Manage Your Day-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind (99U)

Recently, this quote from the musician and composer Brian Eno in Eric Tamm’s biography has been floating back into my mind:

“The difficulty in feeling that you ought to be doing something is that you tend to undervalue the times when you’re apparently doing nothing, and these are very important times. It’s the equivalent of dream time, in your dail... See more

Our ideas, too, will disappoint us if we don’t give them the right environment to develop in. They’ll be shallow, derivative, dull, repetitive, or take too long to show up. Or they’ll just not show up at all. We must find the perfect glass jar and lid for them to appear in.

What is that perfect glass jar, though? Our ideas appear primarily in one s... See more

” When you train your mind to delay taking action on an exciting and problematic task for a few hours and completely focus yourself on the most important things you need to do, you honor your little voice. So what happened to me at the end of the seven days? For the first time in my life, I touched freedom. When I cut off the external world complet

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The way you feel when you awake early in the morning and your mind is fresh and as yet unsoiled by the noise of the outside world—that’s space worth protecting. So too is the zone you lock into when you’re really working well. Don’t let intrusions bounce you out of it. Put up barriers. Put up the proper chuting to direct what’s urgent and unimporta

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