The key ideas

Manage Your Day-to-Day

Jocelyn K. Glei (ed.), 99U, 2013

We think we are short of time. More often we are short of attention and energy: the day goes to other people's emails and notifications, and the main work never gets started. Some twenty practitioners, writers, entrepreneurs and designers among them, share the techniques that help them protect their creative time. This book teaches you to do the important thing first, guard your attention and stop mistaking busyness for work.

Who it is for

For anyone who wants to do their real work but is drowning in email, notifications and endless busyness. And for everyone tired of waiting for the perfect day and a great wave of inspiration.

The single most important change you can make in your working habits is to switch to creative work first, reactive work second.

What this book is about

Picture a busy person's morning. They sit down with one important task, open their email "just for a minute" and surface two hours later, when their energy has already faded and the main work still hasn't started. In the evening they will tell themselves there simply wasn't time.

This book is a collection of short essays that editor Jocelyn K. Glei put together for 99U, a project about how creative people get things done. Some twenty practitioners describe their methods in it: writers, entrepreneurs, designers. All of them wrestle with one question: how do you do your real work in a world that pulls you every second to reply, to check, to look away?

The book has four parts: building a routine, holding your focus, taming your tools and not burning yourself out. Next you will see why the important work should come first, why frequency beats inspiration and why rest is not a reward for work but a condition of it. Then come three tasks so you can try all of this as soon as tomorrow. If you are reading these lines, you are already one of those who want to change something.

Idea 1. Your own work first, other people's requests second

Mark McGuinness, a coach for creative people, puts the book's main advice simply: creative work first, reactive work second. Creative work is the reason you took the job on in the first place: an idea, a piece of writing, a project. Reactive work is answering other people's requests: emails, messages, small favours.

Why does the order matter so much? In the morning your head is fresh and your willpower is still untouched. Give those hours to your inbox, and the main work gets whatever tired scraps of the day are left. McGuinness advises you to do the important thing first, before the world starts dictating its tasks to you.

The usual mistake is to start the morning with email, to "clear the small stuff and free up your head". In fact the small stuff never runs out, and your head only frees up by evening. How to use it: tomorrow, don't open your email first. Give the first hour to what truly matters to you.

A designer walks into the studio at nine and decides to "quickly answer a couple of emails". At eleven he is still in his inbox, the layout untouched, with meetings ahead. The same story repeats day after day.

If you answer other people first, you spend the whole day on their schedule. Your own work gets the hours when you have nothing left.

Read in Livria

About the author

Jocelyn K. Glei is the founding editor of 99U at Behance, a project about how creative people get things done. She gathered essays from some twenty practitioners into a book about working well in a world full of distractions.

All books by this author: Jocelyn K. Glei (ed.), 99U

Terms from the book

  • Ritual
  • Multitasking
  • Rubin
  • Schwartz
  • 99U: A Behance project about the productivity and working habits of creative people. The collection edited by Jocelyn K. Glei was published under this name.
  • McGuinness: Mark McGuinness is a coach for creative people and a poet. In the book, the advice to do creative work before reactive work is his.
  • creative work: The book's name for the work you are really there to do: an idea, a piece of writing, a project. The advice is to do it first.
  • reactive work: The book's name for answering other people's requests: emails, messages, small favours. The advice is to do it second.
  • Newport: Cal Newport is a computer science professor who came up with the idea of deep work. In the book he advises setting aside protected blocks of focused work.
  • single-tasking: Working on one thing at a time, without switching to other tasks. The opposite of multitasking.
  • Stone: Linda Stone is a former executive at Apple and Microsoft who studies attention. She coined the term continuous partial attention.
  • continuous partial attention: Linda Stone's term for the state of always keeping an eye on many things and never being fully focused on any of them. It keeps a person in a mild, constant state of anxiety.
  • Babauta: Leo Babauta writes Zen Habits, a blog about simplicity. In the book he advises finding a little quiet every day and simplifying your work tools.
  • Belsky: Scott Belsky is the founder of Behance and the author of books on turning ideas into action. In the collection he advises catching yourself reaching for the feed out of boredom.
  • Sagmeister: Stefan Sagmeister is a well-known graphic designer. Every seven years he closes his studio for a whole year to come back to the work fresh.

All terms

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