For too long, the creative world has focused on idea generation at the expense of idea execution. As the legendary inventor Thomas Edison famously said, “Genius is 1 percent inspiration, and 99 percent perspiration.” To make great ideas a reality, we must act, experiment, fail, adapt, and learn on a daily basis. 99U is Behance’s effort to provide this “missing curriculum” for making ideas happen. Through our Webby Award–winning website, popular events, and bestselling books, we share pragmatic, action-oriented insights from leading researchers and visionary creatives. At 99U, we don’t want to give you more ideas—we want to empower you to make good on the ones you’ve got. (Page 10)
Creative minds are exceedingly sensitive to the buzz and whir of the world around them, and we now have to contend with a constant stream of chirps, pings, and alerts at all hours of the day. As these urgent demands tug us this way and that, it becomes increasingly difficult to find a centered space for creativity. (Page 11)
Note: Centered space
So rather than lay out a one-size-fits-all productivity system, we provide a playbook of best practices for producing great work. (Page 12)
My review of the early manuscript for Manage Your Day-to-Day raised some glaring concerns in my own mind about my productivity and mindfulness. These new perspectives caught me off-guard—I realized that much of my most valuable energy had been unknowingly consumed by bad habits. (Page 13)
It was clear that I was long overdue for a self-audit of how I manage my time in a rapidly changing work environment. (Page 14)
Of course, every great leader must face his or her demons in order to overcome them. I’ve always known this, but I wasn’t aware of any immediate problems. But these days the demons are more insidious; they’re the everyday annoyances, the little things that suck away our potential to do big things. (Page 14)
Alas, when folks want to talk creativity, what they’re really seeking is help with execution, ways to take action more effectively. Once the true problem becomes clear, the blame quickly shifts to the ecosystem. The company is either too big or too small. The management is screwing things up. Or it’s the “process” that gets in the way. It’s time to stop blaming our surroundings and start taking responsibility. While no workplace is perfect, it turns out that our gravest challenges are a lot more primal and personal. Our individual practices ultimately determine what we do and how well we do it. Specifically, it’s our routine (or lack thereof), our capacity to work proactively rather than reactively, and our ability to systematically optimize our work habits over time that determine our ability to make ideas happen. (Page 15)
Note: Really seeking
DON’T JUST DO, RETOOL YOUR DOING Often I’ll ask a great team about the last time they had a meeting to discuss how they work. Aside from the occasional mention of an annual off-site, I usually get a null response. Why? Everyone’s too busy doing stuff to take a pause and make some changes to how they do stuff. (Page 15)
As individuals we’re even worse off; we never have off-sites with ourselves. (Page 15)
The biggest problem we face today is “reactionary workflow.” We have started to live a life pecking away at the many inboxes around us, trying to stay afloat by responding and reacting to the latest thing: e-mails, text messages, tweets, and so on. Through our constant connectivity to each other, we have become increasingly reactive to what comes to us rather than being proactive about what matters most to us. Being informed and connected becomes a disadvantage when the deluge supplants your space to think and act. (Page 16)
Paradoxically, you hold both the problem and the solution to your day-to-day challenges. No matter where you work or what horrible top-down systems plague your work, your mind and energy are yours and yours alone. (Page 16)
Writer Ernest Hemingway wrote five hundred words a day, come hell or high water. (Page 19)
No one likes the feeling that other people are waiting—impatiently—for a response. At the beginning of the day, faced with an overflowing inbox, an array of voice mail messages, and the list of next steps from your last meeting, it’s tempting to “clear the decks” before starting your own work. When you’re up-to-date, you tell yourself, it will be easier to focus. The trouble with this approach is it means spending the best part of the day on other people’s priorities. By the time you settle down to your own work, it could be mid-afternoon, when your energy dips and your brain slows. “Oh well, maybe tomorrow will be better,” you tell yourself. But tomorrow brings another pile of e-mails, phone messages, and to-do list items. If you carry on like this, you will spend most of your time on reactive work, responding to incoming demands and answering questions framed by other people. And you will never create anything truly worthwhile. (Page 22)
CREATIVE WORK FIRST, REACTIVE WORK SECOND The single most important change you can make in your working habits is to switch to creative work first, reactive work second. This means blocking off a large chunk of time every day for creative work on your own priorities, with the phone and e-mail off. (Page 22)
I used to be a frustrated writer. Making this switch turned me into a productive writer. Now, I start the working day with several hours of writing. I never schedule meetings in the morning, if I can avoid it. So whatever else happens, I always get my most important work done—and looking back, all of my biggest successes have been the result of making this simple change. (Page 22)
Start with the rhythm of your energy levels. Certain times of day are especially conducive to focused creativity, thanks to circadian rhythms of arousal and mental alertness. (Page 23)
Manage to-do list creep. Limit your daily to-do list. A 3” × 3” Post-it is perfect—if you can’t fit everything on a list that size, how will you do it all in one day? (Page 24)
Capture every commitment. Train yourself to record every commitment you make (to yourself or others) somewhere that will make it impossible to forget. This will help you respond to requests more efficiently and make you a better collaborator. More important, it will give you peace of mind—when you are confident that everything has been captured reliably, you can focus on the task at hand. (Page 24)
We tend to overestimate what we can do in a short period, and underestimate what we can do over a long period, provided we work slowly and consistently. Anthony Trollope, the nineteenth-century writer who managed to be a prolific novelist while also revolutionizing the British postal system, observed, “A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.” Over the long run, the unglamorous habit of frequency fosters both productivity and creativity. (Page 27)
Frequency makes starting easier. (Page 28)
Frequency keeps ideas fresh. You’re much more likely to spot surprising relationships and to see fresh connections among ideas, if your mind is constantly humming with issues related to your work. (Page 28)
Frequency keeps the pressure off. If you’re producing just one page, one blog post, or one sketch a week, you expect it to be pretty darned good, and you start to fret about quality. I knew a writer who could hardly bring herself to write. When she did manage to keep herself in front of her laptop for a spate of work, she felt enormous pressure to be brilliant; she evaluated the product of each work session with an uneasy and highly critical eye. She hadn’t done much work, so what she did accomplish had to be extraordinarily good. Because I write every day, no one day’s work seems particularly important. I have good days and I have bad days. Some days, I don’t get much done at all. But that’s okay, because I know I’m working steadily. My consequent lack of anxiety puts me in a more playful frame of mind and allows me to experiment and take risks. If something doesn’t work out, I have plenty of time to try a different approach. (Page 28)
Often folks achieve their best work by grinding out the product. Creativity arises from a constant churn of ideas, and one of the easiest ways to encourage that fertile froth is to keep your mind engaged with your project. When you work regularly, inspiration strikes regularly. (Page 29)
Frequency nurtures frequency. If you develop the habit of working frequently, it becomes much easier to sit down and get something done even when you don’t have a big block of time; you don’t have to take time to acclimate yourself. I know a writer married to a painter, and she told me, “We talk about the ‘ten-minute rule.’ If our work is going well, we can sit down and get something good done in ten minutes.” (Page 29)
The opposite of a profound truth is usually also true. While there are many advantages to frequency over the long term, sometimes it’s fun to take a boot camp approach, to work very intensely for a very short period of time. (Page 30)
One of my most helpful Secrets is, “What I do every day matters more than what I do once in a while.” (Page 31)
Tactics are idiosyncratic. But strategies are universal, and there are a lot of talented folks who are not succeeding the way they want to because their strategies are broken. The strategy is simple, I think. The strategy is to have a practice, and what it means to have a practice is to regularly and reliably do the work in a habitual way. (Page 34)
The notion that I do my work here, now, like this, even when I do not feel like it, and especially when I do not feel like it, is very important. Because lots and lots of people are creative when they feel like it, but you are only going to become a professional if you do it when you don’t feel like it. (Page 34)
Sometimes we work hard in the short term but still fail to achieve our big-picture goals. How do you keep your short-term work aligned with your long-term objectives? The reason you might be having trouble with your practice in the long run—if you were capable of building a practice in the short run—is nearly always because you are afraid. The fear, the resistance, is very insidious. It doesn’t leave a lot of fingerprints, but the person who manages to make a movie short that blows everyone away but can’t raise enough cash to make a feature film, the person who gets a little freelance work here and there but can’t figure out how to turn it into a full-time gig—that person is practicing self-sabotage. These people sabotage themselves because the alternative is to put themselves into the world as someone who knows what they are doing. (Page 35)
Zeke is a creative director at a large agency. The workday he described when we first met was typical of the managers and leaders I meet in my travels. After six or six and a half hours of sleep—which never felt like enough—Zeke’s alarm went off at 5: 30 a.m. each morning. His first move was to take his iPhone off the night table and check his e-mail. He told himself he did this in case something urgent had come in overnight, but the truth was he just couldn’t resist. Zeke tried to get to the gym at least two times a week, but he traveled frequently, and at home he was often just too tired to work out. Once he got to work—around 7: 30 a.m. most days—Zeke grabbed a cup of coffee, sat down at his desk, and checked his e-mail again. By then, twenty-five or more new messages were typically waiting in his in-box. If he didn’t have an early meeting, he might be online for an hour or more without once looking up. (Page 39)
Note: Voorbeeld intro “karakter”
The challenge is that the demand in our lives increasingly exceeds our capacity. Think of capacity as the fuel that makes it possible to bring your skill and talent fully to life. Most of us take our capacity for granted, because for most of our lives we’ve had enough. (Page 41)
A couple of key scientific findings point the way. The first is that sleep is more important than food. You can go a week without eating and the only thing you’ll lose is weight. Give up sleep for even a couple of days and you’ll become completely dysfunctional. (Page 41)
The notion that some of us can perform adequately with very little sleep is largely a myth. Less than 2.5 percent of the population—that’s one in forty people—feels fully rested with less than seven to eight hours of sleep a night. (Page 41)
The second key finding is that our bodies follow what are known as ultradian rhythms—ninety-minute periods at the end of which we reach the limits of our capacity to work at the highest level. It’s possible to push ourselves past ninety minutes by relying on coffee, or sugar, or by summoning our own stress hormones, but when we do so we’re overriding our physiological need for intermittent rest and renewal. (Page 42)
What if you aligned your workday habits more closely with the natural rhythms of your body—recognizing renewal as a critical aspect of both effectiveness and sustainability in a world of rising demand? (Page 42)
Set the time for your first block of solitude now—and make it an essential part of your daily routine. (Page 47)
Many people can’t create solitude at home or at the office because of constant interruptions and requests for their time. In this case it’s best to get away and go to a coffee shop, library, or park where you can find quiet and—ideally—a place without wireless Internet. A great option for the night owls among us is to use the late-night hours for solitude and distraction-free space. If you work best at night, you can find solitude by scheduling a block of time to work alone after dark. (Page 47)
Markeren(geel) - Pagina 53 · Locatie 435 (Page 53)
Note: Armoede
In 1971, renowned social scientist Herbert Simon observed, “What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” (Page 53)
SCHEDULING IN TIME FOR CREATIVE THINKING–Cal Newport Since yesterday, I’ve received eighty-six e-mail messages, many of which require a time-consuming response. Only four of these messages directly concern the primary responsibility of my job as a university professor: publishing big new ideas. This disparity is astonishing. And I’m not alone in my experience. Increasingly, creative minds are torn in two opposing directions. We’re asked to apply our intellectual capital to solve hard problems—a creative goal that requires uninterrupted focus. At the same time, we’re asked to be constantly available by e-mail and messenger and in meetings—an administrative goal that creates constant distraction. We’re being asked, in other words, to simultaneously resist and embrace distraction to advance in our careers—a troubling paradox. I believe that this phenomenon has a lot to do with the lack of clear metrics in the knowledge work sector. (Page 54)
In a business environment, people will resort to whatever makes their life easier—like firing off e-mails to subordinates at the drop of a hat—until someone higher up demands that a particular behavior stops. (Page 55)
The review of Freeman’s book in the New York Times captures the standard dismissal of such critiques: “By John Freeman’s lights, [the fact that I send group e-mails] makes me a bad guy,” the reviewer wrote. He then points to a specific e-mail, and replies: “And the problem is? In this case I asked a question and got helpful responses.” 2 In other words, the reviewer rejects Freeman’s argument that group e-mails consume a disproportionate amount of our time by countering that he had recently sent such an e-mail and had received useful replies in return. This is the essence of our convenience addiction: because we lack clear metrics for these behaviors’ costs, we cannot weigh their pros against their cons. (Page 55)
THE POWER OF DAILY FOCUS BLOCKS The focus block method leverages the well-understood concept of a pre-scheduled appointment. It has you block off a substantial chunk of time, most days of the week, for applying sustained focus to your most important creative tasks. This scheduling usually happens at the beginning of a new week or at the end of the previous week. The key twist is that you mark this time on your calendar like any other meeting. This is especially important if your organization uses a shared calendar system. (Page 56)
People are used to the idea that they cannot demand your attention during times when you already have a scheduled appointment. (Page 57)
Blocking off time for uninterrupted focus, however, is only half the battle. The other half is resisting distraction. This means: no e-mail, no Internet, and no phone. (Page 57)
Start with small blocks of focused time and then gradually work yourself up to longer durations. A good rule of thumb is to begin with an hour at a time, then add fifteen minutes to each session every two weeks. The key, however, is to never allow distraction. (Page 57)
Tackle a clearly identified and isolated task. If you have to write an article, for example, do the research ahead of time, so that when you get to your focus block you can put your word processor in fullscreen mode and turn your entire attention to your prose. (Page 58)
THE MULTITASKING MYTH Studies show that the human mind can only truly multitask when it comes to highly automatic behaviors like walking. For activities that require conscious attention, there is really no such thing as multitasking, only task switching—the process of flicking the mind back and forth between different demands. (Page 62)
BACKGROUND DISTRACTIONS Of course, double-tasking isn’t our only affliction. Perhaps even more insidious is our habit of superficially committing to focused work while leaving e-mail or social media sites open in the background. All it takes is a whistle from one of these apps offering the thrill of an unexpected communication, and bam, we’re off course. But we don’t just lose the time spent answering a message when this happens; we also struggle to rediscover the “flow” we were enjoying before we were disturbed. (Page 62)
Even if you have cast-iron willpower, the mere fact that the Internet is lying in wait on your computer takes a toll on your work performance. The very act of resisting temptations eats up concentration and leaves you mentally depleted. (Page 63)
This may seem like a harmless change of pace, but research has shown that the unfinished morning task could linger in your mind like a mental itch, adversely affecting your performance later on—an effect that psychologists call “attentional residue”. (Page 64)
Note: Residu
If you can, it’s best to find a good stopping point on a project—one that frees your mind from nagging questions—before moving on to another task. That way, you’ll find it easier to achieve mental closure and apply all your energy to the next challenge. (Page 64)
Note: Mental closure
Of course, there are times in the creative process when it does pay to switch things up. When you’re at the problem-solving stage or you need to generate new ideas, psychologists have shown that taking your mind off-task briefly can help your subconscious find links between disparate concepts. But this is an exception to the general rule that multitasking is a productivity drag masquerading as an efficiency booster. Once you’ve cooked up your ideas and identified the way forward, it’s time for the real labor of love. For that, you need single-minded focus. (Page 65)
Note: Single-minded
In your research, you explore why we make bad decisions—often unintentionally. Can you talk about how this impacts us in the workplace? First, people have a really bad habit of coming in and checking e-mail first thing in the morning. And for many people, the morning is the most productive time. E-mail is very, very tempting, so they basically sacrifice their productive time for e-mail. The second issue is that in doing things, we like to feel that we’re making progress. So if you get to erase ten e-mails from your inbox, you feel like you have achieved something. But if you think carefully about it, it’s not clear that you’re going to get something out of it. The next thing working against us is the calendar. It has a tendency to represent tasks that can fit in thirty-minute or one-hour blocks. And tasks that take, say, fifty hours—which could be how long it takes you to complete a meaningful creative task—don’t naturally get represented in that calendar. (Page 68)
