10 years ago, I got a book deal to write Design for Hackers – thanks to the Hacker News community.

Nothing I had learned about productivity prepared me to write a book.

I then dug into the science behind creativity. I wrote a blog post which led to collab. with Dan Ariely on Timeful, which Google bought.

After more experimentation, this week I self published, Mind Management, Not Time Management.

The gist:

- “There’s only 24 hours in a day”. What it really means is “time management” is squeezing blood from a stone.

- You have to be creative to stay relevant in the robot apocalypse.

- We know from the work of neuroscientists Konious and Beeman that insightful thinking is unique. Promoted by a relaxed mood. A fragile state: Hard to get into, easy to ruin.

- We have “peak” and “off-peak” times of day. It’s the off-peak times when you’re more creative.

- 4 stages to creativity: Preparation, Incubation, Illumination, Verification. Respect these stages.

- Work with natural cycles in the day, week, month, or year to go through the 4 stages. (Use night’s sleep as Incubation.)

- Organize tasks not by project but by mental state. Seven mental states I use: Prioritize, Explore, Research, Generate, Polish, Administrate, Recharge.

- Not all hours are equal. There aren’t 24 hours in the day – there’s an hour here or there for various mental states.

- Harness cycles, work by mental state, build systems that account for Incubation.

- You want creative systems to be antifragile. Leave slack for chaos, be ready to capture the opportunities chaos presents.

I put up a sample of the first chapter on my website. That’s over here: https://kdv.co/mmtint

There’s a little more in the free Kindle sample, which is available here: https://kdv.co/mind

Take a look. Does this sound like something that could help you with creative work? Any methods you've found that work for you?