I follow a Substack hosted by Ted Gioia (pronounced Joy-yah). Ted is a thought leader who’s been around fifty working years. Primarily, he’s in the music industry as a performer, composer, and critic. However, Ted Gioia is an exceptional writer with an amazing ability to grasp complex subjects and clearly break them into comprehensible components.

A few days ago, Ted published a Substack article titled My 9 Predictions: What the Music Industry Will Look Like a Decade from Now. Here’s an infograph outlining his predictions.

I read his article several times, and it struck me the same thing goes with the book industry. It’s a close parallel, for sure. It got me thinking to take the infograph and substitute words. Replace:

Record labels and music companies with book publishers.

Artists and musicians with writers.

Music and playlists with books.

Music industry with book publisher.

Listeners with readers.

Live music with print books.

Come to think of it, these 9 predictions about books could have been made a decade ago and are realizing now.

Kill Zoners — Thoughts? Comments?

I’m sure most folks are aware of the highly successful, self-help/motivational book titled The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change written by the late Stephen R. Covey. Certainly, most writers know the work because most writers are highly motivated, avid readers who want to be effective. At least we like to think we are. 🙂

Jane Friedman recently published an interesting guest post on her blog written by Joni B. Cole. It’s called The 7 Habits of Highly Ineffective Writers: Powerful Lessons in Personal Sabotage. I felt Ms. Cole made seven great effective, ineffective writing points that (mis) aligned with Covey’s hit. I’m pleased to link it here.

In reviewing Stephen Covey’s original book, he isolated these points:

Habit 1 — Be proactive.

Habit 2 — Begin with the end in mind.

Habit 3 — Put first things first.

Habit 4 — Think win-win.

Habit 5 — Seek first to understand and then be understood.

Habit 6 — Synergize.

Habit 7 — Sharpen the saw.

In Joni Cole’s article, she points out mistakes that writers—emerging and seasoned—repeatedly make. That’s from being overly sensitive to feedback, not having a clear vision, procrastination, wasting time and energy, trying too hard to satisfy, not listening, being too self critical, and over-sharpening the saw.

To quote Cole, “While highly effective people seek a balanced program of self-improvement to renew their edge, highly ineffective writers are determined to make their saws so sharp they inevitably drive themselves right over the edge.”

Kill Zoners — Take a few minutes and read Joni B. Cole’s post on Jane Friedman’s site. Then drop back and leave a comment. Do you see a bit of yourself in this piece? I sure see myself in one spot.

It’s the Fourth of July. Happy Independence Day to all my American friends and colleagues. Although I’m Canadian, I’ve spent a lot of time in the US—visiting or passing through 37 of the 50 states. I must say, I’ve never had a bad experience in America, and I look forward to the next trip which is to Chicago and taking the Amtrak down the Mississippi to New Orleans.

I was going to write something unique for today’s Kill Zone contribution but I’m going to cheat and recirculate a piece I recently published on my own site at Dyingwords.net. It’s about a time management tool I tried out. Here goes:

There’s only one area where we humans are truly equal. Time. Each of us are given exactly the same amount of time in our day. 24 hours. 60 minutes. 60 seconds. It’s how we use, track, and manage our time that sets us apart. Think of what you could accomplish with your time, and your energy, if you were able to supercharge your schedule with the game-changing 100 blocks strategy.

This strategy of dividing your waking time into 100, 10-minute blocks and tracking it comes from Tim Urban. Tim is a thought leader and prolific writer who hosts the popular website Wait But Why. I’ve followed Tim Urban for years, and I find him a fascinating man. One of his posts was titled 100 Blocks a Day. With credit to Tim for the images and graphs, I’ll paraphrase and personalize the content.

You probably sleep 7 to 8 hours per night. That leaves you with about 1,000 active minutes in your day. If you break that into 10-minute intervals, you isolate 100, 10-minute blocks.

Click Here or on the Image to Print This Graph

Throughout your day, you spend your time progressing through the 100 squares of blocks. When you wake, you’re in the first block and you run out of blocks when you go to bed. By stepping back and looking at what you’ve done in each block, you gain immense clarity from which you can supercharge your schedule.

By time tracking with blocks, we can readily see where we’ve been productive and where we weren’t. We can see time management efficiency, or we can see a complete waste of this priceless resource called time. We can see where to cut back and where to double down.

Ask yourself if each time-block furthered your definite purpose in life and which block was merely enjoyed for its moment. Ask if each block was a time gain or a time suck. Ask if each block allowed you to constantly create, to continue to consume, or to just comfortably cruise.

If you imagine your time blocks laid out on a 10×10 grid, you’d get a total screenshot of your day. How much of it was spent at work, and how much of that work time was productive and necessary? Or unnecessary? How much of your leisure time was worth the lack of effort? How much of your family time and friend time was enjoyed? And what really mattered in your day?

Graphing and tracking time blocks let you think about everything you spend your time on in context of value per 10-minute block. Preparing dinner might take 3 to 6 blocks. Ordering in takes none. Meditation might take 1 block and a yoga session 3 blocks. Ask what the dollar-per-hour or return-on-investment might be.

2 blocks of reading per evening might add 15 books per year to your mental library. Writing a novel might take 20 blocks per day and researching/writing/formatting/publishing something like this 675-word post takes 23 blocks or 3.8 hours. I know because I tracked it on the 100-block graph.

As part of this post, I recorded my entire day from the time I awoke to the time I shut down. I’ve always kept a journal and loosely tracked my time, but this was the first crack at being so detailed. Here’s a screenshot of my 10-minute time blocks for June 28, 2024.

I have to say this exercise was enlightening. It made me focus intently as I moved from morning to night. In my writing/content producing world, I have a massive project underway called City Of Danger. It’s in its third year of production, and it’ll be a year or two more before release because the delivery technology is under development. From this point forward, I’m going to religiously track the City Of Danger production time with the 100 block strategy. I’m curious if I’ve finally found something that can increase my focus and productivity.

Tim Urban of Wait But Why has three more insightful graphs. One is a 90-year period of human life in years. One is a 90-year period of human life in months. The other is a 90-year period of human life in weeks. Feel free to download them and begin plotting your blocks, supercharging your schedule, and changing your game.

Kill Zoners—Have you heard of this 100-block thing? Do you have a time management system that you use? Or, do you find that trying to track and manage time is just a waste of time? Comments please.

“A mental model is a compression of how something works. Any idea, belief, or concept can be distilled down. Like a map, mental models reveal key information while ignoring irrelevant details. Models concentrate the world into understandable and useable chunks.”

This quote is from Shane Parrish who hosts a fascinating blog and podcast called Farnam Street. I’ve subscribed to Shane’s site for years and look forward to his weekly newsletter that arrives every Sunday morning. It’s free, but you can purchase a more in-depth dive for only a few bucks a month. It’s worth every nickel.

An extensive piece that Shane put together is titled Mental Models: The Best Way to Make Intelligent Decisions (~ 100 Models Explained) that deals with thought experiments. He covers a vast array of subjects like Circle of Competence, Reciprocity, First Principle Thinking, Second Order Reasoning, Inversion, Probabilistics, Inertia, Leverage, Compounding, and Entropy. Here’s the link: https://fs.blog/mental-models/

This is a short submission to the Kill Zone today. I’m on vacation and traveling for most of this Thursday. I can’t respond to comments till about noon PST, but I wanted to generate discussion around critical thinking and how it applies to our work as writers.

Who has heard of mental models and the latticework of integration into thought processing? Has anyone else tapped into Shane Parrish and his Farnam Street world? And who develops characters (like Sherlock Holmes) who use woven or latticed mental models in their thinking? Comments, please.  🙂