Work House II: Having a Creative Day

This is part two of a three part series on the past, present, and future of the home as a workspace. Part one is here, and three, here.

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In 2016 researchers tracked the day-to-day lives of 62 entrepreneurs to see how big the differences were between the most and least creative.

The differences in day-to-day creativity for a single entrepreneur were three times greater than the difference between entrepreneurs.

It didn’t matter which of the 62 you were, if the conditions were right any one of them could, and would, be creative, and go on to do great work that day.

This makes sense. If you look at people who did (and do) great work, they almost uniformly work in deeply idiosyncratic ways.

Here’s how Georges Simenon wrote a Maigret novel:

“A Maigret novel came on Simenon like an illness: he would feel the pressure of an idea building to a point where he had no choice but to write it. At that stage he would go to his doctor for a check-up, then shut himself up in a room and write flat out until the novel was finished. This would take around seven days, plus two for revision.”

And here’s how Kazuo Ishiguro wrote the Remains of the Day:

“For a four-week period, I ruthlessly cleared my diary and went on what we somewhat mysteriously called a ‘Crash’. During the Crash, I would do nothing but write from 9am to 10.30pm, Monday through Saturday. I’d get one hour off for lunch and two for dinner. I’d not see, let alone answer, any mail, and would not go near the phone.”

It’s not just writers either. Demis Hassabis, CEO of DeepMind, works what he calls a second day, starting at 11pm each evening, and finishing at around 4am.

Puttering time

This type of work is not just idiosyncratic, but also often highly inefficient.

Right now it’s popular to talk gushingly about the love of the grind, or the value of 996 (working from 9am to 9pm, six days a week).

But very few of the people who actually build great things work in that way.

The average day in the life of Churchill? Work from bed until 11am. Kick off a three hour lunch at 1pm. 5pm: nap. Wake up at 6:30pm, dinner until midnight. An hour more work, then back to bed.

Any spare time? Get some landscape painting in.

His most important part of Jeff Bezos’ day? His puttering time:

“I got to bed early. I get up early. I like to putter in the mornings. Read the newspaper, have coffee, and have breakfast with my kids before they go to school. My puttering time is very important for me. That’s why I set my first meeting for 10 o’clock.”

It’s this fact that’s behind what Tyler Cowen described as his first rule of productivity:

“There is always time to do more, most people, even the productive, have a day that is at least forty percent slack.”

It’s this style of work - long periods of time spent thinking and planning, punctuated by moments of action and decision-making - that moves the needle when you move up the cognitive stack.

In that world, one in which we’re valued first and foremost by the decisions we make, not the size of our inputs, the way to great work is intensely personal.

This is what most self-help books, with their one quick trick, or single unified theory of getting ahead and doing great work, miss.

Productivity is heterogenous: it depends on who you are, and what you’re doing.

There is no one simple trick. As music producer Jack Antonoff put it in a recent interview:

“When I was a kid, I was always in my room, and then one day I was like, “I should write songs in the basement!” I moved my stuff down there and it was like, “I wonder if I would write songs in the garage, maybe that’ll crack the code!” To make art is entirely random — you are out there in the wilderness trying to catch something. There’s no space, no thing, no time of day that makes it happen, so sometimes you go, “I’ll go there and see what happens.”

In the Pacific Northwest

The traditional office is, however, a terrible space for this kind of highly personalised work.

This is for three reasons.

First, by their very nature, modern offices are one-size-fits all, meaning an inability to shape your workspace to suit your own working style. Here’s Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic:

“It’s so bizarre when you think of the autonomy you removed from people being in the office. Your things are better when you work from home. The temperature, the music, the seat, your desk, your control over the environment, going to the bathroom, exercising, eating, all of these things, you have so much more control over that we just take for granted. Tech and traditional offices remove so much agency from people.”

Second, they’re very distracting: on average you’ll be interrupted once every eleven minutes if you work from one.

But third, and most importantly: in an office you work in public.

You’re observed by others, and that constrains the way in which you work, locking you into a very specific set of norms: ones that aren’t particularly helpful if you want to do the type of work I’ve just discussed.

This is the nub of Morgan Housel’s point in an essay published a few months back.

For Housel, great work now looks like lazy work, and so retains a stigma in doing it publicly:

“Productive work today does not look like productive work did for most of history. If your job was to pull a lever, you were only productive if you were pulling the lever. But if your job is to create a marketing campaign, you might be productive sitting quietly with your eyes closed, thinking about design.

The problem is that too many workplaces expect their knowledge workers to pull the proverbial lever – today in Microsoft Office form – 40+ hours a week when they’d be better off doing things that look lazy but are actually productive.”

This is why artists, writers and musicians seek out private spaces when they need to focus, away from the critical eye.

A good example is Aaron Dressner’s Long Pond, a private recording studio with bedrooms that was built alongside his family home in the Hudson Valley.

It’s the same in sports as well.

As I write this the American Football team, the Kansas City Chiefs are halfway through their training camp, in St. Joseph Missouri.

Unlike many other teams, they train in a different place to where the team is usually based.

And it’s no frills: some of the most highly paid athletes in the world are crammed into the dorm rooms of Missouri Western State University for just under a month.

Travis Kelce, Chiefs Tight End, and partner of Taylor Swift was asked about how he found the switch from the greatest hotels in the world to a dorm with a shared bathroom.

His response? “This is my sanctuary.”

Someone who’s applied this desire for privacy to their work successfully is Bill Gates: someone you could never accuse of not taking thinking seriously.

Since the late 80s, twice a year he’s retreated to a cabin in the Pacific Northwest and spends an entire week doing nothing but reading. He calls the practice Think Weeks:

"Think Week is a time when I can be creative and push my own thinking. It's a time to step outside the day-to-day demands of my job and really focus on the big picture."

Papers are provided and printed in advance, which he then takes with him to his aforementioned cottage. He reads. Digests. And thinks. For seven days.

The quality of thinking leads to great outcomes as well: a 1995 Think Week led to Microsoft developing its own internet browser: leading to the birth of Internet Explorer.

We should think of our homes as Bill does about his cabin in the Pacific Northwest, or Kelce about his dorm in St Joe: as a performance tool for a very specific type of work.

A quiet space, a sofa, and an internet connection

Thinking this way also allows us to reset the debate around productivity and home working.

Right now, the best studies in this space find that productivity at home is - when done as part of a pattern of hybrid working - about the same as in the office.

This, in itself, is a good piece of evidence that something about how we work has changed, and that the office has failed to catch up.

It’s also a massive cause for optimism.

Right now, offices: spaces with one job, to help you work, can be replaced by spaces designed for the opposite, without any drop in productivity.

But if they’re head to head right now, just imagine how productive we could be in homes that actually are designed for work, with working patterns that actually reflect how we work today.

Ethan Evans, VP at Amazon, made this point well a few months back:

“We’re about 300 years into learning how to use offices well. What that means, is that offices aren’t going to get much better. Working from home, we’ve only been doing that a few years since the pandemic began, and at all before the internet started 20 years ago. Which one is more likely to have more opportunity for improvement?”

This is what the debate is missing.

We’re not in a world where the best the home can do can achieve parity with the office.

That’s not the home’s ceiling, but it’s floor.

If we get this right, we can be magnitudes more productive than we ever could be sticking to a wholly office-based existence.

The low hanging fruit is technological.

Particularly so as right now we’re seeing the first wave of tools designed for home-first working, instead of simply tools for the office that we place in our homes via hacked-together setups.

This was Jensen Huang’s main reason for remote work bullishness back in June 2020:

“There’s no question we’re going to do this. We’re going to do video conferencing and VR. And we’re going to get much better, much better AI-assisted video conferencing systems and augmented reality video conferencing systems.”

It’s striking, in particular, that the best bull case for VR is work. At least this is what Apple and Meta think.

Here’s Ben Thompson making the pitch after the launch of Apple’s Vision Pro:

“I have been relatively optimistic about VR, in part because I believe the most compelling use case is for work. First, if a device actually makes someone more productive, it is far easier to justify the cost. Second, while it is a barrier to actually put on a headset - to go back to my VR/AR framing above, a headset is a destination device - work is a destination.”

This is the ultimate realisation of Toffler’s vision all the way back in 1980: a life lived in homes built for work, specialised around what we do and how we work.

It’s just, unlike the citizens of 1760s London, we won’t need any major physical changes to do so.

All we’ll need is a quiet space, a sofa, and an internet connection.

aled@ashore.io