? There are powerful biological rhythms in our bodies that cause our energy to fluctuate throughout the day.
Leon Kreitzman’s The Rhythms of Life.
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.
Life is like an airport. You start the day with the best of intentions, but then delays lead to other delays, which lead to cancellations. By the end of the day, you have a stomach full of fast food and you’re sleeping on the floor.
The culture in many companies kills creativity. There are tight deadlines, so you’re watching the clock, trying to fit the work you need to do into the time you have available. This creates a sense of what scientists call “time pressure” – the feeling that you don’t have enough time to do what you need to do. In everyday life, we call it being busy.
A Harvard study found that the busier knowledge workers were, the less creative they were.
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.
this study found that 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 also helps to realize that the idea of “time” itself is completely made up. There’s nothing about the natural world that says that we need to divide the day into twenty-four hours, with sixty minutes within each of those hours, with sixty seconds within each of those minutes. These units are left over from a 4,000-year-old Babylonian numbering system.
Yes, 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 Creativity – are Preparation, Incubation, Illumination, and Verification. More than 120 years later, Helmholtz’s observations still stand up. Mentioning Wallas’s four stages is practically a requirement for any research paper on creativity.
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. As you’re trying to connect concepts to generate ideas, it’s like you’re pulling actors onstage to act in scenes. But the more actors you have on the stage, the more difficult your scene becomes to follow. So at some point you need to send some actors offstage.
Another item on my weekly review checklist that’s worth mentioning is to do “@thisweek” items. “@thisweek” is the actual filename of the note in which I do my weekly review, such as my bullet-point calendar review. The “@“ is inspired by the Getting Things Done concept of there being a context for every action. For example, you can only do certain tasks @home, or @office. @thisweek is a temporal context. These are items that are best done in a given week: this week. Throughout the week, whenever something comes up that I need to address during my weekly review, I put it in my @thisweek note.
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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.
But it’s a waste to try to force yourself to do work you aren’t in the right mental state to do.
Many task management systems have a “tags” or “labels” feature. (I’ll simply call it “tags.”) 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 associated with a given tag. Tags are useful for organizing tasks according to physical context.
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.
I also have inboxes for each of my projects. Anything I think about throughout the day for one of my projects, including new ideas, goes in that project’s inbox. 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 give you something to work with when you finally are available to process ideas.
I have inboxes for just about everything. I have a “comedy” inbox, full of things I said off-hand that made people laugh.
The “@thisweek” note I process during my weekly review is another inbox.
