The Pearson correlation coefficients are closer to 0 this time, indicating a very weak linear relationship between the variables. More importantly though, take a look at the color of the circles in all the previous graphs. The darker the circle is, the closer to the end of the project it is. The lighter the color, the further away the session is in the past. As always, correlation is not causation and this might be another one of those cases: I got more REM sleep at the start of my project & I tended to have longer sessions at the start of my project > there’s a weak correlation there. It’s not that REM sleep caused these shifts, more so that they happily coincided in my (Spreadsheet of) Life.

Thus, the conclusion is slightly more boring than “Increase REM sleep and you’ll wake up as Salvador Dalí”. It is this: make sure you get enough good-quality sleep. As you can see from my Total Sleep Minutes graph, it’s almost a straight vertical line. In other words, I was consistently sleeping 7–9 hours per night and consistently writing something.

Writing a book is a marathon, not a sprint and you’ll need to be able to sustain your work over years. I’d venture a guess that like athletes, we creative athletes need sleep and recovery too, not just pushing ourselves to the MAX.

4. Allow yourself to concentrate

Despite my best efforts, my experiments were turning out insignificant results time and time again. I had different goal metrics, but mostly I used Words-Per-Minute as a proxy for productivity.

Here’s my Words-per-minute (WPM) while listening to binaural beats compared to writing in silence. No significant differences here.

Average words per minute per soundscape. Silence is a s good as binaural beats.

I was personally hoping for binaural beats to fare better than silence. Nope, brain music is as good as no music, at least for me. But this individual experiment is a part of a bigger hack: giving yourself the best chance for focused work. Looking back, I can see that I was already doing that:

I didn’t look at my notifications or social media before I started writing

I was writing in the morning with minimal distractions

My morning routine was always the same

My data logging routine was always the same

I believe that all these routines were tiny cues for my brain and body to get ready to start writing. Once I opened up my Scrivener document, I started writing or editing straight away, which also meant that even sessions shorter than 30 minutes were enough to get something done.

5. Stop hacking and start habiting your creativity

To some extent I was being slowed down my spreadsheet and the minutiae of things I tracked. My neck circumference didn’t have anything to do with my productivity (gasp) and neither did the number of pull-ups I could do in the morning.

Here comes the key learning for anyone looking for that One Hack That Allowed Me to 10X My Productivity and Unlock My Creativity:

Do or do not. There is no hack.

Or to put it less bluntly: the key to better productivity is not in the individual hacks, it’s in the big picture. More important than the frequency of your binaural beats is the frequency and consistency of your working sessions.

Habit should be a transitive verb. Find ways to habit your creativity and you’re 92% of the way there.

6. Embrace the variation in your creative process

I love routines. They give me comfort. And I love predictability. With enough practice, I’ve found the creative process to be more predictable than most people think.

You sit down and you start writing — instead of waiting for a moment of inspiration.

That said, there will be different phases in your writing journey. Sometimes you’ll be slower, sometimes faster. Especially when I got feedback on my manuscript, it had a huge impact on how much I worked. And after I did a big push to finalize a draft, I found myself stuck on idle for some time.

Here’s my average session length over the 2 and half years:

Average session length over time. The average duration changes throughout the process and different work phases.

There will be variation in your creative process too. Push through it. Embrace it. Know that it’ll be there and you’ll be better equipped to handle it.

7. Start with one session, add another if you can

Let’s have another look at the image of writing minutes per time of day:

Working minutes per time of day. One peak in the morning.

There’s only one mountain with its peak approximately on the 7:00 am mark. You can imagine an invisible barrier starting from 8 am that stops the base of the mountain from expanding right. That’s me having to go to work. Another invisible barrier is me being asleep that’s stopping it from expanding left.

We all have these invisible barriers, but you can work around them.

When I start my next project, I’ll try to speed up the process by doing two things:

1. Expanding the base of the mountain

2. Adding another peak

This is what I’m aiming towards.

By adding another working session I could double the amount of work I get done. The second session can be focused on editing or ideation, depending on the mental energy I have left.

I would also try to extend my morning (writing) session length by doing more preparations the night before. Maybe laying out my clothes the night before or making myself breakfast so that I can squeeze out 10 minutes more in the morning.

What Next?

From a scientific (repeatable, verifiable) perspective this project is far from done. Some of the caveats include:

a small sample size (n=1),

a lax experimentation regimen where I tried a bunch of different experiments but didn’t control for confounding factors,

settling for local maximums instead of trying out for possible global maximums…

That said, to me the project was a success. I got to go up on the TEDx stage. I have a book I’ll focus on getting published. I also have actionable next steps for my next book project.

And lastly, I hope my journey has inspired you to start your own big creative project.

You Have What I Takes To Write a Book

If you’ve made it this far, I congratulate you. You have what it takes to write a book — or finish some other creative project that requires sustained effort. Not only because you made it this far but because there is no magic sauce.

I’ll restate what I said in the TEDx talk: Creativity isn’t a magical creature that only befriends those it deems worthy. Creativity is work. To start and finish that project you’ll need to do two things:

Find your reason to get started Find your way to keep going

I got started because I wanted to publish a novel. I kept going because I was accountable to my Spreadsheet of Life and curious to see what secrets it could tell.

What’s your reason to get started?

Jukka Aalho (formerly Ahola) is a Finnish writer, TEDx speaker, podcaster and marketer. For contact details and more info, visit jukkaahola.fi/en/cv.

Do you know someone interested in creativity and productivity? If you think this article could help them start and finish their creative project, why don’t you share this story with them.