Don't Read This Book: Time Management for Creative People - Softcover

As creative people, we have ideas. Bad, good, weird, clever, and even brilliant ideas. But most of them (even the great ideas) never see the light of day. Why? If you ask a creative person, the answer will always revolve around time. We simply need time to execute an idea, and do it well — more time than we have.

Don’t Read This Book focuses on how to make choices about everything you do in your daily creative practice and life. The book follows the ‘ToDon’tList’ method: When you say ‘no’ to one to-do, task, or project, you have more time to execute another one. The more you subtract, the more focus you get.

The book is divided into 3 parts: Life, Work, and Projects. It covers everything from defi ning your life goals, to writing a 5 sentence email, to leaving out as much as possible in a project. Whether you are a student or a professional, this book will save you time. Or, don’t read this book. That will save you time too.

10 Where Do Ideas Come From?
The evolution of ideas

Everything we see around us — except for nature — was once an idea someone had. Charles and Ray Eames may have designed iconic chairs, but the idea of the chair emerged when a distant ancestor found a rock and sat down on it. Every invention flows from previous ideas. Often ideas seamlessly merge from one into the other, but some feature as milestones in the evolution of ideas, like Henry Ford’s idea to manufacture cars at a large scale. He did not invent the car itself. Nor did he invent the assembly line. But his idea to combine the two became a milestone in production history.

Everything is connected
Google would never have existed if Tim Berners-Lee had not invented the World Wide Web, which became the method for viewing the Internet (which was already in place) through personal computers. The Internet itself emerged from a network of telephone lines between various universities. Telephone lines, in turn, emerged from telegraph machines.

Innovation is serendipity,
so you don’t know what people will make.
— Tim Berners-Lee

From one idea grows another, often without us being able to anticipate it. That’s because ideas don’t function along linear lines, but come together through all sorts of twists and turns: something that philosopher Gilles Deleuze calls a Rhizome. A Rhizome is a root that grows and worms its way into everything. It is symbolic for how connotations and ideas work: You are standing at a crossing with a random number of directions. You turn into the road that feels like it suits you best. Only in retrospect can you see what the choices you’ve made were good for.

Time Management for Creative People is therefore not an hour-by-hour planning method, but a way to help you decide which route you wish to take, even if your goal is not entirely clear yet. In brief: you execute some quick tests to decide which road suits you best. Sounds vague to you? No worries, I will come back to this in a minute.