My daily routine

Working independently means the burden and opportunity of creating my own structure. I’ve found ritual and routine essential to guide me.

When my days don’t go well, it’s often because something derailed me in the morning, and I never really got back on track. The high-order bit for my productivity is whether I complete a deeply-focused morning creative block. So my day is structured around making intense creative mornings happen.

• ~7:00: Wake; shower; walk, train, feed my dog; make coffee
• ~7:45 – 13:45: Uninterrupted morning working block
  • Default environment: WiFi off; Forest on my phone; alone at my desk (It’s hard to hear yourself think)
  • No meetings; working in 25m/5m pomodoros (see notes on Pomodoro technique); no extended breaks (I find maintaining momentum is more important than combatting fatigue)
  • Start a Daily working log, write for a minute or so about how I’m feeling and my intentions for the day; look at my Menu for the week, get a sense of what I’d like to dig into.
  • Dig into whatever seems most exciting creatively, usually sticking to one task for the entire block
  • Details here vary depending on my projects and their status. Sometimes it’ll be My morning writing practice; sometimes it’s designing or building prototypes; sometimes it’s reading through a stack of material about something I’m trying to understand.
  • If I start to run out of steam (usually around pomodoro 10), I’ll switch to administrative and procedural tasks, like email time: I’ll spend ~30m ~3 times a week replying to email (and generally ignore it otherwise).
  • I eat lunch at my desk. It’s usually Chopped salad or Quiche.
  • After this block, I think of my workday as effectively “done” and free myself from any further sense of obligation.
• ~2 – 3: Decompression walk with my dog. Often also walking with a friend or taking a meeting by phone at this time.
• ~3 – 6:30: Unstructured time. Napping, socialization, meditating, exercising, reading, more walking.
• ~6:30 – 8: Cooking, dinner.
• 8 – 10:30: (If a friend wasn’t over for dinner) piano, reading, time with Sara.

The high-order bit for my productivity is whether I complete a deeply-focused morning creative block

There’s so much productivity advice out there. You can get lost for months reading blogs of people optimizing their work with special journals and note-taking systems. I’ve spent tons of time measuring and optimizing my schedule throughout the day, trying to eke out an extra hour of work. All these things are useful, no doubt, and for some types of work they’re perhaps what’s most essential. But my experience has been that really one thing determines whether or not I have a “good day” at work. If I sit down at my desk in the morning for an uninterrupted 4-6 hour working session, and manage to “sink into” a deep state of focus and clarity on some creative project, I’ll probably have a great day creatively. If my mind is scattered and never settles on any particular problem, it rarely matters how much I “optimize” the rest of my day—that will not be a day of meaningful creative progress.

The first hurdle was simply clearing my morning schedule consistently, so that I always have a 5-6 hour contiguous working block. That’s pretty easy (for me) to do. And of course the next obvious obstacles are the things “productivity hackers” often write about: blocking distracting stuff on my computer really does help, so long as one isn’t too rigid about it. A writing practice helps me get clear on my projects and their goals, so that I’m reasonably likely to have some clear sense of what to do when I sit down at my desk.

But still, I often find that I sit down to my desk for four hours without ever really settling into any particular line of creative work. That’s not because I’m checking Twitter or my email or anything obvious like that. It’s just that I’ll jump around between various questions without ever committing to any one, or I’ll find myself solving some convenient problem which actually isn’t important, or my mind will simply wander. Or I’ll experience Dullness. This is a problem because Effective deep work depends on both time and intensity.

Meditation certainly helps here: Dullness and distraction in creative work may arise from the same causes as in meditation. The key does seem to be continuous metacognitive awareness. It also helps to Get curious and Get playful. And part of it, I observe, is just practice. I spent many years doing quite task-oriented work. The project of moving into increasingly challenging creative work is in part the project of getting comfortable being lost, and still making progress while remaining lost. Deep research requires a slower pace than tech industry work

Another strategy that’s helped: It’s easier to remain focused when collaborating live.

Related: It’s hard to hear yourself think.