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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.

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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

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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:
There is a popular notion that artists work from inspiration—that there is
some strike or bolt or bubbling up of creative mojo from who knows where…
but I hope [my work] makes clear that waiting for inspiration to strike is a
terrible, terrible plan. In fact, perhaps the single best piece of advice I can
offer to anyone trying to do creative work is to ignore inspiration.

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In a 
New York Times
column on the topic, David Brooks summarizes this reality
more bluntly: “[Great creative minds] think like artists but work like accountants.”
This strategy suggests the following: To make the most out of your deep work
sessions, build rituals of the same level of strictness and idiosyncrasy as the important
thinkers mentioned previously. There’s a good reason for this mimicry. Great minds
like Caro and Darwin didn’t deploy rituals to be weird; they did so because success in
their work depended on their ability to go deep, again and again—there’s no way to
win a Pulitzer Prize or conceive a grand theory without pushing your brain to its limit.
Their rituals minimized the friction in this transition to depth, allowing them to go
deep more easily and stay in the state longer. If they had instead waited for inspiration
to strike before settling in to serious work, their accomplishments would likely have
been greatly reduced.
There’s no one 
correct
deep work ritual—the right fit depends on both the person
and the type of project pursued. But there are some general questions that any effective
ritual must address:
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