The schedule that supercharged my productivity
Part 1 of the How I Finished My Book series
The first thing I should say about my schedule, while finishing a book or otherwise, is that I don’t have kids. The second thing is that I work from home and always have. The third thing is that my entire life is organized around Mexican meal times: A substantial breakfast around 7:30 or 8 am, a main-meal lunch between 2 and 4 pm, and a smaller dinner around 8 or 9 pm. Sit-down meals are the anchors in my day; if I’m not away from my desk and eating a huge lunch at 2 pm, something has gone really wrong. Don’t worry: I’ll be doing a whole future issue in this series on eating to fuel creative work. For now, just know that the particular hours I’m about to discuss work for me because of these meal times. In other places, with different culturally sanctioned breaks, other hours may better suit most people. But I think the general philosophy can be broadly applied.
For me, in this place in the world and period of my life, there are three chunks of time each day during which I can conceivably “do things,” including and especially writing: roughly 8 to 11 a.m., 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., and 5 to 8 p.m. These are strict stop times (usually to eat), but not strict start times. If I can get two hours of work or another engaging activity out of a given three-hour chunk, I’m very happy. I don’t track my time (more on that in a future issue) or necessarily attempt to stay on a single task for the whole chunk, but I do know when I’ll be stopping and that’s usually sufficient motivation to get absorbed in whatever I’m planning to do with enough time left to make it satisfying.
A sustainable, regular-life-and-deadline work pace, for me, is one chunk per day dedicated to I guess what we still have to call “deep work.” As I finished my book this summer, that deep work was almost always writing. If I’m working on a news story or a feature, or when I was at different phases of the book, it could also be research, correspondence (finding sources, scheduling calls), and doing interviews. At a sustainable pace, shallow work (non-book emails, keeping up on my tabs, etc.) goes in another chunk. And that’s usually more than enough productivity for one day.
My version of “writing as much as I can,” as I did from June through September to meet the final book deadline, is two chunks of deep work per day. My preferred way of splitting them up is working during the 8-11 a.m. chunk, and then again during the 5-8 p.m. chunk. Again, for the past few months this deep work has been mostly writing, but when I do two chunks per day, all the bits and bobs of shallow work (mostly emails) also have fit in one chunk or the other. I don’t get two chunks for deep work and one chunk for the rest of it. Two chunks is the maximum I can work and still come back to my desk with creative energy the next day.
Three chunks of work per day is impossible and should almost never be attempted, aside from a few extremely rare and specific circumstances. I did three chunks for a few days right before the deadline to get my endnotes and references in order, but that was organizational work, and I knew I could collapse after the sprint, which I did. It also undid weeks of progress in physical therapy. I was willing to pay that price for this particular deadline on this particular project, but I went in clear-eyed about the cost and confident it would be very short-term.
Life is (usually) not just work, however, and my schedule’s chunks aren’t just for working. Everything else I can categorize as “doing something” also has to fit into one of the chunks. Exercise usually goes in the 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. chunk these days. So does cooking, as lunch is my main meal. If I do chores or run errands, however enjoyable or relaxing I find them (walking somewhere; cooking something familiar), they also have to go in a chunk. Socializing: in a chunk, and it usually means I’ll be creatively and energetically useless for the other two that day. (Which is not to say socializing isn’t worth it; it almost always is.)
And what have I been doing between chunks? Absolutely nothing, and I mean NOTHING. On most days of the four months I spent finishing my book, I spent the after-lunch hours, as well as any pre-work time, lying on the floor. I almost always did neck exercises for my lingering dizziness. Some days I stretched with a podcast or an audiobook, others I did yin yoga. I gave various body parts excruciating massages with a foam roller and a lacrosse ball, especially if I had lifted that day. Sometimes I slept a little, using my yoga mat and props to make it comfortable. Floor time could last anywhere from 30 minutes to two hours, depending on when I started and what felt good that day. During floor time, I didn’t look at my computer or phone, I didn’t click around on the internet, and I didn’t talk to anyone. I didn’t, for one single second, think about the book. I did nothing.
Here’s the shocking twist: I had no idea I was following this schedule for most of the time I was doing it. If I could send this newsletter back in time to the me of four months ago, with my ideal book-finishing schedule’s rules and frameworks spelled out, it would be less than useless to her. I never could have developed this schedule, much less stuck to it so consistently and for so long, if I’d known what I was doing, or had any kind of external metric or expectation about it. Of course, I was aware that most days, I worked, then exercised, then ate, then lay on the floor, then worked again once I felt ready. I knew each of those things tended to happen around the same time of day. But my goal was never to follow a clock. It was to find and follow my own rhythms. It’s only by looking back over the past several months that I can see the schedule that naturally emerged from those rhythms, and how much work it allowed me to get done.
Next week: More on attentional rhythms, alternating deep work and deep rest, and how I’m thinking about this schedule in a phase of non-maximum work.