Mind Management, Not Time Management (Design for Hackers Author) | Hacker News Reader

Mind Management, Not Time Management (Design for Hackers Author)

amazon.com

10 pointsrobbiea6 comments

I wrote this book! (thanks @robbiea for sharing).

It started when I was writing Design for Hackers 10 years ago. Couldn’t figure out why nothing I had learned about productivity had prepared me for writing a book.

The gist:

- People say “there’s only 24 hours in a day” as if you need to make use of those hours. What it really means is “time management” is like squeezing blood from a stone.

- We’re entering the Creative Age. You have to be creative to stay relevant in the robot apocalypse.

- We know from the work of neuroscientists John Konious and Mark Beeman that insightful thinking is unique. It’s promoted by a relaxed mood. It’s a fragile state: Hard to get into, easy to ruin.

- We each have “peak” and “off-peak” times of day. Counterintuitively it’s the off-peak times when you’re more creative. (If you’re groggy in the morning don’t ruin it with a cup of coffee).

- There are four stages to creativity: Preparation, Incubation, Illumination, Verification. Respect these stages and you won’t get blocked.

- You can work with natural cycles in the day, week, month, or year to go through the four stages. For example, you can use a night’s sleep as Incubation.

- Organize your tasks not by project but by mental state. I’ve identified seven mental states by which I organize my tasks: Prioritize, Explore, Research, Generate, Polish, Administrate, Recharge. (I personally prefer Todoist’s “labels” feature).

- Not all hours are equal. When I was working with behavioral scientist Dan Ariely on Timeful, we noticed there aren’t 24 hours in the day – there’s an hour here or there for various mental states.

- By harnessing cycles and working according to mental state, you can build systems that account for Incubation. For my podcast, tasks that used to be 1 grueling hour are now spaced into three five-minute bursts, with space for Incubation.

- In a chaotic world, you want your creative systems to be antifragile. Leave slack for chaos, and be ready to capture the opportunities chaos presents, for breakthrough ideas.

This is good advice! I'll check out the book.

Thank you! Glad you were able to find this item despite the flagging.

I flagged this because a direct link to a book on Amazon without any explanation in the comments as to what it's about and why it's been posted here feels a bit shady.

Thanks for the explanation @frereubu. I was just typing up a summary. It's in the comments now. Sorry for the strange delay.

Thanks frereubu. Sorry, I posted it because the author kadavy wrote the book "design for hackers" and it was big on HN a while ago. I was going to add the "design for hackers author" to the title, but I didn't want to editorialize it.

I thought this community would like it and can relate to it, but I understand if it goes against guidelines.

is this good enough to post or unflag, or is linking directly to Amazon not a good idea. Thank you!

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