[book] Manage Your Day-to-Day

View on Amazon

This is a short, easy-to-read, summary of tips for how to be more productive and more creative. The bottom line: focus.

Here are some of the specific tips worth remembering:

• Do your most creative work first thing in the day, before everything else.
• “Feel the frequency”: set up a routine, doing the same things at the same time.
• Defend your creative time against all interruptions: schedule it on the calendar and treat it seriously.
• It’s harder to see day-to-day progress on long, big (and hence worthwhile) projects, so invent metrics to enable self-tracking.

Two specific ways to break mental blocks:

• [Ray Bradbury]: make a list of random word pairs, then force yourself to piece together a story about them.
• [Edward de Bono] Repetition is the enemy of insight. Take a starting point that has nothing to do with your project and work from there.

Most of these tips are found elsewhere, so I didn’t think this was a breakthrough book, but it’s a readable and inspiring.