I got the inspiration for this book when I started writing Design for Hackers 10 years ago (I got my book deal thanks to the HN community).
I couldn’t figure out why nothing I had learned about productivity had prepared me for writing a book. I was banging my head against the wall 12 hours a day just to get 15 minutes of flow.
The gist:
- People say “there’s only 24 hours in a day” as if you need to make use of those hours. What it really means is “time management” is like squeezing blood from a stone.
- We’re entering the Creative Age. You have to be creative to stay relevant in the robot apocalypse.
- We know from the work of neuroscientists John Konious and Mark Beeman that insightful thinking is unique. It’s promoted by a relaxed mood. It’s a fragile state: Hard to get into, easy to ruin.
- We each have “peak” and “off-peak” times of day. Counterintuitively it’s the off-peak times when you’re more creative. (If you’re groggy in the morning don’t ruin it with a cup of coffee).
- There are four stages to creativity: Preparation, Incubation, Illumination, Verification. Respect these stages and you won’t get blocked.
- You can work with natural cycles in the day, week, month, or year to go through the four stages. For example, you can use a night’s sleep as Incubation.
- Organize your tasks not by project but by mental state. I’ve identified seven mental states by which I organize my tasks: Prioritize, Explore, Research, Generate, Polish, Administrate, Recharge. (I personally prefer Todoist’s “labels” feature).
- Not all hours are equal. When I was working with behavioral scientist Dan Ariely on Timeful, we noticed there aren’t 24 hours in the day – there’s an hour here or there for various mental states.
- By harnessing cycles and working according to mental state, you can build systems that account for Incubation. For my podcast, tasks that used to be 1 grueling hour are now spaced into three five-minute bursts, with space for Incubation.
- In a chaotic world, you want your creative systems to be antifragile. Leave slack for chaos, and be ready to capture the opportunities chaos presents, for breakthrough ideas.
It started when I was writing Design for Hackers 10 years ago. Couldn’t figure out why nothing I had learned about productivity had prepared me for writing a book.
The gist:
- People say “there’s only 24 hours in a day” as if you need to make use of those hours. What it really means is “time management” is like squeezing blood from a stone.
- We’re entering the Creative Age. You have to be creative to stay relevant in the robot apocalypse.
- We know from the work of neuroscientists John Konious and Mark Beeman that insightful thinking is unique. It’s promoted by a relaxed mood. It’s a fragile state: Hard to get into, easy to ruin.
- We each have “peak” and “off-peak” times of day. Counterintuitively it’s the off-peak times when you’re more creative. (If you’re groggy in the morning don’t ruin it with a cup of coffee).
- There are four stages to creativity: Preparation, Incubation, Illumination, Verification. Respect these stages and you won’t get blocked.
- You can work with natural cycles in the day, week, month, or year to go through the four stages. For example, you can use a night’s sleep as Incubation.
- Organize your tasks not by project but by mental state. I’ve identified seven mental states by which I organize my tasks: Prioritize, Explore, Research, Generate, Polish, Administrate, Recharge. (I personally prefer Todoist’s “labels” feature).
- Not all hours are equal. When I was working with behavioral scientist Dan Ariely on Timeful, we noticed there aren’t 24 hours in the day – there’s an hour here or there for various mental states.
- By harnessing cycles and working according to mental state, you can build systems that account for Incubation. For my podcast, tasks that used to be 1 grueling hour are now spaced into three five-minute bursts, with space for Incubation.
- In a chaotic world, you want your creative systems to be antifragile. Leave slack for chaos, and be ready to capture the opportunities chaos presents, for breakthrough ideas.
Thanks for reading and for the thoughts, Andrew! For sure I have overlooked opportunities to market the book without ads. Unfortunately, I don't know which ones. Maybe I'll try a spending freeze at some point so I can isolate what works.
Have you written about your own marketing tactics? I'd love to read them.
And thanks for the input on the title and description. Someone else on the thread had feedback on the subtitle, which I may experiment with. I didn't know myself what this book was when I put it out there, and now that my readers have helped by describing what the book is, it's time to reflect and revisit.
Thanks for reading. I'm pretty open about the fact that "bestseller" is relatively meaningless, but that I use it anyway.
Some people will say that you only have a "real" bestseller if NYT or WSJ say so. And, as described in the article, you could sell 3,000 99¢-cent ebooks in a week and be a WSJ bestseller. Well short of 11k or 8k for that matter. No guarantee you'd sell another book after that timeframe. Authors manipulate these lists all of the time. Especially NYT, which is curated.
Just about anybody can get a "bestseller" tag on Amazon. Is that somehow not a bestseller? It's an argument in semantics.
Thanks for reading and commenting. As for breaking down the $50,000, what did you have in mind? It was simply selling 16,000 copies.
I suppose I could break down every foreign rights deal and what was ebooks vs paperback, but given the reporting of my publisher, that would be like reading tea leaves. Would that be helpful in some way?
Thanks for the input! I may experiment with the subtitle. I had other strategies in mind with the current one – but that was a whole year ago, and I know much more now.
