Sublime

Rising at five thirty to write a thousand or more words before beginning the day’s labor became an entrenched habit, unbroken to this day. Each day’s writing ended with four or five short reflections on subjects then occupying my mind. By the late ’90s, my writing had grown to five thousand pages containing several thousand of the short reflections

Like John McPhee waiting on the picnic table for insight on his article structure, Zuiker’s efforts point toward a definition of meaningful and valuable work that doesn’t require a frenetic busyness. Its magic instead becomes apparent at longer timescales, emanating from a pace that seems, in comparison with the relentless demands of high-tech pseu

Before writing this book, I called Mason Currey, author of Daily Rituals, which profiles the rituals of 161 creatives like Franz Kafka and Pablo Picasso.

Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work. —Gustave Flaubert, French novelist

To do real good physics work, you do need absolute solid lengths of time . . . it needs a lot of concentration . . . if you have a job administrating anything, you don’t have the time. So I have invented another myth for myself: that I’m irresponsible. I’m actively irresponsible. I tell everybody I don’t do anything.

I build my days around a core of carefully chosen deep work, with the shallow activities I absolutely cannot avoid batched into smaller bursts at the peripheries of my schedule. Three to four hours a day, five days a week, of uninterrupted and carefully directed concentration, it turns out, can produce a lot of valuable output.