Why stopping work is just as important as starting

Or maybe even more

In my last newsletter of 2021, I included this note about recalibrating my work and rest schedules:

When I was doing mostly news and feature articles, I could usually let rest come to me. Weekend work would be balanced out with light weekdays, or I would get a break when the piece was with my editor, or I could take a few days to relax after a story was published. None of those built-in downtimes exist with a book-writing schedule, which is almost entirely up to me. So I’ve had to get more serious about scheduling work, and also scheduling rest.

So far, this looks like a renewed commitment to taking weekends off, as well as not returning to writing after lunch. (In Mexico, lunch is the big meal, eaten around 2 pm.) I’m also the one who makes lunch most days, so I usually end up stopping writing around 1. I save the email and the admin and the miscellaneous digital loose ends for after that, which lets me focus on writing and research in the morning and gives me an easy offramp into the evening. This isn’t so different from how I’ve done things for a while now, so I know it works for me. But I’ve made one big change since coming back from the holiday break: If I have a “bad” morning, I don’t try to make up for it in the afternoon. I don’t come back to writing, even if I’m not satisfied with the amount or quality of work I did in the morning. I just…stop.

I’m thinking about stopping in a new way precisely because of what happened a few weeks ago when I didn’t follow my own schedule. I had an unproductive and frustrating morning, and so I decided to do some more work after lunch. Nothing too hard, I thought. Not real writing. Something on the border of creation and organization. So I overhauled my resume for an application. I wasn’t excited about it, but I once I started I got in the flow and ended up at my computer until 7 pm. That wasn’t great, but I’d taken care of an annoying but necessary and time consuming task. One less thing to be stressed out about. So far so good.

And then I came back to my desk the next morning, and I was wrecked. I couldn’t focus. Everything I’d written that week looked even worse than I already thought it was. I got depressed. Instead of closing my browser and working on that writing for even a half an hour, I spent the entire morning looking at ceramic baking dishes online—and then I didn’t even buy one.

Previously, this would have induced a spiral. I would have felt so bad about that second lost morning that I would have “made up for it” by working in the afternoon again. And then I wouldn’t have had any energy for the next morning. Again. It probably would’ve taken a weekend reset to get back on track. And, perhaps even worse, I would have been teaching myself that it’s ok to not to respect my schedule, because I’ll find a way to get things done anyway. If I don’t actually follow my own schedule, I’ll never learn to work within its borders.

So this time, I didn’t do that. I acknowledged the lost morning and connected it to being tired from the previous afternoon. And then I got up from my computer, made lunch, and didn’t go back. Even though I felt panicked and guilty and woefully behind. I stuck to the schedule, and over the next few days, writing in the mornings only, what I was working on started to gel, and now it’s basically finished.

I know it won’t always be like this. There will be fast-turnaround deadlines and inconvenient interview times and breaking news. There will also be bursts of inspiration and pre-vacation scrambles and unexpected emergencies. There always are. But for now, my schedule is under my control, and I have the chance to practice stopping. Even when it feels bad. Even when I didn’t do “enough.” Even when I know I could keep going. Especially when I know I could keep going.

The importance of stopping was clarified for me by Oliver Burkeman in his new book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. There’s a lot of great stuff in this book, which argues the only approach to “time management” that really works is embracing the inescapable reality of your own death. Obviously, I loved it. The part about stopping is relatively short, but it hit me hard. Burkeman talks about a study of writing habits that showed the most “productive” academics “generally made writing a smaller part of their daily routine than the others, so that it was much more feasible to keep going with it day after day.” Writing sessions could be “as short as ten minutes, and never longer than four hours.” The psychologist who did this study then tried to teach grad students to work in the same way, and they “rarely had the forbearance to hear it”:

It was precisely the students’ impatient desire to hasten their work beyond its appropriate pace, to race on to the point of completion, that was impeding their progress. They couldn’t stand the discomfort that arose from being forced to acknowledge their limited control over the speed of the creative process—and so they sought to escape it, either by not getting down to work at all, or by rushing headlong into stressful all-day writing binges, which led to procrastination later on, because it made them learn to hate the whole endeavor.

I’m in this picture, and I don’t like. So I’m going to stop.