By carefully organizing your tasks, and managing your schedule so that you tend to the right task when you have the right energy, your busy schedule can accommodate more productivity than you otherwise thought possible. So he shifted his paradigm, focusing instead on when to do which tasks to maximum effect, based upon his mental state at the time. Mind Management, Not Time Management: Productivity When Creativity Matters is a gripping blend of inspiring insights and actionable practices that will make you want to grab pen and paper, put your fingers to strings, or start in on a blank canvas.

Mind management involves consciously directing your thoughts, emotions, and mental resources to achieve specific outcomes. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. Relying solely on time management can create a sense of perpetual stress, as individuals constantly feel the pressure of deadlines and the need to keep up with a never-ending to-do list.Best energy should be given to high leverage activities like Generate (working on a new feature in a program, for example). Contending with the troubles of our own pasts, the ready distractions our (“stupid little dog”) brains love, the needs and demands of our colleagues, spouses, bosses, children, and friends, is like an earthquake for the fragile, sophisticated beauty of any productivity system.

I felt this book's aim, or marketing spiel, is to give you tips you help you structure your creativity and productivity in an easy-to-do way. Meditate: By practicing mindfulness meditation, you carve neural pathways to better process stimuli in your present environment, making you more calm and deliberate.

You can read it and check another self improvement or productivity book off your list, but I think there is enough here that a lot of the other stuff out there fits with this and supports it; or, maybe better said, this book gives us a foundation to build on, taking anything and everything we might have already known to the next level, or even the level above that, if we DO what David has given us. Because the generating of insights is a seemingly magical thing that doesn't depend on intense focus and scrutiny, we need a different strategy for ensuring we are always generating new creative ideas.