For example, MostRecentCombinedUserSnapshotSource seems to be influential (such as for calculating "tweepcred"), but we can't see how it's calculated.
2,052 karma · joined April 24, 2008
THE BOOK http://designforhackers.com
http://twitter.com/kadavy
As an author I can tell you, it’s annoying to try to get 3D mockups of your books. I usually hire someone on Fiverr, but the results are inconsistent.
So glad this exists now. I’ll use it for the book I launched this week!
I couldn’t figure out why nothing I had learned about productivity had prepared me for writing a book. I was banging my head against the wall 12 hours a day just to get 15 minutes of flow.
The gist:
- People say “there’s only 24 hours in a day” as if you need to make use of those hours. What it really means is “time management” is like squeezing blood from a stone.
- We’re entering the Creative Age. You have to be creative to stay relevant in the robot apocalypse.
- We know from the work of neuroscientists John Konious and Mark Beeman that insightful thinking is unique. It’s promoted by a relaxed mood. It’s a fragile state: Hard to get into, easy to ruin.
- We each have “peak” and “off-peak” times of day. Counterintuitively it’s the off-peak times when you’re more creative. (If you’re groggy in the morning don’t ruin it with a cup of coffee).
- There are four stages to creativity: Preparation, Incubation, Illumination, Verification. Respect these stages and you won’t get blocked.
- You can work with natural cycles in the day, week, month, or year to go through the four stages. For example, you can use a night’s sleep as Incubation.
- Organize your tasks not by project but by mental state. I’ve identified seven mental states by which I organize my tasks: Prioritize, Explore, Research, Generate, Polish, Administrate, Recharge. (I personally prefer Todoist’s “labels” feature).
- Not all hours are equal. When I was working with behavioral scientist Dan Ariely on Timeful, we noticed there aren’t 24 hours in the day – there’s an hour here or there for various mental states.
- By harnessing cycles and working according to mental state, you can build systems that account for Incubation. For my podcast, tasks that used to be 1 grueling hour are now spaced into three five-minute bursts, with space for Incubation.
- In a chaotic world, you want your creative systems to be antifragile. Leave slack for chaos, and be ready to capture the opportunities chaos presents, for breakthrough ideas.
For example, in the book "One Small Step," the author tells the story of a client he told to stand on her treadmill every day.
She was not to even turn it on. Only to stand on it. After a week of that, then she could turn it on. Bit by bit, she built the habit.
It started when I was writing Design for Hackers 10 years ago. Couldn’t figure out why nothing I had learned about productivity had prepared me for writing a book.
The gist:
- People say “there’s only 24 hours in a day” as if you need to make use of those hours. What it really means is “time management” is like squeezing blood from a stone.
- We’re entering the Creative Age. You have to be creative to stay relevant in the robot apocalypse.
- We know from the work of neuroscientists John Konious and Mark Beeman that insightful thinking is unique. It’s promoted by a relaxed mood. It’s a fragile state: Hard to get into, easy to ruin.
- We each have “peak” and “off-peak” times of day. Counterintuitively it’s the off-peak times when you’re more creative. (If you’re groggy in the morning don’t ruin it with a cup of coffee).
- There are four stages to creativity: Preparation, Incubation, Illumination, Verification. Respect these stages and you won’t get blocked.
- You can work with natural cycles in the day, week, month, or year to go through the four stages. For example, you can use a night’s sleep as Incubation.
- Organize your tasks not by project but by mental state. I’ve identified seven mental states by which I organize my tasks: Prioritize, Explore, Research, Generate, Polish, Administrate, Recharge. (I personally prefer Todoist’s “labels” feature).
- Not all hours are equal. When I was working with behavioral scientist Dan Ariely on Timeful, we noticed there aren’t 24 hours in the day – there’s an hour here or there for various mental states.
- By harnessing cycles and working according to mental state, you can build systems that account for Incubation. For my podcast, tasks that used to be 1 grueling hour are now spaced into three five-minute bursts, with space for Incubation.
- In a chaotic world, you want your creative systems to be antifragile. Leave slack for chaos, and be ready to capture the opportunities chaos presents, for breakthrough ideas.
Have you written about your own marketing tactics? I'd love to read them.
And thanks for the input on the title and description. Someone else on the thread had feedback on the subtitle, which I may experiment with. I didn't know myself what this book was when I put it out there, and now that my readers have helped by describing what the book is, it's time to reflect and revisit.
Some people will say that you only have a "real" bestseller if NYT or WSJ say so. And, as described in the article, you could sell 3,000 99¢-cent ebooks in a week and be a WSJ bestseller. Well short of 11k or 8k for that matter. No guarantee you'd sell another book after that timeframe. Authors manipulate these lists all of the time. Especially NYT, which is curated.
Just about anybody can get a "bestseller" tag on Amazon. Is that somehow not a bestseller? It's an argument in semantics.
I talk about it more in this article: https://writingcooperative.com/yes-your-amazon-best-seller-i...
I suppose I could break down every foreign rights deal and what was ebooks vs paperback, but given the reporting of my publisher, that would be like reading tea leaves. Would that be helpful in some way?
I don't want to enable the bully.
My choice may have a lot to do with the distinction between being an independent creator and being a large company.
The large company is probably more likely to take the profit over some sort of "stand." Plus, large companies are a part of the "establishment" that higher institutions are. The large company also can handle the operational complexity of student discounts better.
This touches on a topic I ignored in the article: Is it "right" for a company like T-Mobile to offer student discounts. In other words, are they ever so slightly perpetuating credential inflation, the need for unnecessary degrees, and the resultant predatory student lending?
It may sound like a stretch. And could anyone imagine T-Mobile saying "We no longer offer student discounts because the higher education is a bully that needs to stop victimizing 17 year olds. We're taking a stand!"? Ha.
Just a thought that passed through my mind that I haven't explored a great deal.
For example, if it were legal and profitable to sell babies to whomever wanted to buy them (no background check), would you still do it?
Thanks for reading.
But of course I think I'm doing the right thing – after all, I've put everything I have into it. If I felt like I had a choice, I'd probably do something differently.
I didn't realize how much the condition was affecting me until several years after I started on my own. Now I know that it caused me to make more emotional decisions, to have a short fuse, and to tire easily. It still does.
As I reflect on it, I try not to make that too much of a factor. It's one of those mysterious impossible-to-indentify conditions. I still marvel that a person can go to an office every day, work around all of those people, and not need to take a nap in the middle of the day. In the rare days that I really feel good, suddenly "normal" people make sense. But that quickly slips away.
I don't want to make that a part of my rationalization of my decisions, though it likely played a large part. Anyway, I think I explained the rationale behind my irrationality in my post so I'll let that do the rest.
Do you have any recommendations for me for whose writing I can study so that I can write humbly and I don't always make it about myself?
My first episode was an in-person interview with Jason Fried, and was a real honor. He just spews brilliance – very easy to interview: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/jason-fried-basecamp/
Another popular interview is with a neuroscience who studies insightful thinking: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/love-your-work-episode-8-creati...
Engineers are every bit as capable – if not more capable – as learning design as any other person who wasn't "born with it" (which I haven't seen to be a requirement). But, since most of their energy is going towards one type of thinking, it diverts cognitive resources from doing another type of thinking.
Engineering requires logical thinking, whereas design requires that you be able to let your brain go quiet and let your unconscious take over for a little bit. From what I've seen, once engineers have seen a logical way of understanding what makes a good design, they have a framework on which to bind logical thinking to their experiences with design, and iteratively progress.
(P.S. I think this article could just as easily be called "designers make unusable products.")
For me, the first couple of weeks was just reminding myself that I still existed – that my "flesh sack" was still there, and would still be there despite the fact that I didn't have a job. Of course, all of the questions about "what will [I] do next?" didn't help this existential crisis.
I gradually got over it. My main metric for my days was reconnecting with the sense of "flow." For enjoying what I was doing in the moment. Thankfully, for me, I could still find that in something that resembled work.
I knew there was something in my brain that I had to discover, so after the first year, I fled SV, away from all of the noise. Two more years of experimentation later (finally supported by some freelance income), I scored a book deal on a topic that was a perfect amalgamation of my curiosities and interest.
I hope you find a similar sense of satisfaction! Just find the joy in what you're doing, and don't let others' expectations create worry for you.