Desk lights help keep the world small and visually quiet. My writing space is illuminated only by a desk lamp that throws a narrow beam; I keep the rest of the room in shadow, and avoid turning on overhead lights as long as possible. Narrow light reflects my state of mind: I want to be stay focused, keep distractions in the shadows, and be up but n

Dealing with deadlines, mastering the crafts of editing (at Encyclopedia Britannica) and consulting (at Institute for the Future), dealing with clients, and trying to fashion myself into someone who looked like a Productive Worker, didn’t leave a lot of time for reflection about why I was working the way I was.

If you “stop while you are going good and don’t think about it or worry about it until you start to write the next day,” Hemingway said, “your subconscious will work on it all the time.” John Le Carré says he’ll “always try to go to sleep before I finish working, just a little bit before. Then I know where I’ll go the next morning, but I won’t quit

The fact that I have ideas after mornings when I’ve been working, and don’t have them on mornings when I’ve slept in, suggests that a wandering mind only thinks hard about ideas that you’ve been working hard on. It only does its work if you’ve done yours.

On most mornings I’m nudged out of sleep at 5:00 am by the strains of Miles Davis’ “Freddie Freeloader” or one of Bach’s solo cello pieces.

even in subjects I liked I continued to trust that my talent would save the day. I believed I did my best work late at night, in the wee hours, when I could catch up with the reading, or when the combination of coffee and fatigue and deadlines would force me to bear down on an assignment and come up with something good.

I thought this was how smart people worked. Creative accomplishment isn’t organized, it doesn’t obey rules, and it has no respect for the clock or the needs of the body.

Getting out in the fresh air, experiencing the world at another species' pace, and walking in companionable silence are healthy activities, but not automatically creative ones. I need to have just been working, to still have a problem echoing in my mind, in order to have a moment of insight.

At 5 a.m., I can still feel the weight of sleep in my head— it feels like a blanket pressing down on my consciousness— but it’s light enough to let ideas flow. It’s worth spending the first part of my morning there. The fact that I’m not a morning person doesn’t impede my ability to work well in the early morning; in fact, it probably gives me a bo