159: Mind Management, Not Time Management by David Kadavy

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1. 00:00:00 Happy Thanksgiving, Joe Buleg.
2. 00:00:02 Thanks. Happy Thanksgiving to you too.
3. 00:00:05 What do you do to celebrate Thanksgiving?
4. 00:00:08 What sort of traditions? What sort of meat do you cook and partake of?
5. 00:00:14 The only meat that is allowed on Thanksgiving is turkey.
6. 00:00:19 Unless my parents get a wild hair and decide to do something different.
7. 00:00:24 Which they didn't do this year.
8. 00:00:26 But normally we go down to Missouri, visits my mom for a little while,
9. 00:00:31 and we go visit my dad for a little while, make fun of both of them while we're there, and then we come home.
10. 00:00:36 Super fun.
11. 00:00:38 And I say that because it's always different in both realms, right?
12. 00:00:43 So my mom and stepdad don't like to do DIY projects, but we do them all the time.
13. 00:00:48 So I make fun of, you know, your clock isn't set correctly because the time changed and you haven't fixed it yet.
14. 00:00:53 So it's an annual tradition that Joe comes and fix the clocks at my mom's house.
15. 00:00:57 Like that's just how it goes.
16. 00:00:59 So of course I had to make fun of them for that.
17. 00:01:01 Okay, that's legitimate.
18. 00:01:03 I thought you just like showed up hurled some insults and then left.
19. 00:01:07 Sometimes it feels that way, but not this time.
20. 00:01:11 Okay.
21. 00:01:12 We had an interesting Thanksgiving and we typically have turkey.
22. 00:01:20 We sort of had two thanksgivings.
23. 00:01:24 However, the day of Thanksgiving was a little bit hectic.
24. 00:01:30 My brother had some health issues.
25. 00:01:32 They actually ended up going into the hospital for a collapsed lung, but he's doing a lot better.
26. 00:01:36 He's home already and making a quick recovery.
27. 00:01:39 So fortunately, everything is looking good there, but that set us back a little bit.
28. 00:01:45 So we, uh, feels like the main Thanksgiving happened on Friday where we had brisket instead of turkey.
29. 00:01:51 And it was amazing.
30. 00:01:53 Five stars would definitely recommend brisket for Thanksgiving or any holiday really.
31. 00:01:59 Awesome.
32. 00:02:00 We had one year where we did seafood.
33. 00:02:03 And my dad's anyway, so, but I don't know.
34. 00:02:05 Turkey is kind of the thing that I feel like Turkey is Thanksgiving.
35. 00:02:09 That's, but I'm very traditional in that sense.
36. 00:02:13 So I know that people do other things.
37. 00:02:16 It's just not my cup of tea.
38. 00:02:18 Well, if you're going to replace turkey with something, I can recommend brisket.
39. 00:02:23 Okay.
40. 00:02:24 Good to know.
41. 00:02:25 I'll, uh, I'll stick that one in my back pocket and brisket will be on the menu if turkeys are ever not available.
42. 00:02:33 Do you ever do any sort of like smoking or anything at your, uh, okay?
43. 00:02:38 Recently, I've been starting to do that.
44. 00:02:40 Yeah.
45. 00:02:41 All right.
46. 00:02:42 So, I'm going to go ahead and put it on.
47. 00:02:43 What's your favorite?
48. 00:02:44 Uh, honestly, this is going to sound weird.
49. 00:02:46 One of my favorites so far is mac and cheese, which you would not expect.
50. 00:02:52 No, but put together some mac and cheese, put it in the smoker for a couple hours.
51. 00:02:57 And that is some amazing mac and cheese.
52. 00:03:00 Interesting.
53. 00:03:01 You wouldn't guess that, but that's, that's my favorite so far.
54. 00:03:04 Well, now that you've said it, I can kind of, I can kind of see it, but yeah, I never would have predicted that.
55. 00:03:09 Nope.
56. 00:03:10 Definitely an oddball thing for sure.
57. 00:03:12 All right.
58. 00:03:13 Well, uh, shall we do some follow up?
59. 00:03:16 I suppose.
60. 00:03:17 If we must.
61. 00:03:18 All right.
62. 00:03:19 Have you been exercising in the morning?
63. 00:03:21 I have.
64. 00:03:22 Excellent.
65. 00:03:23 It's really annoying for the rest of my family though, because by the time they get out of bed and they're ready for breakfast, Joe's like hyper.
66. 00:03:31 I thought you were going to say that you're waking them up when you were picking things up and putting things down.
67. 00:03:36 Nope.
68. 00:03:37 Nope.
69. 00:03:38 Nope.
70. 00:03:39 Not at all, but that's partially because when we remodeled our house, I put insulation between the second floor and the first floor.
71. 00:03:45 Okay.
72. 00:03:46 That way you can have entire groups of people over downstairs and not wake people up when they're upstairs sleeping.
73. 00:03:52 Nice.
74. 00:03:53 So I wanted the house to be able to handle that.
75. 00:03:55 So it does.
76. 00:03:56 I found out, which is good.
77. 00:03:58 So that said, I've been exercising in the mornings.
78. 00:04:01 The week of Thanksgiving was a challenge though.
79. 00:04:04 Yes.
80. 00:04:05 So that one was difficult.
81. 00:04:07 But what I found was that I was able to kind of short circuit that process a little bit in that I convinced people to go on walks with me through the neighborhoods, which worked out well.
82. 00:04:22 So we were able to do like 30 and 40 minute walks just because everybody's standing around not knowing what to do.
83. 00:04:28 So it's like, hey, let's go do something instead of just standing here not knowing what to do.
84. 00:04:32 So that worked out well.
85. 00:04:33 So I was able to continue kind of that.
86. 00:04:35 I was able to do some mornings like early early mornings, but it was still in the morning for the most part.
87. 00:04:40 So I'm going to continue this trend because this week I've been doing it every morning.
88. 00:04:45 Yeah, I do the hit workouts.
89. 00:04:47 So like the 20 minutes, you know, 40 seconds on, 20 seconds off repeatedly for 20 minutes.
90. 00:04:54 Definitely gets your heart rate going pretty quick.
91. 00:04:58 High intensity interval training.
92. 00:05:00 Yes.
93. 00:05:01 Yeah.
94. 00:05:02 So those are fun.
95. 00:05:03 But that's what I've been doing.
96. 00:05:05 And so far, I can't say I'm like, you know, super strong man, but better than I have been.
97. 00:05:11 I'll say that.
98. 00:05:12 It's only a weekend.
99. 00:05:13 So it can't be that great.
100. 00:05:15 All right.
101. 00:05:16 What about no phone before breakfast?
102. 00:05:18 That one I'm pretty good at.
103. 00:05:20 Has that been supplemented by the exercise in the morning?
104. 00:05:25 Like, does that make it easier?
105. 00:05:27 I know that we're going to talk about this a little bit today, but I've kind of shifted the way that I think about it.
106. 00:05:32 So it's more like when I process a morning routine, I've typically thought of like, okay, this is 10 minutes long.
107. 00:05:41 This is four minutes long.
108. 00:05:42 Like I've thought that way.
109. 00:05:43 Like here's how much time I've got.
110. 00:05:45 I'm giving myself to do that.
111. 00:05:47 Again, we'll talk about this a little bit later, but whenever I've been doing that, it's more of a, let me get up.
112. 00:05:54 Use the restroom.
113. 00:05:55 Going to go do my workout.
114. 00:05:57 And then once I've done that, I'm going to grab a shower, go get breakfast.
115. 00:06:01 And by the time I've done all of that, the kids are up or getting close to getting up.
116. 00:06:06 And I'm either sitting with a book over breakfast.
117. 00:06:10 And by the time I'm done with all of that, it's time to go to work.
118. 00:06:14 So then I don't really have time to grab the phone and run through things.
119. 00:06:19 So I haven't even had a chance to pick it up really until I get to work, which is roughly eight o'clock and I'm up at like 5.30.
120. 00:06:25 So it ends up being like two and a half hours that I'm going without my phone in the morning, which is,
121. 00:06:30 I'm not going to go to work in the morning, which previous Joe would have freaked out over that concept.
122. 00:06:36 But so far, it's been fine.
123. 00:06:38 So I'm glad for the change in that routine.
124. 00:06:43 But having no phone before breakfast means that I'm set up better for the day I find, just because I'm not seeing everybody angry about what Elon Musk is doing with Twitter today until I'm past that point.
125. 00:06:56 So like, okay, I'm okay with it.
126. 00:06:59 I absolutely love this routine.
127. 00:07:00 I would say if anybody's considering doing this, absolutely please do it because it's huge.
128. 00:07:05 Cool. So since you brought up Elon Musk, I don't want to go too far down here, but I'm serious.
129. 00:07:10 Are you interested at all in Mastodon?
130. 00:07:14 So you may not know this, but I've had my own Mastodon server for all long time now.
131. 00:07:22 I do not know that.
132. 00:07:23 I do have a Mastodon account that I set up in like 2017, but I haven't touched it.
133. 00:07:28 I'm not intending to leave Twitter from Mastodon.
134. 00:07:31 I use Twitter for very specific purposes, none of which is connecting with the people that I really care about.
135. 00:07:37 Sure.
136. 00:07:39 Yep.
137. 00:07:40 I will say this.
138. 00:07:41 If you want to follow me on Mastodon and make sure that you don't miss anything that I post on Twitter, you can absolutely do that 100% without having to check Twitter because it all is the same.
139. 00:07:51 You can do the same thing on Tumblr.
140. 00:07:52 Oh, yeah, you put that into your website, didn't you?
141. 00:07:55 Yeah.
142. 00:07:56 So all of my posts, I post to my website and then it goes everywhere from there.
143. 00:08:01 So if you want to follow me on Mastodon, it's great.
144. 00:08:03 It's JoeBuleg@JoeBuleg.com.
145. 00:08:05 Like, that's all it is.
146. 00:08:08 So you can find me there, but it's the exact same thing that goes to Twitter.
147. 00:08:12 I just syndicate it to a whole bunch of different places that way.
148. 00:08:14 People don't have to choose.
149. 00:08:15 Just pick whichever one you want and it's all the same.
150. 00:08:18 Of course you would have your own Mastodon server.
151. 00:08:20 I don't know why I didn't think about that.
152. 00:08:21 It's absolutely the way it should be.
153. 00:08:26 I didn't want some weird, like, JoeBuleg@Mastodon.something else or some other place.
154. 00:08:32 I'd rather just own it and have a single user set up and be done.
155. 00:08:37 Yeah, Mastodon.social seems to be the one that people are trying to get into, but I heard that they just stop signups because every single Mastodon instance has to be run by somebody somewhere.
156. 00:08:50 Correct.
157. 00:08:51 Yeah.
158. 00:08:52 And that whole model makes no sense to me.
159. 00:08:57 Once you understand it, it makes sense.
160. 00:09:00 But trying to understand it is not a simple process.
161. 00:09:05 Which is why it will never replace Twitter.
162. 00:09:08 I think that it's going to be the nerds who do server stuff like I do that get the infrastructure up and running and then keep it up and running.
163. 00:09:19 I think that's the model behind it, right?
164. 00:09:22 But I don't know that it's not a true replacement of Twitter.
165. 00:09:27 Sure.
166. 00:09:28 It's just very different as far as the community and the feel of it.
167. 00:09:32 So just know it's kind of like Twitter from 15 years ago, it feels like.
168. 00:09:38 Open source, social networking.
169. 00:09:41 You know exactly who's hanging out there and who's not.
170. 00:09:45 Oh, yeah.
171. 00:09:46 You have one other action item here for follow up.
172. 00:09:50 The evening tea and book instead of screens.
173. 00:09:52 How's this going?
174. 00:09:53 I tender miss.
175. 00:09:55 More hit than miss.
176. 00:09:57 Which is solid.
177. 00:09:59 So the routine has shifted a little bit for me.
178. 00:10:01 Historically, I would get the kids to bed at night and then I would come downstairs, grab my computer and either do some writing for myself or write some code for myself or a client or a client or a client or a client.
179. 00:10:15 Or do a video project that I've got on contract or something along those lines.
180. 00:10:21 So it would typically be something like that.
181. 00:10:23 I would go work on something for maybe an hour, hour, 15 minutes.
182. 00:10:26 Then I'd get myself ready for bed, go to bed.
183. 00:10:29 And I would fall asleep pretty quick.
184. 00:10:31 But I started trying to keep track of how good is my sleep.
185. 00:10:37 And I did this kind of as an experiment to begin with.
186. 00:10:40 So instead of that whole routine, I just explained.
187. 00:10:44 I'll get the kids to bed and then I'll come downstairs and brew some tea, grab either my bookworm book or some other book that I'm in the middle of which at the moment is Dickens.
188. 00:10:56 Sorry, Mike.
189. 00:10:57 And I will read for maybe an hour and then I'll go to bed.
190. 00:11:02 And just the sleep tracking stuff has shown me that my sleep is significantly better that way.
191. 00:11:09 Even though technically nothing has changed time wise.
192. 00:11:13 It's purely the actions beforehand.
193. 00:11:15 So I don't know.
194. 00:11:17 It's strange in the sense of it shouldn't matter, but it does.
195. 00:11:21 And because it does, I'm going to continue doing this.
196. 00:11:24 And I like the effects of it.
197. 00:11:27 I fall asleep in about the same amount of time.
198. 00:11:30 But I'm waking up a little bit earlier because I think the sleep that I'm getting is much better.
199. 00:11:35 So overall, 10 out of 10.
200. 00:11:38 Highly recommend.
201. 00:11:39 What tea are you drinking?
202. 00:11:41 It's a whole mix of stuff.
203. 00:11:43 So what was the one I had last night?
204. 00:11:46 There was one.
205. 00:11:48 I'm not even going to think of it.
206. 00:11:50 It's like a cam and nail something.
207. 00:11:51 I'm going to recommend something for you though.
208. 00:11:54 And that is bedtime tea.
209. 00:11:56 Bedtime tea.
210. 00:11:58 There's all sorts of those.
211. 00:11:59 Which one?
212. 00:12:00 I'll find out and I'll put the link in the show notes because there is a very specific one that my wife and I have almost every night.
213. 00:12:09 I'm really happy that this particular action item is clicking for you.
214. 00:12:15 Sure.
215. 00:12:16 I do something similar almost every night and it's awesome.
216. 00:12:20 I do think you're going to probably have to replace Dickens with the next book that you chose for a bookwork.
217. 00:12:25 I did actually swap that.
218. 00:12:28 Because it is a couple nights ago I got to this one and I started diving into it.
219. 00:12:33 It's like, "Oh boy, what did I do?"
220. 00:12:35 I had that thought.
221. 00:12:36 And I knew you were going to bring it up.
222. 00:12:38 I've been reading gap books and I've been enjoying my gap books.
223. 00:12:42 And then today I'm like, "I should probably order this one."
224. 00:12:46 And on Amazon it wasn't going to get here until Monday.
225. 00:12:49 I'm like, "Oh, that's not that big a deal.
226. 00:12:51 Let me see how long it..."
227. 00:12:53 What?
228. 00:12:54 [laughs]
229. 00:12:56 So I canceled my Amazon order, went and picked it up at the local Barnes & Noble.
230. 00:13:01 And yeah, this one's going to take a while.
231. 00:13:04 But my apologies to those who are reading along, but this will be a good challenge for you.
232. 00:13:08 It will.
233. 00:13:09 We'll get it done.
234. 00:13:10 And me.
235. 00:13:11 We'll get it done.
236. 00:13:12 It's okay.
237. 00:13:13 So at this point I have to continue the evening tea just to be able to get through the book.
238. 00:13:17 [laughs]
239. 00:13:19 Yeah, you're going to have to read for a while and then have the bedtime tea and then read some more.
240. 00:13:24 Yes.
241. 00:13:25 So because we're talking about bedtimes, I know you've got one here.
242. 00:13:29 Have you been getting yourself into bed by ten o'clock?
243. 00:13:32 No.
244. 00:13:34 So these two action items are related.
245. 00:13:39 The real action that I want to have happen is I want to be able to get up earlier.
246. 00:13:45 And I am inching forward in this direction.
247. 00:13:50 However, we spent all of last week up in Door County.
248. 00:13:53 I was working for the first three days of the week and then the rest of my family came up for Thanksgiving.
249. 00:14:00 Every time we go up there though, it is a especially outside of the tourist season in Door County.
250. 00:14:07 It is pretty chill.
251. 00:14:08 And so pretty much any time I get up there, I sleep a ton.
252. 00:14:15 So for a while I was doing better going to bed earlier, but I was still like, I don't know, I sleep eight hours a night, but somehow it's like I have a bunch of sleep to catch up on.
253. 00:14:24 I don't know.
254. 00:14:25 So I was getting up actually even later.
255. 00:14:29 That has been pushing forward though the last couple of days I had an early meeting yesterday.
256. 00:14:36 So I had to get up earlier, but still not at my target time of six a.m.
257. 00:14:42 I do have support from the rest of the household in this goal though.
258. 00:14:48 So I do think it's going to get there just weird timing for me to actually make progress on this one.
259. 00:14:55 What time does the rest of your family get up in the morning? Does that make a big difference?
260. 00:15:00 I don't know.
261. 00:15:02 For a long time we've had this okay to wake alarm clock it's called for the kids.
262. 00:15:08 Yeah, so we have basically...
263. 00:15:09 Turns green.
264. 00:15:10 Yeah, so we've trained our kids not to get up before seven.
265. 00:15:14 Some of the younger ones would get up at six with me if they could, but also they'd like to try to push and extend their bedtimes.
266. 00:15:24 We've got a couple of, well, one teenager and one almost teenager.
267. 00:15:29 So they like to stay up later than my wife and I if we would let them.
268. 00:15:35 So we basically start bedtime at like seven thirty trying to get Adelaide in bed and then like the next one goes to bed by eight thirty then nine.
269. 00:15:46 And then so like bedtime is just becoming this...
270. 00:15:50 It's consuming our entire evening and then lately our youngest has been getting up in the middle of the night and that just throws off everything.
271. 00:15:58 Yep.
272. 00:15:59 So I guess what I'm saying is pray for us.
273. 00:16:04 Okay.
274. 00:16:06 All right, Mike, writing down.
275. 00:16:09 Bedtime is exhausting with five kids who don't want to go to bed, but...
276. 00:16:14 Mm-hmm.
277. 00:16:15 We're getting there.
278. 00:16:17 Yeah, for a little while, this only lasted about a week because the point was made, but the okay to wake.
279. 00:16:26 So you set the quote unquote alarm, but it doesn't set off an alarm. It just turns green, which means the kids can sleep longer if they're tired.
280. 00:16:34 But if they wake up and see that it's green, they're allowed to get up.
281. 00:16:37 And I just started telling them like, that's fine. Take as long as you want to get ready for bed.
282. 00:16:42 And every five minutes past seven thirty, because our kids go to bed at seven thirty, any five minutes past seven thirty that it takes you to get in bed, I'm moving that back five minutes.
283. 00:16:53 Like, so the longer you're up tonight, the longer you have to stay in bed in the morning.
284. 00:16:58 And I think it was one night they pushed it pretty hard to like eight o'clock, but then they were just laying in bed for like an hour the next morning and could not.
285. 00:17:05 They did not like that at all.
286. 00:17:07 See that?
287. 00:17:08 That's a lot of reprogramming for us.
288. 00:17:11 Yeah, it is totally is.
289. 00:17:13 But I like that idea in theory.
290. 00:17:16 Yep. Again, it only lasted about a week. And then I don't think I've touched it or had an issue with it since.
291. 00:17:21 So maybe that drove the point home. I don't know, but I know that it's not an issue for us right now.
292. 00:17:29 So I'm sure that day's coming though.
293. 00:17:32 Lucky you.
294. 00:17:35 All right, let's get into today's book here, which is mind management, not time management.
295. 00:17:40 By David Kadavi.
296. 00:17:42 This is the guy who did the digital zenal cast of book, I believe.
297. 00:17:48 And this was a recommendation.
298. 00:17:51 I should have looked up who recommended it. It might have been Carol who's in the chat.
299. 00:17:54 So it was you, Carol. Thank you. Because this was an interesting read.
300. 00:18:00 And the whole premise of this book isn't capsulated by the title and it's broken down into seven different chapters.
301. 00:18:09 There really isn't different parts, introduction, conclusion, whatever that's worth expounding on here in the outline.
302. 00:18:18 So I think we'll take it chapter by chapter here today.
303. 00:18:23 I'm kind of curious before we get into the specifics of the chapter.
304. 00:18:29 What was your, your frame of mind regarding time management going into this?
305. 00:18:36 I saw you had a tweet about how this was going to be your excuse not to time box.
306. 00:18:41 And I think you were kind of, kind of joking, but I'm just kind of curious, you know, what were you thinking regarding time management as you picked up this book?
307. 00:18:50 And was it in alignment with your current way?
308. 00:18:55 Or what, what sort of broad changes to time management?
309. 00:19:01 Have you made since then?
310. 00:19:03 I'm doing a bad job explaining this.
311. 00:19:05 So basically, was this book like a shock to your system when you picked it up?
312. 00:19:10 No, it wasn't.
313. 00:19:11 I didn't think it was.
314. 00:19:12 And just, just for reference, like the tweet I put out was, did I just find an excuse to skip time blocking?
315. 00:19:18 Maybe that's clickbaity.
316. 00:19:20 I don't know. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn't.
317. 00:19:23 But it's more that this is, this is really getting around the mindsets behind creativity
318. 00:19:33 when we have a culture that's very time based, as in like tracking time or time blocking, or this is what I'm going to do every day at this time, or I have it.
319. 00:19:45 It's probably not what I'm going to do every day at this time.
320. 00:19:48 It's more around I have an hour.
321. 00:19:50 What can I put in that hour?
322. 00:19:52 And not considering the type of task you put in that hour.
323. 00:19:58 If that makes any logical sense to you at all. But that's ultimately, I think the way that people in general think about it, I don't think about it that way and haven't for quite a while, just because I know, and I've said this for a long time, that I cannot do like my heavy coding projects or my heavy writing stuff in the afternoon.
324. 00:20:18 I just can't.
325. 00:20:19 Because I just cannot focus on it. I always do like the physical pulling cable setting up a stage, configuring sound boards.
326. 00:20:28 Like I do the physical stuff in the afternoons just because I know that I can always focus on that no matter the time of day because it's physical movement.
327. 00:20:37 When it's just sitting on the computer, I cannot do that in the afternoon.
328. 00:20:40 So coming from that mindset into this book, it's really more about giving a vocabulary around what's going on.
329. 00:20:49 That's kind of my view of how this turned out.
330. 00:20:52 Gotcha.
331. 00:20:53 Yeah.
332. 00:20:53 And that's kind of what I would have anticipated from you is that this was not a radical idea to either one of us.
333. 00:21:02 We were doing this in some way, shape, or form already.
334. 00:21:05 But I do.
335. 00:21:06 The reason I asked it, clumsily, was that I think if you have a stereotypical view of productivity, this could be a very radical idea.
336. 00:21:21 And I think it is a very valuable idea.
337. 00:21:24 It's absolutely worth unpacking.
338. 00:21:26 And I'm kind of surprised that there are not more books that take this approach.
339. 00:21:34 I feel like there's more being written.
340. 00:21:37 Probably the most popular ones that we've covered for Bookworm are things like Deep Work by Cal Newport and Essentialism by Greg McKeown.
341. 00:21:46 But I don't know.
342. 00:21:49 I feel like none of them have just put their finger on the problem the way that this one does.
343. 00:21:57 Starting with the title.
344. 00:21:59 Yeah.
345. 00:22:00 It's like, no, but what you think about time management is wrong.
346. 00:22:04 You need a totally different paradigm in terms of how to be productive.
347. 00:22:10 Yeah.
348. 00:22:11 And I was just going to say at the same time, and I think we'll get into this in more detail, it's interesting to me how much of his explanation of how to manage your mind revolves managing time differently.
349. 00:22:26 And so it's not necessarily an anti-time management view, which is kind of the connotation with the title.
350. 00:22:34 And kind of why I posed that question in my tweet the way I did.
351. 00:22:38 Did I find an excuse to stop time blocking?
352. 00:22:40 It's why I pitched it that way because it's not what he's saying.
353. 00:22:45 He's not saying stop managing time.
354. 00:22:48 He's just saying change the way you're doing it, even though he does say not time management.
355. 00:22:53 Yeah.
356. 00:22:54 So that's probably the place we should jump off here with the first chapter, which is the title of the book, my management not time management.
357. 00:23:06 That part was kind of weird, I thought, but whatever.
358. 00:23:10 I understand why he did it.
359. 00:23:11 This is laying the foundation for all of the rest of the book, which is really about managing your creative energy.
360. 00:23:20 Maybe is another way of framing this.
361. 00:23:23 But a couple of specific things worth talking about in this first chapter.
362. 00:23:30 Number one is that eventually there are limits with how you would try to become more efficient.
363. 00:23:42 And this was the first book that really spoke to the roots of a lot of the traditional approaches to time management, why we do it, stuff like that, which is tailorism.
364. 00:23:52 Taylorism is the name of this theory, I don't know, theory, but perspective introduced by Frederick Taylor, who in the 19th century used a stopwatch to identify the most efficient way to move a piece of iron across the yard.
365. 00:24:09 And basically, like he's watching somebody do this, okay, go, you know, and they do it a certain way, and then they, okay, put it back, okay, go, and they do it a different way.
366. 00:24:17 He's figuring out the way to do the work that requires the least amount of effort and you can get done in the quickest amount of time.
367. 00:24:25 So then he teaches these prescribed movements to other workers in the Bethlehem Steelyard, and by doing that, "productivity," quote unquote, quadrupled.
368. 00:24:36 So this scientific management for how you do your work or tailorism was born thinking of time as the production unit.
369. 00:24:48 And so the belief here is that more time means more production.
370. 00:24:54 However, any production unit has its limits and there's a very interesting chart in here.
371. 00:25:02 We've all heard of the point of diminishing returns, right?
372. 00:25:06 So that's, if you've got your productivity on the y-axis and time management on the x-axis, once you go past a certain number of hours, productivity does not continue to increase at the same rate.
373. 00:25:19 It kind of, if it's going up at like a 45 degree angle, eventually it's going to become more flat with the horizon.
374. 00:25:28 But what he's saying is that there is actually a point of negative returns beyond this point where if you continue to work, you're actually doing more harm than good.
375. 00:25:39 And anyone who has pulled an all-nighter trying to write a paper understands this.
376. 00:25:46 But I think there's points of negative returns probably sooner, these kick-in sooner than we realize a lot of times.
377. 00:25:55 And just to follow up with this, this Taylorism concept isn't wrong.
378. 00:26:02 I just want to say that it's not wrong in the arena that Frederick Taylor was developing it.
379. 00:26:09 Yeah.
380. 00:26:10 Which is primarily in the physical actions realm. So if you're doing, you know, I think of people like moving a lot of, I don't even know, wood chips with a shovel.
381. 00:26:22 You can adjust your stance and the way you hold a shovel and adjust your movements so that you can move that very efficiently and very quickly, which is exactly what Taylor was doing.
382. 00:26:35 That's the exact concept. And I would argue that's a very good thing to do because typically it means that you're not as hard on your body in the process.
383. 00:26:44 The problem is that that concept carried over into not the knowledge work world, which doesn't apply as well because it's too messy. It's not fluid movements.
384. 00:26:57 Your brain doesn't move the exact same way every single time. Every time I sit down to write something, there's all sorts of background that is now changing the mind frame that I'm in whenever I sit down to write.
385. 00:27:10 And that's not the case when you're holding a shovel. It's just a different game altogether. So although Taylorism isn't valid, I would say in most arenas today, I think it was valid at the time. We just haven't let it go yet.
386. 00:27:26 Well, it's valid in certain arenas, like you said, but I would argue even there, there is a point. I mean, the eight hour workday, I forget what book we read that spoke to that, that was instituted around Henry Ford's time.
387. 00:27:47 Because of realizing that point of diminishing returns, it dropped significantly at eight hours for the average worker. That was not so that people could have work-life balance. It was so that they could achieve the maximum productivity from the workers that they were paying.
388. 00:28:08 Right. And so that idea is spoken to very strongly and directly in this first chapter, and I like it. Not just because I'm what I do classifies as knowledge work. I mean, he does talk about how you want to earn with your mind, not with your time. That's an idea attributed to naval
389. 00:28:30 camp. Some of these revicon. I don't know. I kind of find names. They are very fun names. Page 26 talks about how time is apparently money when your boss is using it, yet somehow it's free time when it's left over for you to use.
390. 00:28:43 So there's a very top down approach here to the employer owning your time. And I think that should be pushed back against. And really, the rest of this book is sort of written for the knowledge worker because that's how that's David Cadaevi's role. He's a writer.
391. 00:29:07 And so there's a lot of personal story in here, which maybe we'll get into. I didn't jot a whole lot of that down in my mind node. But there is some pretty crazy story in here, especially in the last chapter.
392. 00:29:22 But this whole idea of mind management, if you're trying to be productive in the creative realm, this is the thing you need to pay attention to because spending eight hours on writing doesn't mean that you are going to produce a quality writing.
393. 00:29:39 Mind management is about that, about optimizing the resource of your creative energy. You can't connect the quality of an idea with the time that you spend on them.
394. 00:29:51 And that I completely agree with. We kind of talked about some of that stuff with the laws of creativity by by Joey Kefone.
395. 00:29:58 And I feel like this book is a very good compliment to that one. This is much less tactical, I would argue. This is kind of the why behind it.
396. 00:30:08 But in this first chapter here, he does a really good job, I feel, of just laying the case for why you should care about this stuff.
397. 00:30:17 Which is primarily just showing why one of the next chapters, he's got a title time worship, subtitles. I got confused by that a little bit.
398. 00:30:27 But we really do borderline idolize the minutes and hours that we devote to things. I'm so busy. I've got this dedicated to blah, blah, blah time.
399. 00:30:37 I don't even know. It gets to be so excessive. We're so bent on, I don't want to say maximizing time because it's not really it.
400. 00:30:48 It's just making sure we're utilizing all of it. It doesn't necessarily mean that you're doing the right thing in that time.
401. 00:30:54 We just are focused on making sure we have set aside time for certain things. Which isn't necessarily the right way to do it.
402. 00:31:01 It is in some cases, but not always.
403. 00:31:03 I'm kind of on the fence about what book to pick next, but I will say that there is a complimentary book that I've been reading called Some Days Today by Matthew Dix.
404. 00:31:14 Who primarily writes fiction but has written this book and then story worthy as non-fiction books.
405. 00:31:21 This one is really good. It's very complimentary to this.
406. 00:31:25 As I've been reading and thinking about both of these, they are transforming the way that I go about my workday.
407. 00:31:33 Typical workday, eight hours. I track my time so I know how much time I spend on things.
408. 00:31:39 Parkins' law work expands the fill of time that you give it.
409. 00:31:43 I have been experimenting with this. We've been doing some stuff with the leadership team at the day job.
410. 00:31:51 I've had to compartmentalize things. There's no way I'm getting all of the normal stuff done because we've been in all day meetings for some of these things.
411. 00:32:01 I'm trying to 80/20 stuff and trying to just get things done.
412. 00:32:05 Some days today, it basically talks about how it doesn't have to be two hours under uninterrupted time where you are doing these things, which is the traditional time blocking approach.
413. 00:32:16 He shares a story about how he meets with somebody at a McDonald's who wants to pick his brain about writing.
414. 00:32:22 She's got all these excuses about why she hasn't written her book yet.
415. 00:32:28 To make his point, he's got his laptop open. Adam McDonald's.
416. 00:32:33 He's like, "You were seven minutes late today."
417. 00:32:35 "I'm really sorry."
418. 00:32:36 He's like, "No, in those seven minutes that I was waiting for you, I wrote three great paragraphs and I revised this one."
419. 00:32:43 His whole point is there's these little pockets at times where you can actually move the needle on the things that you really want to do, especially as it pertains to creative or knowledge work.
420. 00:32:54 I don't know. All this stuff is bouncing around in my brain, but I feel like when it comes to my--
421. 00:33:01 That's mind management, not time management, in a nutshell. It's like those seven minutes. What are you going to do with those?
422. 00:33:06 Most of us would just go surf social media, check email, whatever, kill the time, right?
423. 00:33:11 Instead of he's capitalizing on it and actually doing some writing.
424. 00:33:16 That makes me a little bit uncomfortable because I prefer to have my day structured and time blocked.
425. 00:33:23 Page 34 in this chapter talks about how to get into the flow. You need to go with the flow.
426. 00:33:28 Just being ready for whatever the world is going to throw at you, there's a whole idea of fragility and rigidity a little bit later.
427. 00:33:37 One other thing I did want to ask you about in this first chapter is Kifu Lee, who is the AI expert, and makes the point of saying that Kifu Lee says that the jobs that will require creativity are safe from the AI invasion.
428. 00:33:53 However, in recent history, there's been some AI writing tools that have been making the rounds.
429. 00:34:04 And people like Nat Ellison, I saw tweet about, "Oh, there goes my job as a creator because this thing is so good at just pulling stuff out of the year."
430. 00:34:16 What do you think about this? What do you think about AI writing tools like Lex.page is the one that I'm familiar with, but I know that there's Open.ai and other things.
431. 00:34:25 Do you think that this statement by this AI expert who says that creative jobs are safe? Do you think that's true in our current culture?
432. 00:34:35 I do because there's also Jasper AI, which does some writing for you.
433. 00:34:43 I saw beta is Notion putting something like this. I saw a thing about Notion AI where it could be potentially some writing for you.
434. 00:34:50 The thing that they're not accounting for is the quality of writer involved.
435. 00:34:59 The chances of one of these AI is being able to write, say, Ryan Holiday, or who was a Nicholas Tlaib, being able to write at that level with the research and stuff behind it.
436. 00:35:13 I don't see it as ever being possible because it has to make connections that aren't necessarily obvious.
437. 00:35:22 Computers would either have to randomly connect things, which then would make you question that writer, quote unquote, writer, or you have to have...
438. 00:35:33 I guess this is what I'm saying. People who write how-to documents, the stuff that I write, you could probably get rid of the voicing behind it, but you could probably get an AI to do some of the writing about the stuff that I'm doing that I write about, or previously written about.
439. 00:35:50 You could probably do that, but getting it to voice consistently for a specific scenario, you could, again, get there, but these things are in mass.
440. 00:36:02 They're not necessarily going to be specific to a person. I think you could probably get it to be specific to a person at some point, but if it gets to where these things are generating a lot of content, really what happens is they end up working themselves into a spot where they're not necessarily going to be specific to a person.
441. 00:36:19 They're not going to be specific to a person at some point.
442. 00:36:22 They're going to be like, "Oh, I'm not going to be specific to a person at some point."
443. 00:36:28 They're going to be like, "Oh, I'm not going to be specific to a person at some point."
444. 00:36:33 They're going to be like, "Oh, I'm not going to be specific to a person at some point."
445. 00:36:40 They're going to be like, "Oh, I'm not going to be specific to a person at some point."
446. 00:36:50 They're going to be like, "Oh, I'm not going to be specific to a person at some point."
447. 00:36:55 They're going to be like, "Oh, I'm not going to be specific to a person at some point."
448. 00:37:00 I think they can simulate it and make it look like they're truly creative and coming up with cool connections and writing well, but I suspect that no matter how long they work at this, you're probably always going to be able to pick out which ones were AI-written and which ones were human-written.
449. 00:37:16 That's my suspicion.
450. 00:37:17 Therein lies the rub. I'd like to think you are correct. I don't know, though. I saw Ali Abdahl. He was one of the early adopters of the Lex.page one, and he put together a Twitter thread, which was completely generated by the AI, sort of as a "Ha ha gacha."
451. 00:37:41 The last tweet in the thread was, "By the way, this was all generated by AI. I didn't write any of this to see how many people could tell."
452. 00:37:50 I follow Ali Abdahl pretty closely. I've been through Part-Time YouTuber Academy.
453. 00:37:56 I've seen him directly communicate, fooled me.
454. 00:38:02 Tiago Forte did something similar. I don't know. It's pretty good.
455. 00:38:07 You go for it. I don't want to do it either. I don't want to do it either. I think it's interesting. What does the marketplace look like for creators in the future?
456. 00:38:18 I think there will always be distinctions. The ways that creators can stand out, but I don't think you can just rely on the ones that we've used previously.
457. 00:38:30 The more data you feed into the models, the more accurately they can produce that stuff. You've got to find new stuff.
458. 00:38:38 Here's the other side of the coin. Maybe you're right. Maybe I'm wrong.
459. 00:38:44 Let's say that they get so good you can't tell the difference. Let's just make that assumption.
460. 00:38:49 If you found out that Tiago Forte used an AI to write his next book, would you want to read it?
461. 00:38:58 No, I would not. That's the point. If you know that somebody is using a computer to do all of their writing and all of their content generation, typically people back off from them.
462. 00:39:09 If they're using even Ghost Riders, I've seen where people have used Ghost Riders and put their name on it.
463. 00:39:16 People stop following them once they find out. Even if these things take off, you better make sure you've got it kept as a pretty big secret that you're using that because
464. 00:39:27 a moment it goes public, people drop off in droves. I don't foresee that being a positive thing just from a moral stance,
465. 00:39:35 which from a business stance, you really don't want that to happen at all. A lot of these big time writers, they're playing with it.
466. 00:39:44 I don't foresee that being something that's going to take that particular place by storm, which means it's your low-end people trying to generate content to get ads, to get affiliate links and that sort of thing that just want the dollars off of it.
467. 00:39:56 They're not trying to build or follow a mission behind it. I can see that, but don't let people find out about it.
468. 00:40:06 That's a perfect place to jump off there because I mentioned, Tia Goforte did a similar experiment with this.
469. 00:40:16 In his book, "Building a Second Brain," he talked about this idea of divergent versus convergent thinking.
470. 00:40:26 Let's go into chapter two and pick up that conversation there. Chapter two is the creative sweet spot.
471. 00:40:35 This starts with a conversation about divergent and convergent thinking. I didn't jot a whole lot down about this because we had read about it in "Building a Second Brain."
472. 00:40:47 I didn't feel there was a whole lot that was revolutionary here, but if you're not familiar with this concept, then this is worth expanding.
473. 00:41:00 Divergent thinking is the brainstorming and letting your brain make the connections.
474. 00:41:07 If you were to graphically visualize this, you've got a point on the left side of the timeline, and this is where the rays expand.
475. 00:41:17 You consider all the possibilities, and then when you are going to create something, that's basically the point where you say, "Okay, that's enough information.
476. 00:41:26 Now you switch over into convergent thinking, and the points come back together."
477. 00:41:33 This is essentially how creators create in a nutshell, no matter what medium they use.
478. 00:41:39 They have their antenna up, they're collecting a whole bunch of dots, and then at some point they say, "Okay, I've got enough. I'm going to synthesize this down.
479. 00:41:47 I'm going to make something as the output of all of this divergent and convergent thinking."
480. 00:41:53 The challenge with writing, David could have he talks about, but as I said, I think this is true of any creative endeavor is balancing this divergent and convergent thinking.
481. 00:42:03 How do you do this?
482. 00:42:05 How do I do it?
483. 00:42:07 Do you have any sort of framework for, "Yeah, this is how the process works," or do you just do this without even really thinking about it?
484. 00:42:17 And then, "Here's the stuff at the end," which I think is probably a lot of people, by the way.
485. 00:42:22 I don't necessarily think of it as divergent and convergent, which side note, it's weird to me that both Tiago and David use the exact same terms for the exact same content.
486. 00:42:34 It makes me wonder, did they both get it from somebody else?
487. 00:42:38 One of them get it from the other and not attribute it to them, like I have all kinds of questions.
488. 00:42:42 Well, to be fair, this book existed, I think, before building a second brain did.
489. 00:42:48 But it makes me wonder, did Tiago write about it on his blog a while back and then made it into the book?
490. 00:42:53 I don't know, I have questions. I want to know the source.
491. 00:42:57 That said, I don't necessarily think about this as divergent and convergent.
492. 00:43:01 I think it more around collecting dots versus connecting dots.
493. 00:43:05 Like you and I have talked about this before, and collecting dots tends to be more around the content consumption piece.
494. 00:43:11 So when I'm listening to podcasts, when I'm reading books, when I'm running through certain newsletters in the morning or reading blog posts,
495. 00:43:17 when I'm doing those things, that's the divergent piece.
496. 00:43:21 That's where I'm expanding and collecting a whole bunch of those dots and gathering them in places.
497. 00:43:26 And then the convergent piece is when I'm connecting those pieces together, not necessarily explicitly, but just mentally in a lot of cases.
498. 00:43:36 A lot of times it ends up in a note system or sometimes it's on a notepad somewhere.
499. 00:43:43 It's dependent, but there's not really a set time or place for that convergent piece to happen, at least for me.
500. 00:43:52 The divergent piece, like the collection of the dots, every morning and every night is usually the time frames where that happens for me,
501. 00:44:00 though that's kind of changing here recently.
502. 00:44:02 But again, the convergent piece, the connecting of the dots, doesn't necessarily have a set place.
503. 00:44:07 But that's how I think about it is the dot piece versus these two terms.
504. 00:44:11 That's fair. And I like that better, actually.
505. 00:44:16 Really the whole point of that discussion at the beginning of this chapter is sort of to set the stage for the creative framework that he expounds in the next chapter.
506. 00:44:29 But before we get there, the title of this chapter is the creative sweet spot.
507. 00:44:34 So he's trying to get you to understand how the process works so you can identify your own creative sweet spot, which is the time when you do your best creative work.
508. 00:44:44 And then the argument is that you should build your schedule around this.
509. 00:44:48 I like this idea a lot.
510. 00:44:50 I've also heard this called your biological prime time.
511. 00:44:55 I think that was Chris Bailey, who first introduced me to that idea in the productivity project.
512. 00:45:02 The idea is, and I actually built this into my ideally plan for a while, I had 10 a.m. to 11 a.m. highlighted because that is the point in the day when I'm most focused.
513. 00:45:16 And if I'm going to try to create something, that's like the best time to do that.
514. 00:45:21 But I don't know that the divergent versus convergent, I kind of feel that's unnecessary information.
515. 00:45:30 It's sort of like how the sausage is made.
516. 00:45:33 And it's, I don't know, it's interesting information.
517. 00:45:38 I guess you could get inspired by that if you've never heard that before.
518. 00:45:42 But I also don't think it really matters.
519. 00:45:45 You're not actively switching.
520. 00:45:48 Maybe this is spoiler alert as we get into some of the other stuff because he's got some different ideas on how to manage your time and go in and out of the different modes.
521. 00:45:57 But my brain, I can't just say, okay, I'm going to switch now from divergent to convergent.
522. 00:46:05 It doesn't work that way.
523. 00:46:07 Like, yes, I could say I'm switching from this task to that task.
524. 00:46:11 But a lot of this is just the inspiration.
525. 00:46:16 Like you have to be inspired, I feel, to get the insights, which he describes as a sudden realization, change of perspective or novel idea.
526. 00:46:24 Creative ideas are both novel and useful.
527. 00:46:27 So insights are just novel.
528. 00:46:29 But you have to have a whole bunch of those insights before you can really get the creative idea that's worth developing.
529. 00:46:37 So he's trying to lay the groundwork here for identifying your creative sweet spot and then talks about the two different cultural approaches to time, which I kind of teased you about at the beginning, the clock time versus the event time.
530. 00:46:51 Right.
531. 00:46:52 So clock time is probably how a lot of us Americans specifically, but Westerners approach how we go about our day at two o'clock, I'm going to do this thing.
532. 00:47:03 There are other cultures that operate on event time.
533. 00:47:07 When I went down to Costa Rica for a missions trip, that was a lot of that country is by event time.
534. 00:47:16 This thing is going to happen about this time. And if people are going to show up half hourly, half hour late, whatever, eventually everyone will be here and we'll do the thing.
535. 00:47:24 And then when it's over, who knows when that's going to be, we'll go on to the next thing.
536. 00:47:28 Yeah.
537. 00:47:29 Right.
538. 00:47:30 Which actually there's a lot I appreciate about that approach.
539. 00:47:34 And David talks about how he's even gone to different countries that operate that way so that he can sort of facilitate that into his creative rhythms.
540. 00:47:45 So there's a lot to be said for that. However, I don't think, I don't know, I have a really hard time thinking about how I could actually apply that to my own life.
541. 00:47:56 There's too many people in the day job and even like the extracurricular responsibilities that I have that rely on the clock time for me to really just live in that event time.
542. 00:48:06 Yeah. I don't think I could live in the event time at all.
543. 00:48:10 Most of my day job is built on schedules.
544. 00:48:14 Right.
545. 00:48:15 And they're not my schedules. It's not like I can control when a certain group is going to come use our sanctuary.
546. 00:48:23 I have no control over that. I just simply have to react to that.
547. 00:48:27 So I don't see that as something that I'm going to do day job wise.
548. 00:48:32 However, like I was saying in the middle of follow up in the morning, like I have an event based procedure that I'm going through.
549. 00:48:41 Again, historically, I would have said, you know, I'm going to give myself five minutes to get myself ready for the day.
550. 00:48:47 And then I'm going to spend 25 minutes in a workout and then I'm going to give myself 10 minutes to get a shower and get dressed.
551. 00:48:53 And like, you know what I mean? Like I would normally have kind of given it that amount of detail just because it kind of helps me think about it.
552. 00:49:01 But at the same time, working through it from an event stance is cleaner.
553. 00:49:06 It's like, okay, this and then this and then this and then this.
554. 00:49:10 What the timing is doesn't really matter.
555. 00:49:12 Like I'm going to do something a little bit quicker. Something's a little slower.
556. 00:49:16 Depending on the day, it might flux. And that's okay. I'm totally fine with that.
557. 00:49:20 But I can do some of that in the afternoons as well.
558. 00:49:23 But again, everything is so time based in our culture that it's kind of hard to completely break from that unless you completely break.
559. 00:49:30 From pretty much any social activities whatsoever.
560. 00:49:36 Like you're going to have to go be a hermit somewhere or join a culture that's adopted that or a subculture that's adopted that.
561. 00:49:43 But generally speaking, like I don't have that ability at all.
562. 00:49:47 I don't either. I like the idea.
563. 00:49:50 One of the distinctions he talks about is at an event time.
564. 00:49:53 One week from today is actually eight days ahead because today is an event that is not done yet.
565. 00:50:00 So that's an interesting way to define that and that event time people are better able to savor their positive emotions, which I really like that.
566. 00:50:09 And again comes that word saver.
567. 00:50:11 I remember talking to Chris Bailey about that savoring the moment.
568. 00:50:16 I really like that that term that idea.
569. 00:50:19 The big takeaway is that we don't want to race against time. We want to walk alongside it.
570. 00:50:24 He puts it on page 70, 80 says the point of time is not to fill as much life into a given unit of time.
571. 00:50:29 The point of time is to use time as a guide to live a fulfilling life.
572. 00:50:32 And I agree with that as well.
573. 00:50:34 I'm not moving to a different country like he did in order to accomplish that goal.
574. 00:50:39 Seems a bit excessive, but hey, go for it.
575. 00:50:42 Cool thought experiment.
576. 00:50:44 Let's go into the next chapter here, which is the four stages of creativity.
577. 00:50:52 And I'll just ask you, what did you think about these four stages?
578. 00:50:58 So the four stages, to me, this made more sense than like the divergent versus convergent piece.
579. 00:51:08 Because like the divergent versus convergent, like I kind of get it, but like we were talking about the dots thing makes more sense to me.
580. 00:51:15 The four stages here, preparation incubation incubation.
581. 00:51:20 I have a problem.
582. 00:51:21 My kids have been making fun of me for this.
583. 00:51:23 I have a hard time saying incubation comes out incubation.
584. 00:51:27 I don't know where that comes from.
585. 00:51:29 Anyway, preparation incubation, illumination and verification.
586. 00:51:32 Like those are the four stages of creativity.
587. 00:51:35 And I don't think these are necessarily wrong.
588. 00:51:39 I don't know that I have enough info on it to say that they're completely correct either.
589. 00:51:45 Because at the same time he says these are the four stages later on he'll talk about how you can jump from one to the other and it's not clean lines from one to the other.
590. 00:51:57 Whereas the term stages to me is like 0, 1, 2, 3.
591. 00:52:03 It's in a line.
592. 00:52:04 Just like the stages.
593. 00:52:05 Like you start at one and then you go to the next stage and you go to the next stage and you go to the next stage.
594. 00:52:09 But when you can move around on all of them, like it's basically having lines that connect all of them to each other.
595. 00:52:15 Which means it's not really stages.
596. 00:52:17 So then is it really four different elements of creativity?
597. 00:52:21 I mean, similar to like the laws of creativity I guess.
598. 00:52:24 But I don't know. I'm still kind of up in the air on this one and kind of looking at it side-eyed.
599. 00:52:30 Well, this is not original to David Kadavi.
600. 00:52:35 This is actually the four stages of control identified by a psychologist whose name is Graham Wallace.
601. 00:52:42 However, I think these are garbage.
602. 00:52:44 Okay. Thank you for saying that because I haven't been able to completely nail down like my thoughts on this.
603. 00:52:50 So tell me what you think they're garbage.
604. 00:52:53 Okay. So when I hear these four stages, I think of a linear progression.
605. 00:53:01 Right? And you can see retroactively how something would move once it's over through these four different stages.
606. 00:53:12 However, you tell me the point where you can control moving from incubation to illumination.
607. 00:53:20 How does that work?
608. 00:53:22 You can't. You don't just push a button and get the insight or the aha moment, which is the definition of illumination.
609. 00:53:32 So at that point, well, this is nice information, but how am I going to apply this?
610. 00:53:39 And I'm biased here already because I have my own version of this.
611. 00:53:45 I'm not sure.
612. 00:53:46 That's what you don't like it.
613. 00:53:47 Well, I honestly think mine's better. So as I was, as I've been doing a lot of thinking about my creative work and I'm still kind of thinking through like what exactly this this looks like.
614. 00:54:03 But there's two different approaches, I guess, for like a writer.
615. 00:54:06 Like you could try to be a New York Times best-selling author, sign a book deal.
616. 00:54:10 That's kind of the thing that everybody wants to do, right?
617. 00:54:13 But the more I read books like this by David Kadevi, I realize like he's self-publishing this.
618. 00:54:19 I could totally do this.
619. 00:54:21 And honestly, this is becoming more and more attractive to me, this like self-publishing route, because I have a whole bunch of these models that could be books.
620. 00:54:30 And so I've got these five C's of creativity, I call them, which I think could be the basis for a book just like this one that David Kadevi wrote.
621. 00:54:40 And it was at this point when I read these four stages, because he's kind of laying this as like, "Well, this is how this all works."
622. 00:54:46 And I'm like, "No, I have a better one. I need to get this into the hands of people."
623. 00:54:54 Like he's writing for the same people that I would be creating for.
624. 00:54:57 And I'll just share my five C's I guess, and we can go from there.
625. 00:55:00 And I've done like whole workshops on these.
626. 00:55:03 So I'm going to try to condense this down in like two minutes. But my five C's are capture, curate, cultivate, connect, and create.
627. 00:55:13 So capture that this is divergent thinking, right? You're just grabbing all the dots you can.
628. 00:55:19 And then curate, once you have all these dots, then you're picking the ones that are valuable, and those are the ones that ultimately end up in obsidian for me.
629. 00:55:28 You're not dumping everything in there. You're curating the museum of your mind, right?
630. 00:55:36 So you're trying to pick the highest quality stuff, and you're cutting a whole bunch of things because you're trusting that the really good ones are going to come back to you later.
631. 00:55:47 And this is why I agree with you that AI isn't going to completely replace people who do this the right way, but you may have to change how you do it.
632. 00:55:55 All right, so then you've curated these things, and then you cultivate them, right?
633. 00:56:00 This is where you bounce them around and you don't really know what seeds you planted in the greenhouse of your mind, but you're going to water them.
634. 00:56:10 You're going to give them the right conditions. You're going to ask some questions about them and see what they turn into.
635. 00:56:16 You're not going to put any pressure on. This one has to be the thing, but you're just going to kind of see what develops.
636. 00:56:22 And then once these things start to grow, they poke up through the ground, you start to see what these things are, then you connect them to other ideas.
637. 00:56:33 And this is where the whole bidirectional linking thing to me is fascinating because it gives you a visual representation of the type of stuff that your brain would be doing anyways.
638. 00:56:43 And so this is really cool. I like this. And then finally, after you do all that, then convergent, you decide, "I'm going to create something."
639. 00:56:53 And this whole process, if you follow it before you actually sit down to write, for someone who has, for the last several years, had to create on a deadline.
640. 00:57:04 Like if you just sit down like, "Okay, I got to write something. What am I going to write about?"
641. 00:57:08 That's scary. I've had to develop this process. And Bookworm is a big part of this, honestly. This is the first four steps in a nutshell done every couple of weeks.
642. 00:57:22 And by doing that and collecting all these ideas, I never run out of stuff to write about or create about, talk about that was happening long before I had connected note-taking tools.
643. 00:57:36 But by the time I was able to see the connecting note-taking tools, I'm like, "Okay, this fits in with this model that I've been practicing for a while now."
644. 00:57:45 I don't know. But I feel like there are very clear distinctions with those five C's of, "Now I can go on to the next stage."
645. 00:57:52 And you can define for yourself, "This one's done now. I'm going to go do the next thing."
646. 00:57:58 As opposed to just, "When's that illumination going to come?" I think there's a potential that you're trying to develop an idea and you're looking for that "Ah-ha moment."
647. 00:58:09 And it could never come. And you've got to be willing to go try something else after a while.
648. 00:58:15 Yeah, just to put some more meat on his four stages of creativity, just so people can compare that to your five C's of creativity here.
649. 00:58:24 There's the four, which are the preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification.
650. 00:58:29 So preparation is basically to kind of correlate. It's kind of like collect and curate, not necessarily curate, but more collect.
651. 00:58:38 You're just kind of doing the research part of it, collecting a whole bunch of ideas around an idea.
652. 00:58:44 The incubation part is really just taking time away from it.
653. 00:58:49 It is kind of his... And I'm saying this knowing what the rest of the book holds from this point on.
654. 00:58:57 It's really just step away from it.
655. 00:59:00 And then once you've done your research and you've stepped away from it, you're kind of just waiting for something to hit you.
656. 00:59:06 Which I don't necessarily like because it doesn't necessarily give you the freedom to say, "I'm going to keep cranking on this every day."
657. 00:59:15 I don't remember which author it was. It said that they only write when inspiration strikes. Thankfully, it strikes at 8 o'clock every morning.
658. 00:59:21 I don't know who that was or what that work comes from at this point.
659. 00:59:24 But that idea is like, "Put in the work." You're not sitting about waiting. You're just going to get to work.
660. 00:59:30 The verification piece you don't really have here, but it's where you're testing the idea to see if it's valid with other people.
661. 00:59:39 I would say that it's possible in your framework that that fits inside that convergent piece.
662. 00:59:45 Because you might be testing that just through short form content or from talking to other people.
663. 00:59:52 That's maybe part of your process of converging down to the idea.
664. 00:59:56 But in his particular case, what he's referring to is you've had your illuminated idea.
665. 01:00:02 And then you're basically trying to figure out, number one, is it unique? And number two, do other people like it or not?
666. 01:00:08 That's really what he's getting at with those particular pieces.
667. 01:00:11 Yeah, I think you could probably add, "I don't have additional C's for this." But after create for me, right?
668. 01:00:19 I typically create publish. You could, and the type of stuff that I do, I feel like that is the right approach.
669. 01:00:25 But if you're writing a book, for example, yeah, you want to create, and then you want to share and get feedback,
670. 01:00:31 and then you want to edit and revise, and then finally publish.
671. 01:00:35 So the create process, that's the, I think that's the part that maybe is a little bit different for everybody.
672. 01:00:43 But also the main point here is that there are steps before that which make the create part possible.
673. 01:00:49 And I do not like the fact that you are completely dependent on some inspiration which may or may not come.
674. 01:00:57 Right, yeah. And maybe that's why I was a little bit thrown off on this because, again, he's got the stages, right?
675. 01:01:06 And he even called out that sometimes you can be in the middle of preparation and the illumination happens immediately.
676. 01:01:14 But then he gave examples, I didn't write him down, I wish I had, he gave examples of a few people who did this.
677. 01:01:22 And the examples all bypassed the verification phase entirely and went straight to publish, which isn't even a stage here.
678. 01:01:30 So even that was a little bit like, "Huh, interesting." So they skipped incubation and they went right to illumination, bypassed verification
679. 01:01:41 and went to the fifth step that he doesn't talk about which is releasing something.
680. 01:01:45 So, yes. Okay, thanks for helping me feel better about that because I just could not get my fingers around why I didn't like this.
681. 01:01:53 No problem, leave it to me to pick on somebody else's idea.
682. 01:01:58 Good job, Mike.
683. 01:02:00 Alright, let's go on to the next section which I don't think we're going to spend a whole lot of time here because I don't really like this one.
684. 01:02:07 Chapter 4 is the 7 mental states of creative work.
685. 01:02:11 And I'll just run through these. They are prioritized, explore, research, generate, polish, administrate, and recharge.
686. 01:02:20 I guess, you know, I understand these, but I don't know.
687. 01:02:26 The way he describes these, I was left thinking like, "I do not want to manage my creative process this way."
688. 01:02:38 He's even got like different places that he goes throughout his day. He kind of bounces around between different locations for these different modes.
689. 01:02:46 And I've understand that. Like, I used to go from coffee shop to library to co-working space.
690. 01:02:52 And I would use, like, I'd go there and I'd write for an hour and a half and then I'd hit a block and then I would just change the location.
691. 01:02:59 And then that travel time, that was enough by the time I got to the new place, get the creative juices working again.
692. 01:03:06 But I don't want to try to define those things. I think this is too much detail and it's unnecessary.
693. 01:03:16 There are three questions in this section which I like though, which I think these are valuable.
694. 01:03:21 Not in terms of trying to figure out which of the seven mental states am I going to function in?
695. 01:03:27 But what work do I need to do right now? What mood do I need to be in to do that work?
696. 01:03:33 And when was the last time I felt that way?
697. 01:03:35 I feel like if you just ask those three questions and discarded the seven mental states, you could make a lot of hay with this.
698. 01:03:42 What do you think?
699. 01:03:44 Well, number one, he does have an acronym for this. Do you remember what it was?
700. 01:03:49 Yeah, it was something golf related.
701. 01:03:54 Yeah, per golf par.
702. 01:03:56 Yeah, yeah, right. I was looking at it. I knew par was the last part, P.A.R. but yeah.
703. 01:04:01 So prioritize, explore research per, generate is golf and then polish, administrate, recharge is par.
704. 01:04:10 So per golf par, I don't like that.
705. 01:04:13 Somebody was stretching to get an acronym working here.
706. 01:04:17 We don't need my acronyms.
707. 01:04:19 I know. But what I struggle with on this is seven mental states of creative work.
708. 01:04:27 And as I'm looking at these, one of the things he talks about is setting aside time in your week.
709. 01:04:36 He gets into the cycles in the next year. So I'm getting ahead of myself a little bit here.
710. 01:04:40 But he talks about having specific points in your day and week when you do these different types of, like put yourself in these different states just because of energy levels and how they wane throughout the day and throughout the week.
711. 01:04:52 And he intentionally puts all of his administration stuff on Friday afternoons because it's like the low energy doesn't take much to get it done sort of thing.
712. 01:05:04 And then he uses Monday mornings and every morning for the generate, like doing the harder, creative, generative work.
713. 01:05:12 And in my mind, I'm thinking that the administrative stuff is stuff I absolutely despise doing.
714. 01:05:17 So I have to do that Monday morning when I've got the most energy.
715. 01:05:20 Otherwise it won't happen at all because I'll get the Friday afternoon and be like screw it.
716. 01:05:24 I'm not doing that.
717. 01:05:25 Sure.
718. 01:05:26 That's not happening.
719. 01:05:27 So it's completely backwards.
720. 01:05:29 But that also means that the administration piece, the mental state of administrative that he has from an energy stance to me is identical to generate.
721. 01:05:40 So I might be in a slightly different mind frame on that.
722. 01:05:44 But as far as energy and like state of being, like that's kind of the same.
723. 01:05:48 And I get why he's got it that way, like why he's got him broken out.
724. 01:05:53 That I struggle with, things like which ones were they, the polish piece and the research piece and the explore piece.
725. 01:06:03 We're starting to get into a realm where I feel like these can all start to overlap from a mental state stance.
726. 01:06:09 The only difference is what you're choosing to do.
727. 01:06:12 So I feel like there's really only maybe three here.
728. 01:06:16 Like you've got like the hard work.
729. 01:06:19 It's like low, medium, high is really what we're talking about.
730. 01:06:22 So like the low energy stuff puts you in recharge state like recharge and explore like that's low energy.
731. 01:06:29 You can do that no matter when you want.
732. 01:06:31 The medium stuff is when you're doing the specific researching and you're doing the, you know, the polish editing work.
733. 01:06:37 And then the high energy stuff is when you're actually doing the original writing and you're doing the administration piece.
734. 01:06:41 Like it's low, medium, high.
735. 01:06:43 So welcome to Stephen Coveyland.
736. 01:06:45 You know, we're into a three state model instead of a seven, which I feel like is a lot easier to get your head around than it is to get around seven.
737. 01:06:54 As I was going, I feel like this takes a lot of management, which you can see when you start to look at his overall system.
738. 01:07:00 Exactly.
739. 01:07:01 It's an entirely too complicated structure, which again, we'll get into this on the next one.
740. 01:07:08 But I, cool concept. I like that he's at least attempting to identify this, but I can't get on board with this whole seven state thing.
741. 01:07:19 The seven mental states doesn't make any sense.
742. 01:07:23 He should remove this section, rename the chapter and just talk about how the environment affects your state.
743. 01:07:33 Because he talks about this construal level theory where we tend to think big picture when things are far away and small picture when we're in a small space.
744. 01:07:40 That makes a ton of sense. That was an aha moment for me.
745. 01:07:43 You can change your mental state by changing your environment.
746. 01:07:46 He talks about the slippy and grippy tools that allow us to easily get on or off of tasks and talks about his alpha smart Neo that he uses to write as an example.
747. 01:07:56 This is great.
748. 01:07:57 Like I have no interest in this thing.
749. 01:08:00 I have zero interest in that, but I thought it was hilarious that he uses it.
750. 01:08:03 Yeah.
751. 01:08:04 So I saw related to this.
752. 01:08:07 Mike Vardy showed me one time.
753. 01:08:10 It's the same sort of thing.
754. 01:08:12 Hemming write or something like that.
755. 01:08:15 I don't know.
756. 01:08:16 It's this little keyboard sort of a thing where all you can do is write on it.
757. 01:08:20 And it's cool.
758. 01:08:23 I'm not going to buy one, but then I also have a remarkable.
759. 01:08:26 So it's the same sort of thing for note taking as opposed to writing.
760. 01:08:30 I think this is, I don't know.
761. 01:08:32 I think there's a lot to be said about the constraints of the tools that you use, but I don't know.
762. 01:08:38 Just talk about that.
763. 01:08:39 Don't talk about the seven mental states.
764. 01:08:41 I don't know anything else to say about this chapter.
765. 01:08:44 You want to go into the next one?
766. 01:08:46 No, not yet.
767. 01:08:47 So there's one point in this.
768. 01:08:49 So I didn't like the seven states.
769. 01:08:51 I didn't really like his alpha smart because I'm not doing that.
770. 01:08:54 The one thing in this whole section that really struck me is like that.
771. 01:09:00 That's a really good way to explain this.
772. 01:09:02 Was the slippy and grippy thing that you kind of mentioned in passing there?
773. 01:09:05 Really what it means there is if you have a tool, think of your tools as either slippery or grippy.
774. 01:09:12 A computer, like your laptop, would be a very slippery tool because it's very easy to move from one thing to another that then leads to distraction.
775. 01:09:21 Whereas a grippy tool would be like pen and paper.
776. 01:09:24 You really can't get lost on social media on pen and paper.
777. 01:09:27 It just doesn't happen unless you switch tools, in which case you're now on a slippery tool.
778. 01:09:31 So that concept of choosing which tool and which type for the different type of work that you're doing I think is important.
779. 01:09:40 At the same time he made the point that the grippier a tool, the less easy it is to move the data from one place to another.
780. 01:09:48 Yeah, right.
781. 01:09:50 So if you're using pen and paper that's great, it's a very grippy tool, but when it comes to editing, that's a very difficult task to accomplish.
782. 01:09:57 Whereas a very slippery tool makes that process very easy because it can move things from thing to thing very easily.
783. 01:10:04 So anyway, I don't really have anything specific that leads me to wanting to do.
784. 01:10:09 I just thought that that concept was very helpful just to think about it that way.
785. 01:10:13 Exactly, and it has nothing to do with the name of the chapter, the seven mental steps.
786. 01:10:17 Absolutely, really important. None. Yeah.
787. 01:10:20 Unnecessary.
788. 01:10:22 All right, let's go to chapter five, which is the creative cycles.
789. 01:10:30 And this is kind of talking about the rhythms around you.
790. 01:10:35 I have a action item associated with this one to document my weekly cycles or rhythms.
791. 01:10:43 I mean, that's the chapter in a nutshell is that there are rhythms to everything, especially rhythms to your creative work.
792. 01:10:52 And it's worth paying attention to how those rhythms operate.
793. 01:10:57 You want to be able to get into the flow basically and go with that when the opportunity is there, not squander your rhythms on things that you should be doing other places.
794. 01:11:10 And they're different for every person. Like you mentioned the admin stuff that you absolutely hate. You got to do that on Mondays.
795. 01:11:16 Right. So that's the kind of thing I want to do is figure out like, what are Mondays? What are Tuesdays? What are Wednesdays, et cetera.
796. 01:11:22 And I've done this before. I've not done it recently with the day job.
797. 01:11:30 However, I think I can, which is why I want to spend some time thinking about this.
798. 01:11:37 Yeah, so there's actually have three action items from this section. And I didn't really like it.
799. 01:11:45 So this is the weird thing about this book. I don't agree with this, but it spurred me to have a different thing altogether.
800. 01:11:53 So one of these is exactly what you're talking about mapping the week, according to like mental states, knowing that when I'm going, like the mental states that I'm going to map are going to be different than what he has here.
801. 01:12:06 Like what you were just saying, like the administrative thing Monday morning, like that. I've kind of done that for a while and it does seem to work well.
802. 01:12:14 So anyway, I want to work through that. He does talk about, he's a big GTD David Allen fan, which is interesting how that kind of comes out.
803. 01:12:27 But he talks about doing a weekly review and like this is his gold time, right, where he sets up the entire week.
804. 01:12:36 I don't know that I want to do this, but I want to try it once just to see what it does from a mind state, mental state.
805. 01:12:45 But he does this planning session on Sundays where he schedules the tasks for the day and time of the week when he's going to do them.
806. 01:12:53 And I've kind of been doing this on a day to day level, but he made the point that if you do it on a weekly level, you really have a hard time pushing something off till tomorrow because you've already got tomorrow set up, which means that if you don't do it today,
807. 01:13:10 you've got to do a lot of extra work in order to accommodate that change.
808. 01:13:15 And that's the type of thing that works really well for me is when I put myself up against a deadline or a wall that I can't move. That works really well for Joe.
809. 01:13:24 So again, I don't know that this is going to work because I don't even know that I know enough of the tasks that I need to do in a week, generally speaking, to be able to do this.
810. 01:13:33 But I at least want to make an attempt just to see what it does from a mind frame state, mental state.
811. 01:13:40 I keep using weird terms on that. So there's those two. And then the last one here, it's in the section referring to cycles in cultural in cultural cues.
812. 01:13:51 So he mentions base camp and we've talked about base camp before in like eight week cycles and such.
813. 01:13:57 Ah, yes.
814. 01:13:58 Yeah.
815. 01:13:59 Did you get excited about this part?
816. 01:14:01 I did. This is one of my talking points I wanted to talk about is this week of want, which is what I have defined as a sabbatical. And every time I bring this up on focused all the cranky people in the Mac power users forum say, that's not a sabbatical.
817. 01:14:17 And you're technically right, but you're missing the point and I didn't have another term for it.
818. 01:14:22 Basically what it is is a regular cadence where you take a week off and you can do whatever you want.
819. 01:14:28 That is exactly how Sean McCabe has defined this seventh week sabbatical. And it is amazing and everybody should do it.
820. 01:14:35 Well, I don't really have the ability to take an entire week off to do whatever I want. Like, you know, day job stuff. So I don't really have that ability. But what I do have the ability to do is operate on eight week cycles, namely six weeks and then a couple weeks of cleanup around those and tie off and stuff.
821. 01:14:55 I actually had a conversation about this with my IT assistant and he's on board to try it kind of as a department knowing it's just the two of us that makes it fairly easy.
822. 01:15:05 But we also have other volunteer teams involved. So yes, it's just the two of us in the department, but there's maybe 25 people involved that I'm going to be trying to get on board with this concept.
823. 01:15:17 So I want to work on that. I think what I'm going to end up doing is we're going to operate internally and me personally on an eight week cycle first.
824. 01:15:26 And then we'll start incorporating the broader teams into that. Just because the cyclical nature of that, I feel like works really well.
825. 01:15:35 I've been slowly realizing that I work on enough cycles that this could be very helpful and implementing these on a larger scale would be very helpful.
826. 01:15:43 So this is kind of a first step towards doing that on a broader scale.
827. 01:15:47 Love it.
828. 01:15:48 Alright, anything else before we go into the next chapter?
829. 01:15:53 I don't think so other than like this is the whole section where he has all of these ridiculous.
830. 01:16:00 I do this on this day and I do this on that day and this happens here and I do this after this and it's like, I am lost on what your schedule looks like.
831. 01:16:09 For somebody who's not into time management, I feel like you'd have to do a lot to do what you do.
832. 01:16:13 This is somebody who obviously does not have kids.
833. 01:16:16 Very true.
834. 01:16:17 Alright, let's go to the next chapter, chapter six, which is creative systems. Oh good, it's a systems book.
835. 01:16:26 It's your favorite.
836. 01:16:27 Not really, but this is interesting because I do think that when it comes to creativity, it's worth considering systems because most people view creativity as
837. 01:16:38 a flash of inspiration.
838. 01:16:41 That's how I used to view it and that meant that for a long time, I did not think I was creative because I didn't get those flashes of inspiration very often.
839. 01:16:51 I realized after a while that creativity is more of a formula and that is basically what he's talking about.
840. 01:17:00 In this chapter, creative systems are repeatable processes that help you bring creative works from idea through execution.
841. 01:17:10 However, there is a term in here which I like, the minimum creative dose.
842. 01:17:16 And this is the thing I was talking about with some days today by Matthew Dix and just he writes whenever he's got a couple of minutes with nothing to do and I really like that idea.
843. 01:17:27 What is the minimum amount of time or whatever that you would need in order to actually make something?
844. 01:17:34 I guess time is the easy one, but we're talking about my management here, not time management.
845. 01:17:40 So like what is the mental state that you have to be in going back to those three questions and then how do you put yourself in that mental state and reduce as much friction as you can.
846. 01:17:50 That's the whole idea of the systems so that when you get inspired, you can capture something knowing that even if it's just a paragraph or two, eventually that's going to add up and produce the 60,000 words that you need to make your average book or whatever.
847. 01:18:04 Once you get the systems in place, he says that you can move creative projects forward on the back burner.
848. 01:18:12 So he defines front burner where you need full attention, back burner is it simmering in the background.
849. 01:18:18 And this is where I felt vindicated.
850. 01:18:22 If you remember back in episode, I'm going to get 60 something.
851. 01:18:28 We did Work Clean by Dan Charnes.
852. 01:18:31 And I talked about how I was going to create a back burner perspective and Omni Focus.
853. 01:18:37 And you rightfully pushed me on this and like, so what does this actually do?
854. 01:18:44 This is what it does.
855. 01:18:46 All these years later, finally have a definition.
856. 01:18:51 It did.
857. 01:18:54 But this was the idea that I had in the back of my mind that I could not articulate where you have something and it's just you're going to let it simmer.
858. 01:19:05 And a lot of the stuff that happens in the seven mental states and the four stages and the nine, whatever is, you know, all these lists.
859. 01:19:15 That can happen, but you're not actively paying attention to it.
860. 01:19:19 I think this is a really cool idea.
861. 01:19:20 I just, when I say I feel vindicated, but this is what it reminded me of.
862. 01:19:25 And I think this is a really cool idea because I think a lot of people view it as like it's on or it's off.
863. 01:19:31 There's no, I'm just going to set this to the side and my brain is subconsciously going to continue to work on this.
864. 01:19:38 But that's ultimately what's happening.
865. 01:19:40 And that's what David Kadevi is talking about in this section.
866. 01:19:44 I think maybe a good example of front burner versus back burner would be, you know, when we started Bookworm, it was very much front burner.
867. 01:19:54 Like, what is recording look like? What's our normal cadence of the show?
868. 01:19:59 And what are the elements of the show that we're going to cover?
869. 01:20:02 How do we pick books at the very beginning? We kind of collaborated like we kind of worked together to figure out what books came next.
870. 01:20:08 And then we fell into the cadence of every other.
871. 01:20:11 I don't think we ever actually explicitly said that that's what we were going to do, but it just kind of happened.
872. 01:20:16 So it was very much front burner. We had to think through all the details.
873. 01:20:20 And then over time, those details kind of take care of themselves and you just kind of know what's happening.
874. 01:20:26 Whereas like right now, at least in my world, I'm going to project this on you, Mike.
875. 01:20:31 Bookworm is more of a back burner project that we do because it's the same process every two weeks.
876. 01:20:38 We generally know who's in charge of doing the notes set up for that week based on who picked the book.
877. 01:20:44 We know who's picking the book next. We know, like, Joe's going to set up the live stream.
878. 01:20:48 Mike's going to take care of the editing pieces. Like, we know all those things are going to happen.
879. 01:20:52 We don't have to think about them. They just kind of happen because we know all the stuff, which means to produce a Bookworm episode now is significantly less work than it was way back at the beginning.
880. 01:21:03 Just because you have all that stuff, quote unquote, back burner, it doesn't mean it's a stopped project.
881. 01:21:09 It just means you don't have to have the mental wherewithal to have it on, you know, full focus the whole time in order to have it completed.
882. 01:21:17 Yeah, I agree with that 100%. A couple other ideas that kind of, from this chapter that kind of tie into this, when it comes to productivity, open loops are the enemy, but with creativity, open loops are a gift.
883. 01:21:34 I like that idea. So when I don't really know exactly what something is, that's the time when I don't try to push it forward anymore, put it on the back burner.
884. 01:21:47 I guess that's more, more personally, as it pertains to Bookworm, I think you're right, though, that by doing a whole bunch of these episodes, we just kind of fall into the rhythm and the conversation that happens every other Friday as per the release schedule.
885. 01:22:03 That's almost a byproduct at this point. Like, we just trust the process. We read the books, we show up, we talk about them.
886. 01:22:11 Right, there is no, what is the end result going to look like? All that stress is gone. And I feel like anyone who creates regularly on whatever medium, whether that's blogging or YouTube, whatever, they achieve that same thing.
887. 01:22:29 And the systems are the thing that allow you to get there. However, you don't have to have it all figured out at the beginning.
888. 01:22:34 He talks about standard operating procedures. Actually, he called them something different. But then he, well, he changed it eventually to sloppy.
889. 01:22:43 But yeah, so sloppy operating procedures, he says are living documents. And that's what standard operating procedures are supposed to be. They're supposed to be malleable.
890. 01:22:51 But anyway, so I didn't like that part specifically because it was just stretching. It was. It was. I know what he's going for. A lot of times we document something there.
891. 01:23:01 This is the process. It must be followed. But no, you should be asking yourself how it can be improved. But what that does once you have those things and those things are discoverable just by doing it a bunch is like, oh, this is how this happens.
892. 01:23:15 And then once you put together, I mean, a lot of times you don't even really need the specifics of those things. You just need like the checklist, the basics in order to follow through with it.
893. 01:23:26 Once we get done recording, I give the files to be he edits them. Then I get the final file. I create the WordPress post. I put in the all the links.
894. 01:23:37 I schedule it. I mark that book as complete. I create the new one. Like, these are all things. I don't even need to go back and reference anymore. I've done it enough times.
895. 01:23:48 Yeah. So, yeah, it's the. The rhythm and the systems create the rhythms. However, sometimes those rhythms get disrupted. That is the point of the next chapter.
896. 01:24:00 Creating in chaos. And the big idea here is essentially things aren't going to go as planned.
897. 01:24:10 It mentions that rigidity creates fragility. And I think we probably both experienced this. You can get so attached to your plan on this is how things should go. That when that gets disrupted,
898. 01:24:27 it makes you, for me anyways, it would like make me upset. And I'd be frustrated that my plan has been messed up. And at that point, like, it's not helping you to be upset about it.
899. 01:24:42 Yeah, maybe you were planned on doing focus work for the next couple of hours and you got distracted. But what are you going to do with that distraction?
900. 01:24:49 Could you do anything about it? Was it controllable? Well, if not, then there's absolutely nothing that you can do about it. If it is something that you could control or could be prevented, like you can take a note and change a system and hopefully it doesn't happen again.
901. 01:25:02 But if there's nothing you could have done about it, then just roll with it. I mean, deal with the thing, then get back to work. Don't be upset that you lost whatever, whatever time.
902. 01:25:12 And really, the best creators, I feel like the argument he's making here are the ones who are able to just roll with the punches the most. Yeah, there's people who you mentioned the quote.
903. 01:25:26 You know, I only write when inspiration strikes. Fortunately, it's 90 and every morning we read the book on the daily rituals and like a lot of people structure their environments to support this stuff.
904. 01:25:35 But every single person is going to have stuff that doesn't go their way. The better you are at just being flexible with that stuff, I feel like the more prolific your output is going to be in the long run.
905. 01:25:47 Yeah, and just to put some more background to this, he tells the story of how granted in the last couple chapters he's been telling us about his borderline insane schedule and process that he goes through in order to maintain his creative energy.
906. 01:26:06 And then at the beginning of this chapter, because before this chapter, I was kind of thinking, like, dude, you're crazy. Like, that's kind of where I was sitting with this. Like, come on. Like, sure, this works for you, but this is going to work for like point zero zero one percent of the population.
907. 01:26:20 There's not anyone else really that can do it like this. And then he gets to this chapter. And he tells the story of how his mom had a brain hemorrhage and all rituals, all practices out the window immediately.
908. 01:26:34 And he goes to be by her side, changes up his routines a bit to allow him to kind of keep going. He's working on this particular book in the midst of this.
909. 01:26:46 He's deciding what to let go of and what to keep working on. He keeps his podcast. He keeps his newsletter. And then he dropped working on the book for a while and then he picks the book back up.
910. 01:26:56 So that's some of the story behind this. And then he kind of walks through is like, okay, when things break down and things fall apart, you know, you got to kind of roll with the punches.
911. 01:27:07 Now, maybe this is towards the end of this, but he does talk about how he wished that he could be one of those people that just kind of goes to a coffee shop, puts out their 250 quality words and they're done for the day.
912. 01:27:19 And like that was his original goal whenever he was writing a book, but then he got into this whole creative stages and mental states thing and he developed this whole system because he couldn't just go do that.
913. 01:27:30 And then at the end of the book, he's able to do that. Okay. So you kind of went full circle like you wanted to do this, but you couldn't and then you went through this crazy stuff and now you can.
914. 01:27:40 Maybe it's just because he learned some lessons in the process, which I would assume is what happened. But it's like, okay, why didn't you just start with that thing?
915. 01:27:47 The very beginning and keep working at that until it stuck. Like, you know, we talk about this all the time, the consistency pieces, the part that matters, right?
916. 01:27:54 Developed the routines, develop the habits, be okay to flex them if you need to, but that's the important part, which is what he ends up with at the very end.
917. 01:28:05 But he went through an awful lot to get there. But again, it's not necessarily bad. This is part memoir in the way he has this book written, but that's kind of the process he takes us through.
918. 01:28:15 Right. Yeah. And then he shares a whole bunch of tactical things as a result of that, which I think these are dumb.
919. 01:28:23 I didn't write any of them down. I wrote the section headings down, but literally the only one that I wrote was the doorway effect.
920. 01:28:32 He's talking about task triggers and how when you walk through a doorway, you tend to forget the thing that you were doing or going for, something about walking through a doorway resets your mind.
921. 01:28:44 It's like, huh, I feel like I have maybe heard of that before, but it completely left my mind. I was like, okay, now I have a note about it.
922. 01:28:51 Like, I'll keep track of that one later and see when it pops up again. But I thought that was interesting. Maybe that's why I forget things when I walk across the building.
923. 01:28:59 Yeah. So some of the specifics here mentions that when you're managing creative projects, context are mental states.
924. 01:29:05 Remember his affinity for GTD. He talks about tags for mental states on tasks. Absolutely not.
925. 01:29:14 Nope. No way too much micro management.
926. 01:29:18 It talks about cascading inboxes, which in general, I think are a bad idea.
927. 01:29:25 However, when it comes to ideas, I don't think they're necessarily bad.
928. 01:29:30 I mentioned my five season creativity. That depends on me capturing things to drafts and then eventually curating those and sending them to obsidian.
929. 01:29:40 But I think the way he describes them, I think this is dangerous. You want less inboxes in your life, not more.
930. 01:29:48 Could you real quick, can you maybe explain cascading inboxes for people?
931. 01:29:53 Yeah. So things go into one inbox and then as you process that inbox, they go to another inbox and then ideally, or not ideally, but I guess if you carry out this idea, there's no level.
932. 01:30:06 There's no cap on the number of levels down you could go. So you can have an inbox that leads to an inbox that leads to an inbox that leads to an inbox.
933. 01:30:13 And that's where I think people can get in trouble with this.
934. 01:30:16 You want less inboxes to check. If you have a bunch of inboxes, there's a higher chance that one of them is going to be neglected.
935. 01:30:26 I think one example of this is like Evernote, back in the day, people use to clip everything, send it to Evernote. They never go in and clean up Evernote, right?
936. 01:30:34 So it end up with a whole bunch of junk in there. And that's the danger of a neglected inbox.
937. 01:30:40 I do think there is value in this principle when applied tactically, I guess. You got to be really, really careful. But when it comes to ideas, this is the only one that I can think of where I would want multiple inboxes about a Capita too.
938. 01:30:55 One, it just captures the things so I don't forget about them. And then from there, I'll pick the ones that really matter.
939. 01:31:00 But I'm not doing that for email. I'm not doing that for tasks. I mean, whatever other inbox in your life you can think of, I think these cascading inboxes could do more harm than good.
940. 01:31:13 And the way he defines them is just kind of, "This is a good thing. You should apply this where you can't." And I'm like, "No, you should apply it one specific place and then nowhere else."
941. 01:31:22 It's not something that I want to do. I kind of do a two-level thing. I wouldn't even call it that though, because I capture almost everything into drafts or on a notebook.
942. 01:31:36 And from there, I'll usually make two passes. One is like, "Okay, these are the things I know I don't need at all."
943. 01:31:44 Or, "These are the things I know exactly where they go." It's a quote. Well, I know exactly where I'm putting all quotes that I want to hold onto.
944. 01:31:50 But when it gets to like, "Okay, this is an idea for an entire business." Okay? There's a few different ways that I would want to manage that depending on the type of arena it sits in.
945. 01:32:01 So sometimes I'll leave it in the inbox intentionally and know that I'll get back to it in, say, a couple days when I go through that inbox again.
946. 01:32:12 And by that time, I might know exactly where it needs to go. Sometimes I don't, and it sits there, and I've had things sitting in that inbox for two weeks, just trying to figure out where it needs to go, knowing that I don't want to get rid of it.
947. 01:32:23 So maybe that kind of fits into that realm, but really it's all in one place. So it's not like it's a different location.
948. 01:32:29 Right. Right. All right. Anything else before we get into action items?
949. 01:32:35 No, I kind of want to be done with it.
950. 01:32:38 All right. Let's do it. So action items. I have a couple of them. The first one comes from the chapter, actually, that I did not like.
951. 01:32:54 Way back in chapter four, which talks about seven mental states of creative work. I feel those mental states did not provide me much value, but the discussion about the environments did.
952. 01:33:06 So I want to consider the environments in my rituals.
953. 01:33:12 I don't know that anything is necessarily going to change from this. I just want to think about the rituals that I have and where they take place. Basically ask those three questions. What work do I need to do? What mood do I need to be and to do that work? When is the last time I felt that way?
954. 01:33:33 And see if there isn't some low hanging fruit, some things that I can change in terms of my environments and where I try to do certain things. But I'm not requiring necessarily that I change something there. I just want to spend some time thinking about it.
955. 01:33:47 And the other one is to document my weekly rhythms. I think you would find them as cycles, but I've used cycles as like those eight week cycles that we were talking about with the week of want.
956. 01:33:57 I'm really, I just want to think about like, how am I theming my days and can I batch my tasks in uncertain days in order to free myself up and operate in different modes the other days.
957. 01:34:09 I don't know that I'll be able to make a whole lot of changes here because like you, day job, other responsibilities, kids, etc. I don't have complete control over how I stack the tasks that I do in any given day. But I'm going to see if there isn't some improvement that I can make somewhere.
958. 01:34:30 How about you?
959. 01:34:31 Yeah, so I have the three that we talked about earlier. One is, I think I'm just turning this differently than what you're doing. You're talking about documenting a weekly rhythm. I kind of want to map my week according to like energy levels and types of work.
960. 01:34:45 Like there's the administration side. There's creative side. There's like architecture and infrastructure sides. So like, I know where those tend to fit best.
961. 01:34:54 But I don't really have that anywhere. So I kind of need to map that out, document it, whatever you want to call that. So I'm calling it mapping it. So that's one, two.
962. 01:35:04 I'm going to make an attempt. I believe the test that happened on a Sunday for me. Mapping, not mapping, but scheduling out the tasks for the week ahead of time. I'm going to commit to doing this once until we record next just because I don't know how that's going to go.
963. 01:35:21 And I don't want to say I'm going to do it twice because I think it's going to potentially be bad. So I think I go really well and really poorly. And I don't know which one it is. So I want to at least try it mostly from a mental state stance to see how that goes.
964. 01:35:32 And then working on incorporating eight week cycles. I suspect that I'm at a point in the year where I kind of need to wait till January one for that to technically take place. But I've probably got the right timeframe right now to do the planning for that.
965. 01:35:49 And since it's the first time I'm doing that, it's probably going to take me a little longer to prep for that well. So that's what I need to work on. So my goal is to start that on January one. But I got to get the planning stage of that done right now.
966. 01:36:01 So those are the three.
967. 01:36:03 All right. Well, let's go into style and rating then my book. So I will go first. And I think this is a really important topic.
968. 01:36:17 I think this is a good book in speaking to this whole idea of mind management, not time management.
969. 01:36:27 Yeah, it's exactly what the title says, but that's exactly what you get from this book. And I feel like there's some stuff in here that is not necessary.
970. 01:36:40 But it doesn't feel like it's an extended book. You know, sometimes we read these business productivity books and it's 200 pages and it could have been a blog post. Right.
971. 01:36:53 That's not what this is. There's a lot of good stuff in here. There's also some stuff that I feel like I wouldn't have included it like the seven mental states, for example.
972. 01:37:01 But I'll just chalk that up to different personalities. There's some stuff in here that I just absolutely think he's off base with like in the last chapter, the there's way too much management in terms of the tasks and the tags for the mental
973. 01:37:16 states and emotional context yada yada yada like you don't need all that stuff. The average person though, I think could benefit a lot from just considering your sweet spot, your rhythms, understanding how to do it.
974. 01:37:30 And how it's not just blocking out time on your calendar. Very powerful idea. Just realizing that because you have time to create set aside doesn't mean when you sit down to actually create during that time that the ideas are going to flow.
975. 01:37:45 You have to do some additional work there. But I think the 80 20 is just recognizing that you have to put yourself in a position to do that. And if you pay attention to when you do that naturally or when it's easiest, you can move some things around and get some benefit from that.
976. 01:38:05 So, I guess what I'm saying is that I feel anybody can benefit from reading this book, even you and I who are familiar with some of these ideas, my management over time management.
977. 01:38:17 That's not something new. We were talking at the beginning. We've implemented some of this stuff already.
978. 01:38:22 Like, I still got a lot out of this. There's still some action items I'm going to take, but even without that, I feel like a walk out of reading this book with a better understanding and therefore better prepared to make the most of my creative rhythms.
979. 01:38:36 I was hoping this would just be like the book to end all other books when it comes to what is actually what is productivity actually. I don't think that's what I got.
980. 01:38:47 I'm going to give it 4.0. It's a good book. It's not a great book. I think there's some great ideas in here.
981. 01:38:59 But it, I don't know, I was a little bit disappointed, to be honest. It started off really well. It felt like it kind of lost some steam towards the end.
982. 01:39:10 I think there's more to be said on this topic. I don't know exactly what it is, but I felt a little bit wanting at the end.
983. 01:39:23 The style is good. He's a good writer. The stories that he tells are really powerful. The story about going to be with his mom, we eventually passed away and being with his dad.
984. 01:39:36 There's one specific part of that where he's got his morning routine and he decides just to chuck it because he sees his dad sitting at the kitchen table.
985. 01:39:44 He's like, "Let's just go for a walk." That's powerful. It's emotional. It's a great way to end this book, but it also, I don't know, I feel like it doesn't really get into the mechanics of it enough for me to be like, "Okay, so how do I actually implement this?"
986. 01:40:05 Going all the way back to those four stages. That's great information, but am I just going to sit and wait for the inspiration to come?
987. 01:40:11 What can I actually do about that? I don't know. Maybe Carol's right. Maybe I need to write that book. I don't know.
988. 01:40:18 You definitely do. Certainly do.
989. 01:40:22 All right. What about you?
990. 01:40:24 Yeah. On the back of the book, there's a quote that he says effortlessly getting more out of your mind, referring to the content of this book.
991. 01:40:38 I wrote this down at the very beginning, but I just stated that's a really high claim. It's an extremely high claim to effortlessly get more out of your mind,
992. 01:40:49 especially when there's a tremendous amount of effort that he has put in in order to get more out of his mind, having read the book.
993. 01:40:57 I think that's a bit of a misnomer in that particular piece. He refers to all of his task management stuff that you talked about.
994. 01:41:06 I really wanted to know what tool he was using for that because of the different things he was talking about.
995. 01:41:11 Do you ever figure this out? Do you know what he uses?
996. 01:41:13 I don't remember. I remember being curious, but then maybe I just wrote it off as like, "Oh, it's not going to be anything that I would use because he's using the way he's using tags and contents."
997. 01:41:25 I never did figure it out. He doesn't state it in the book. He does have a tools link that you can go to, which is a sign up for his email newsletter.
998. 01:41:35 It's like, "Okay, for the sake of all the Bookworm listeners, I'll do this." I signed up for his newsletter in order to get this.
999. 01:41:41 Then he never states what tools he uses. He has a bunch of affiliate links for specific notebooks and stuff that he likes to use,
1000. 01:41:49 but he never states what digital tools he's using for writing, for task management, for note-taking. He doesn't mention any of that,
1001. 01:41:58 which I feel like is a core component of what you would expect to find there. Maybe this is my bias coming through.
1002. 01:42:05 Anyway, that rubbed me the wrong way for that particular piece. I think he needs a real editor. I can't tell if he actually did.
1003. 01:42:12 There was a number, I wish I had been keeping track of it, but he talks about when I was writing my first book, or five months into my second book,
1004. 01:42:23 or something along those lines, he makes that specific worded phrase. He uses that many, many times, and it was just like, "Sigh, find a different way to say this."
1005. 01:42:35 There's a lot of stuff like that. I know that his storytelling was hard for me. I think I would disagree with you on that one,
1006. 01:42:44 just because I struggled to follow. Sometimes I felt like he was repeating some of his stuff, and he just needed somebody to help him with some of that.
1007. 01:42:54 He's not a bad writer. I think he's a great writer. He just needed some help on this. I think it just needed somebody else to give him once or twice over on it,
1008. 01:43:06 and it could have been so much better had that been done. That particular process may have helped with this four stages in seven mental states piece,
1009. 01:43:16 just from a structure stance. He maybe could have gotten some help there. That said, the seven states, the four stages, although those aren't necessarily things that I find myself saying, "Yes, that's the right way to do that."
1010. 01:43:32 At the same time, it made me stop and think through, "Okay, well, what are those stages? What are those states?" I'm taking his seven and condensing it down into three.
1011. 01:43:41 That's forever the type of thing I do, is I consolidate things all the time. That absolutely fits my brain. That's the type of thing I would do.
1012. 01:43:50 He obviously has spent maybe a little more time with that particular model. Maybe it's possible. I'm just not at that stage.
1013. 01:43:58 I don't understand it at his level. That's possible. I will leave that on the table as something that's... There's opportunity there.
1014. 01:44:05 Right now, I think he's completely bonkers with it. I'm not going to go there and do this at all. I'll take some of what he's saying, and I'll follow through on the action items I have.
1015. 01:44:18 Knowing that a lot of what I feel like I'm getting here seems to be either regurgitated from some other source that wasn't attributed, which isn't necessarily bad.
1016. 01:44:32 But when it's point blank verbatim using the same words, it makes me... Wait, I've read that in those exact words somewhere else.
1017. 01:44:42 What am I supposed to do with that? That's the question marks I started to get. Anyway, it is a great book. I am so grateful that I've read it.
1018. 01:44:51 It is absolutely not, I would say, the book that says, "Here's how you do productivity." It's not necessarily a time management book at all.
1019. 01:45:01 It's not necessarily a mind management book because I really don't know what I would do from a mind management stance having read this now.
1020. 01:45:08 I'm going to put it at 3.5. I'm not going to go quite as high as you might. I think there's a lot of value in this. Obviously, I've got three action items from it.
1021. 01:45:18 But I just feel like from a book stance, there's a lot that could have been done here to make it significantly better that I kind of wish they had done.
1022. 01:45:27 So for the next one, David, please get a little more help.
1023. 01:45:32 All right, let's put this one on the shelf. What's next?
1024. 01:45:37 So coming up next, we have The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Green, I believe.
1025. 01:45:43 As we were talking about beforehand, this is a really short book. You'll read it in about 30 minutes and you'll be done.
1026. 01:45:50 Right.
1027. 01:45:51 Actually, it's the exact opposite of that.
1028. 01:45:54 What do we decide? Is 450 pages? Is that what it is?
1029. 01:45:58 I don't know.
1030. 01:45:59 Amazon listing in front of me and the book is upstairs at the moment.
1031. 01:46:03 But yeah, it's ginormous and really tiny print.
1032. 01:46:09 And from what I've heard, a very polarizing book. So assuming we can get through it, should be a good conversation.
1033. 01:46:18 Yep. So we'll see. Anyway, The 48 Laws of Power. What's after that, Mike? What'd you decide?
1034. 01:46:25 Well, I'm on the fence. I kind of want to make you read some days today at some point, but I don't think that time is next time.
1035. 01:46:36 So I'm actually going to pick another book that I've had for a while, another classic book.
1036. 01:46:45 There is an updated version of the 21 Laws of Leadership. So we'll keep with the number.
1037. 01:46:53 But I've read this in the past and I want to read the updated version.
1038. 01:47:00 This was like one of the first books that I read when I got into reading. I feel like it's going to hit me totally different this time.
1039. 01:47:07 Leadership is a topic that I really, really enjoy.
1040. 01:47:11 And I've got another one that is coming out shortly that I almost picked here instead.
1041. 01:47:17 But I want to make sure that we have time to get it and read it prior to picking it for Bookworm.
1042. 01:47:23 Just too close to release time.
1043. 01:47:26 So yeah, 21 Laws of Leadership by John Maxwell. An oldie but a goodie.
1044. 01:47:31 Yeah, I read this one. What's that been? Eight years ago now? Seven, eight years ago with a men's group.
1045. 01:47:37 So been through it once. I'm guessing it's not too much different, but I'm guessing also the stage of life is going to hit me very different than it did then.
1046. 01:47:47 Yeah, and really the purpose. I mean, I'm looking forward to the conversation also, but the big thing is I feel this is plugging a hole in the Bookworm catalog.
1047. 01:47:59 You know, I take notes when we do these episodes and we go back and we reference other episodes that we've done and other books that we've read.
1048. 01:48:08 I feel like this is one that we would probably reference often, but we haven't covered it yet.
1049. 01:48:15 So yeah, we should do that.
1050. 01:48:18 Yep, that's actually partially why I picked 48 Laws of Power. So I feel like this is one that could be referenced, but isn't.
1051. 01:48:27 Anyway, that'll be good. How about Gap Books, Mike?
1052. 01:48:31 No.
1053. 01:48:35 I was going to say I have one 48 Laws of Power by Robert Green.
1054. 01:48:39 It's going to be my Gap Book this time around.
1055. 01:48:43 Yeah, I actually have been reading some Gap Books, but yeah, putting those on hold for now so I can get through this one.
1056. 01:48:51 Yeah, that's the same boat I'm in, despite having like an extra hour reading at night. This one's filling all of that time.
1057. 01:48:58 Yep.
1058. 01:48:59 All right. Well, thanks everyone for listening. Thanks everyone who joined us live.
1059. 01:49:03 Thank you, especially to the Bookworm Club Premium members who are willing to support the show financially.
1060. 01:49:09 Really means a lot. If you want to help us keep the lights on, you can go to bookworm.fm/membership, five bucks a month, 50 bucks a year.
1061. 01:49:17 Gets you our undying gratitude. In addition to a couple of perks, the Mind Node files from all the books that we read for Bookworm.
1062. 01:49:25 I take notes on those and I upload those to a club. If you are a member and you haven't been there recently, I just uploaded a bunch of them.
1063. 01:49:32 So go check those out. There's also a 4K wallpaper with the Bookworm logo and some Gap Book episodes that Joe did back in the day.
1064. 01:49:40 So yeah, Bookworm.fm/membership. If any of that sounds appealing to you or you just want to help support the show.
1065. 01:49:48 And we don't talk about it a whole lot, but you know, with Christmas coming soon, if you want to gift, the Bookworm sweatshirts are amazing.
1066. 01:49:57 I have one that I wear all the time. If I need a sweatshirt that I know is going to be warm, that's the one I grab every single time.
1067. 01:50:06 I love that thing. So yes, you need to pick up a sweatshirt. It's the go-to for sure. It's my favorite.
1068. 01:50:13 So anyway, if you are someone who's reading along with us, pick up the 48 Laws of Power by Robert Green. Read every lunch break. Read every time you have a chance before you go to bed.
1069. 01:50:23 Read every morning when you get up, at least an hour at each one of those and you might get done in time. And we'll cover that one with you in a couple of weeks.