Mind Management Not Time Management Free Pdf
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Catherine Shearer interviewed me for her podcast! My favorite question was "Tell me what The Lawyer, the Lion, & the Laundry is all about." That's my favorite topic, but I always find it challenging to answer the question concisely because, to me, my book is about all of life and how to live our best life.
But, I did offer a concise answer that I think sums it up quite well. Basically, that it's my synthesis of years of research and trial & error to share a practical time management and mind management strategy that helps readers handle their busy lives without feeling overwhelmed and exhausted. In other words, I did all the work and wrote it into a book that you can read and implement in only 3 HOURS!
My other favorite part of the discussion (though it's hard to choose favorites because I enjoyed the entire discussion!) was our conversation about how Catherine used the tools in my book to realize that she was setting herself up to fail by trying to do more in a week than is possible. This was our discussion of my 168 Hours Exercise, where I guide readers to assess all they are trying to do in a week, to quantify the time it will take to achieve all those things, and add it up. If it will take more than 168 hours (which is the number of hours in a week), then you've set yourself up for failure. No matter how hard you work, you will fail because you set the bar at IMPOSSIBLE. At that point, you have choices to make so that you can achieve all that you desire, but within the reality of time. We discuss those choices and how to achieve more while doing less in the conversation, and I go more in-depth in my book.
As you know, the book (and the podcast discussion) is not only for lawyers. It's for anyone who is trying to balance or integrate competing responsibilities in her life, whether that be career and family, family and self-care, or something else.
Jamie Jackson Spannhake is a lawyer, writer, certified health coach, and parent. Her mission is to help people with competing responsibilities enjoy their busy lives without feeling overwhelmed. She lives in Litchfield County, Connecticut.
Today's show is sponsored by my patrons at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn. After 12 years of the podcast, patron support encourages me to continue sharing the author journey. If you find the show useful, please consider becoming a patron.
I was reading it and it was fascinating to hear about you reaching the end of your tether with productivity hacks and getting things done and all those things. Tell us about that. How did you get to that? Because we're all self-help people here, and that's part of our life usually.
David: I was a Getting Things Done early adopter, I guess. Maybe 2003 or 2004 I was in a cubicle in Nebraska, trying to figure out how to handle my first job, and I was using GTD and it was helping me a lot. And that was fine as a designer which I was pretty well trained at and decent at.
But really, I reached the end of my tether I guess when I got my first book deal which was in 2010 and I was writing my first book, Design for Hackers and I had no experience really as a writer other than writing on my blog a little bit.
I quickly found that GTD wasn't really doing it for me because the thing about getting things done is it helps you get things done if you know what you're doing but when it comes to creative work, you don't always know what it is that you're trying to get done.
For me, it was 12 hours a day of banging my head against the wall and I would suddenly have these 15-minute bursts of flow where suddenly I could write this entire chapter and it would just come out perfectly.
It's funny because as you're talking now, I'm just writing some notes. We're recording this in March 2021. I'm feeling pretty burned out by the pandemic, and I think probably everyone is. We're a year in. And it feels as if on the one hand, it's never going to end and on the other hand, that it might end soon.
And it's funny because what you're talking about here is exactly how I'm feeling at the moment is that I can't get to that 15 minutes. I'm getting a lot done, but it's not what you would call creative work in that way. It's necessary work because you know, listeners know there's more to being an author, a professional author than just the writing.
Joanna: Far more. You're talking about that 15 minutes where you actually manage to create something, but the difficulty is getting to that. Let's talk through the steps of how do you get to that point.
David: I think I would start with the building blocks of creativity are what creativity scientists call insights. And there are scientists like John Kounios and Mark Beeman who have observed the moment of insight in the brain.
They have found that it is a neurologically distinct phenomenon, that when somebody has an aha moment, when they're solving a creative problem, that looks different in the brain from solving a procedural problem. When you are having creative insights, you're connecting these disparate elements from different regions of the brain.
They're all suddenly talking to each other just for a moment. It's like your brain is a racquetball court with these blue bouncy balls bouncing all over them and every once in a while, some of them collide and then you have an insight and that's a good idea.
Now contrast that from your typical procedural work, stuff that you already know how to do where there're steps that you can follow, that's different. Insights are like solving a maze where you have to go down all these different dead ends before you can find the solution.
Procedural work is a little bit like a jogging path. It's one step after another. And this is why my book is called Mind Management, Not Time Management because our understanding of productivity is based on this idea that time is this commodity, this thing that you can line up like blocks of frozen orange juice concentrate and one unit of time is the same as the next.
He the inventor of time management, I would say. Just sitting where with a stopwatch next to some guy who's stacking bricks and deciding exactly what movements need to happen in what order and how long each of those movements should take to follow the steps to complete this task. Creative work doesn't happen that way.
Joanna: I have conflicting feelings on this because first of all, I completely get what you're talking about in that sometimes it doesn't matter how many hours you work on something. You just can't figure out what that character should be like or how that plot point should work.
David: I go both ways myself. Sometimes I think of myself as a bricklayer. Just sit down and pump out words and trust that there's going to be some good stuff in there. And then other times I want to have maximum reverie where I just want to lay back in my hammock and stare at the clouds a bit and just make myself bored until some great insight comes to me.
I think both of those things are useful. For me, it's more about what's my skill level with the problem that I'm trying to attack and how big of an insight am I looking for? If I'm looking for a new idea for a book and I write nonfiction books, I spend years on them sometimes.
This book, I came up with the idea eight years ago, or I guess it started 10 years ago when I was writing the first book and then that became this book something like 10 years ago or 8 years ago. If I'm looking for an idea like that, that's like a big C, Creativity. And that's where I feel like I need more space.
So depending upon the skill level that I have with this problem and the size of the insight that I'm looking for, that's how I manage the amount of space that I feel like I need to make a creative insight happen. In fact, the idea for this book, Mind Management, Not Time Management, came to me during a thing that I like to do once in a while called the week of wants.
From that blog post, a couple of years later, a behavioral scientist named Dan Ariely reached out to me, wanted to know if I wanted to collaborate on a productivity app based upon this mind management idea. We collaborated on that. Google ended up buying that app.
And then I've also written a book now from that eight years later. That is from clearing that week out there. Bill Gates was famous for taking think weeks. He would take all these documents to a cabin and just sit and read and that's where he ended up writing this memo, the internet tidal wave which really poised Microsoft to have a good lead on their competitors in terms of taking advantage of the internet.
Joanna: I love that you call it a week of want there, and I agree on Bill Gates and his reading week. And it's funny because you call it making room for unplanned time in the book, but actually, you have to plan the unplanned time. As you say, you have to clear your schedule.
You also almost have to decide what you are going to do in that time. For example, are you going to, like Bill Gates does, take 10 books to a cabin and think about those books? And you still have to choose those books. Or as you said there, you mentioned your hammock.
I think a lot and I dictate a lot and then I'll write in the evenings. I'll write up my notes and think about my notes in the evenings. And that to me is a way of planning unplanned time in a way that keeps you occupied.
David: A day is better than nothing. Google was famous for having this 20% time that their engineers would use. 20% of their time they could spend on whatever they wanted to work on regardless of what their manager wanted them to work on and this is a common thing a lot of people do.
They'll have one day a week where they work on things that are a little bit higher level. A week is great. You can go even further. You can have it as sabbatical. People take months off for first things sometimes.
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