The Journalistic Philosophy of Deep Work Scheduling
In the 1980s, the journalist Walter Isaacson was in his thirties and well along in his rapid ascent
through the ranks of Time magazine. By this point, he was undoubtedly on the radar of the thinking
class. Christopher Hitchens, for example, writing in the London Review of Books during this period,
called him “one of the best magazine journalists in America.” The time was right for Isaacson to
write a Big Important Book—a necessary step on the ladder of journalistic achievement. So
Isaacson chose a complicated topic, an intertwined narrative biography of six figures who played an
important role in early Cold War policy, and teamed up with a fellow young Time editor, Evan
Thomas, to produce an appropriately weighty book: an 864-page epic titled The Wise Men: Six
Friends and the World They Made.
This book, which was published in 1986, was well received by the right people. The New York
Times called it “a richly textured account,” while the San Francisco Chronicle exulted that the two
young writers had “fashioned a Cold War Plutarch.” Less than a decade later, Isaacson reached the
apex of his journalism career when he was appointed editor of Time (which he then followed with a
second act as the CEO of a think tank and an incredibly popular biographer of figures including
Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, and Steve Jobs).
What interests me about Isaacson, however, is not what he accomplished with his first book but
how he wrote it. In uncovering this story, I must draw from a fortunate personal connection. As it
turns out, in the years leading up to the publication of The Wise Men, my uncle John Paul Newport,
who was also a journalist in New York at the time, shared a summer beach rental with Isaacson. To
this day, my uncle remembers Isaacson’s impressive work habits:
It was always amazing… he could retreat up to the bedroom for a while, when the rest of us
were chilling on the patio or whatever, to work on his book… he’d go up for twenty minutes
or an hour, we’d hear the typewriter pounding, then he’d come down as relaxed as the rest of
us… the work never seemed to faze him, he just happily went up to work when he had the
spare time.
Isaacson was methodic: Any time he could find some free time, he would switch into a deep
work mode and hammer away at his book. This is how, it turns out, one can write a nine-hundred-
page book on the side while spending the bulk of one’s day becoming one of the country’s best
magazine writers.
I call this approach, in which you fit deep work wherever you can into your schedule, the
journalist philosophy. This name is a nod to the fact that journalists, like Walter Isaacson, are
trained to shift into a writing mode on a moment’s notice, as is required by the deadline-driven
nature of their profession.
This approach is not for the deep work novice. As I established in the opening to this rule, the
ability to rapidly switch your mind from shallow to deep mode doesn’t come naturally. Without
practice, such switches can seriously deplete your finite willpower reserves. This habit also requires
a sense of confidence in your abilities—a conviction that what you’re doing is important and will
succeed. This type of conviction is typically built on a foundation of existing professional
accomplishment. Isaacson, for example, likely had an easier time switching to writing mode than,
say, a first-time novelist, because Isaacson had worked himself up to become a respected writer by
this point. He knew he had the capacity to write an epic biography and understood it to be a key task
in his professional advancement. This confidence goes a long way in motivating hard efforts.
I’m partial to the journalistic philosophy of deep work because it’s my main approach to
integrating these efforts into my schedule. In other words, I’m not monastic in my deep work
(though I do find myself occasionally jealous of my fellow computer scientist Donald Knuth’s
unapologetic disconnection), I don’t deploy multiday depth binges like the bimodalists, and though I
am intrigued by the rhythmic philosophy, my schedule has a way of thwarting attempts to enforce a
daily habit. Instead, in an ode to Isaacson, I face each week as it arrives and do my best to squeeze
out as much depth as possible. To write this book, for example, I had to take advantage of free
stretches of time wherever they popped up. If my kids were taking a good nap, I’d grab my laptop
and lock myself in the home office. If my wife wanted to visit her parents in nearby Annapolis on a
weekend day, I’d take advantage of the extra child care to disappear to a quiet corner of their house
to write. If a meeting at work was canceled, or an afternoon left open, I might retreat to one of my
favorite libraries on campus to squeeze out a few hundred more words. And so on.
I should admit that I’m not pure in my application of the journalist philosophy. I don’t, for
example, make all my deep work decisions on a moment-to-moment basis. I instead tend to map out
when I’ll work deeply during each week at the beginning of the week, and then refine these
decisions, as needed, at the beginning of each day (see Rule #4 for more details on my scheduling
routines). By reducing the need to make decisions about deep work moment by moment, I can
preserve more mental energy for the deep thinking itself.
In the final accounting, the journalistic philosophy of deep work scheduling remains difficult to
pull off. But if you’re confident in the value of what you’re trying to produce, and practiced in the
skill of going deep (a skill we will continue to develop in the strategies that follow), it can be a
surprisingly robust way to squeeze out large amounts of depth from an otherwise demanding
schedule.
Ritualize
An often-overlooked observation about those who use their minds to create valuable things is that
they’re rarely haphazard in their work habits. Consider the Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer
Robert Caro. As revealed in a 2009 magazine profile, “every inch of [Caro’s] New York office is
governed by rules.” Where he places his books, how he stacks his notebooks, what he puts on his
wall, even what he wears to the office: Everything is specified by a routine that has varied little over
Caro’s long career. “I trained myself to be organized,” he explained.
Charles Darwin had a similarly strict structure for his working life during the period when he
was perfecting On the Origin of Species. As his son Francis later remembered, he would rise
promptly at seven to take a short walk. He would then eat breakfast alone and retire to his study
from eight to nine thirty. The next hour was dedicated to reading his letters from the day before,
after which he would return to his study from ten thirty until noon. After this session, he would mull
over challenging ideas while walking on a proscribed route that started at his greenhouse and then
circled a path on his property. He would walk until satisfied with his thinking then declare his
workday done.
The journalist Mason Currey, who spent half a decade cataloging the habits of famous thinkers
and writers (and from whom I learned the previous two examples), summarized this tendency
toward systematization as follows:
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