Mind Management, Not Time Management Quotes

“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.”
― David Kadavy, Mind Management, Not Time Management: Productivity When Creativity Matters

“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. 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.”
― David Kadavy, Mind Management, Not Time Management: Productivity When Creativity Matters

“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.”
― David Kadavy, Mind Management, Not Time Management: Productivity When Creativity Matters

“In the 2019 NaNoGenMo, some novels were written by an AI model once considered too dangerous to be released to the public. Yet the novels were still not even close to making sense. In fact, this AI model could hardly write a coherent sentence. AI”
― David Kadavy, Mind Management, Not Time Management: Productivity When Creativity Matters

“Earn with your mind, not your time.”
― David Kadavy, Mind Management, Not Time Management: Productivity When Creativity Matters

“Time management optimizes the resource of time. Mind management optimizes the resource of creative energy.”
― David Kadavy, Mind Management, Not Time Management: Productivity When Creativity Matters

“The most advanced part of our brain is the prefrontal cortex. This thin layer of brain tissue within our forehead does the type of thinking that makes us human. It helps us make long-term plans, prioritize, and suppress urges. It’s the part of your brain that helps you avoid that extra donut when you’re on a diet, or decide to cook dinner at home to save money for a trip to Hawaii. Neuroscientists often refer to the prefrontal cortex as the “CEO of the brain.” The prefrontal cortex sits at a big mahogany desk all day and fields proposals from other parts of the brain. The prefrontal cortex keeps things running, and keeps the paychecks coming. But when it comes to creativity, the prefrontal cortex is a real spoilsport. Think of your brain as a racquetball court. There are a bunch of super-bouncy blue balls flying around the court, each representing a concept in your brain. The blue racquetballs are diverging all over, bouncing off the side walls, the back wall – even the ceiling. Every once in a while, two or more balls collide, like a moment of insight, to form an idea. But the prefrontal cortex keeps interfering. 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. The prefrontal cortex is frantically running around with a racquet, smacking each ball to the front wall of the court. The intention is to follow the rules of the game. The effect is fewer collisions, and fewer insights. To do the divergent thinking required to have insights, you need as little interference from the prefrontal cortex as possible. In fact, the prefrontal cortex is so detrimental to insightful thinking that the people who are some of the best at solving insight puzzles – are people with damaged prefrontal cortices. Their prefrontal cortices aren’t interfering with the racquetballs flying around the court. They have more collisions – more insights. Now don’t go driving a screwdriver into your forehead. You do not want prefrontal cortex damage if you can help it. As I mentioned, having insights does not necessarily mean having great ideas. Even if those ideas are great, you have to execute on them – something that’s hard to do if you have a prefrontal cortex injury. But you can keep the prefrontal cortex from interfering with your ideas if you can do your creative thinking when your prefrontal cortex isn’t working so well. That would be your Creative Sweet Spot. Create the Conditions for Collision For most people, this time when the prefrontal cortex isn’t working so well is first thing in the morning. Most of us are a little”
― David Kadavy, Mind Management, Not Time Management: Productivity When Creativity Matters

“was about being in the right state of mind to do the work at hand.”
― David Kadavy, Mind Management, Not Time Management: Productivity When Creativity Matters

“You can prioritize what you will and won’t spend time on with the “Eisenhower method” of choosing the not-urgent-but-important over the urgent-but-not-important, as made famous by Steven Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.”
― David Kadavy, Mind Management, Not Time Management: Productivity When Creativity Matters

“Things are not difficult to make; what is difficult is putting ourselves in the state of mind to make them.”
― David Kadavy, Mind Management, Not Time Management: Productivity When Creativity Matters

“We have the gall to refer to unused time as “free” time. Do we call our unused money “free” money? No! Ironic, in a world where “time is money.”
― David Kadavy, Mind Management, Not Time Management: Productivity When Creativity Matters

“Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds you plant. —Robert Louis Stevenson”
― David Kadavy, Mind Management, Not Time Management: Productivity When Creativity Matters

“Remember, front-burner projects command your best creative energy. Back-burner projects, you can complete with minimal creative energy, thanks to reliable Creative Systems. But simmer projects are cooking almost completely in the background. Yes, once in a while you open the pot and take a peek at a simmer project. Maybe you stir it up, to keep yourself moving.”
― David Kadavy, Mind Management, Not Time Management: Productivity When Creativity Matters

“Once I gave myself permission to record ideas, without feeling any obligation to do anything with those ideas, capturing random ideas became incredibly productive. I freed up the conscious mental energy I was wasting on these open loops by writing them down. Yet, by writing them down, I also created subconscious open loops that allowed those ideas to incubate.”
― David Kadavy, Mind Management, Not Time Management: Productivity When Creativity Matters

“seemed I’d be better off trying to ignore these thoughts. But I came to realize that the source of this anxiety was my mindset. By writing down ideas, I instinctively felt obligated to do something about them. That feeling of obligation then interfered with my ability to focus on the things I actually intended to do.”
― David Kadavy, Mind Management, Not Time Management: Productivity When Creativity Matters

“Distraction risk is dangerously high when you’re using a smartphone for a Task Trigger. If you have to attend to something on the screen, you run the risk of seeing a distracting notification. Even touching the phone is a distraction risk for many of us – myself included.”
― David Kadavy, Mind Management, Not Time Management: Productivity When Creativity Matters

“A 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.”
― David Kadavy, Mind Management, Not Time Management: Productivity When Creativity Matters

“I had been too rigid in building my system for managing creative energy. I had tried to control every tiny aspect of my life. Sometimes it worked, but I was learning the hard way that the Universe didn’t always cooperate with my “system.”
― David Kadavy, Mind Management, Not Time Management: Productivity When Creativity Matters

“Author Nassim Nicholas Taleb talks about systems that benefit from chaos. That when something is too rigid, it becomes fragile. If you slam a ceramic coffee mug onto a granite countertop, the mug will shatter. When something benefits from chaos, it’s not only flexible enough to withstand stressors – those stressors trigger growth. When you lift weights, you make tiny tears in your muscles, and when those tears heal, your muscles are stronger. Your muscles, unlike the coffee cup, benefit from chaos.”
― David Kadavy, Mind Management, Not Time Management: Productivity When Creativity Matters

“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.”
― David Kadavy, Mind Management, Not Time Management: Productivity When Creativity Matters

“I find myself in a pickle with my sacred morning routine. Not only am I so worried that it’s hard to think of anything other than my mother’s condition, but there’s suddenly something I should be doing in the morning that is more important than writing, meditating, or anything else.”
― David Kadavy, Mind Management, Not Time Management: Productivity When Creativity Matters

“Standardization can obviously go too far. Surely you’ve tried to make something out of LEGO bricks, only to find you couldn’t achieve your vision. There are only so many different blocks, so you can only do so many things. 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. If you choose your constraints wisely, they can actually enhance creativity. Robert Frost said writing in free verse is like playing tennis with the net down. He had better ideas because he was following poetry’s constraints.”
― David Kadavy, Mind Management, Not Time Management: Productivity When Creativity Matters

“Most people don’t like the sound of constraints. It sounds like you’re not getting what you want. But you are getting what you want. Good constraints trade something you only kind of want for something you really want.”
― David Kadavy, Mind Management, Not Time Management: Productivity When Creativity Matters

“When I work on only a small portion of a big project during my weekly review, as we talked about in the previous chapter, I’m using the Minimum Creative Dose. I do that because the Minimum Creative Dose is especially powerful when working on tough creative problems. Tough creative problems are easy to procrastinate on, but not when you commit to the Minimum Creative Dose. You can’t justify procrastinating on something that only takes a couple minutes. When you commit to working on a problem for only a couple minutes, it prevents – as I talked about in The Heart to Start – “Inflating the Investment.” You can’t talk yourself out of making progress by making the excuse that you don’t have time.”
― David Kadavy, Mind Management, Not Time Management: Productivity When Creativity Matters

“Open loops are your enemy when it comes to traditional productivity. Open loops remind you to do things that you can’t currently do. But when it comes to creative productivity, open loops are a gift. Open loops give your Passive Genius something to work with. The way to get the most out of Incubation, with minimal conscious effort, is by using the Minimum Creative Dose.”
― David Kadavy, Mind Management, Not Time Management: Productivity When Creativity Matters

“Creative Systems harness the power of Creative Cycles. Creative Cycles are the trips your creative works take through the Four Stages of Creativity. Creative Systems are the itinerary for taking those trips. When will you arrive at each destination, how long will you stay, and what mode of transportation will you take to get to the next destination?”
― David Kadavy, Mind Management, Not Time Management: Productivity When Creativity Matters

“Creative Systems are repeatable processes that help you bring creative works from idea through execution. By formalizing parts of the creative process and turning them into actionable steps, Creative Systems save mental energy.”
― David Kadavy, Mind Management, Not Time Management: Productivity When Creativity Matters

“For example, one of my rules is: I don’t have meetings on Mondays or Tuesdays. I’m generally able to stick to this rule. If an incredibly important meeting comes up that helps me meet a high priority, I will make an exception. But I do that very rarely.”
― David Kadavy, Mind Management, Not Time Management: Productivity When Creativity Matters

“The thing that determines whether what you produce does extraordinarily well or extraordinarily poorly is the quality of your ideas.”
― David Kadavy, Mind Management, Not Time Management: Productivity When Creativity Matters

“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.”
― David Kadavy, Mind Management, Not Time Management: Productivity When Creativity Matters