Mind Management, Not Time Management

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.

Most people’s idea of productivity is to be able to produce a lot of something. To do a lot. Follow a series of steps, and you’re done. Do it over and over again. But, more and more, if it can be completed in a series of steps, there’s no point in doing it. AI and automation are poised to eliminate forty to fifty percent of jobs within the next decade or two. It’s the jobs in which people follow a series of steps that are the most at-risk.

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 is apparently money when your boss is using it, yet somehow it’s “free” time when it’s leftover for you to use.

when you look at how ideas happen, you can’t connect the quality of those ideas to the time you spend on them.

I’m just another creative, trying to make my ideas real before I leave this world.

If you want to kill creativity: Get five hours of sleep a night, fight traffic for two hours a day, and start each day with a piping hot thermos of a psychoactive drug. This is the unfortunate and inescapable reality of most Americans today.

In fact, 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.

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.

[Inspiration] comes quite suddenly, without effort, like a flash of thought. So far as my experience goes it never comes to a wearied brain, or at the writing-table. I must first have turned my problem over and over in all directions, till I can see its twists and windings in my mind's eye, and run through it freely, without writing it down; and it is never possible to get to this point without a long period of preliminary work.

All I had to do was ask myself three questions: What kind of work do I need to do right now?, What mood do I need to be in to do that work?, and finally, When was the last time I felt that way?

The purpose of the Week of Want is to reconnect with the things you want to do. When I do a Week of Want, I clear as many obligations from my schedule as possible. I cast away any sense of trying to accomplish anything in particular. I give myself an entire week to pursue the answer to one question: “What do I want to do right now?”

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

Some people say that “everything happens for a reason.” I think the appropriate response to that statement is to punch the person who said it in the face. That way, when they ask why you punched them in the face for no reason, you can remind them: “Everything happens for a reason.”