In Lin-Manuel Miranda’s story we find a clear example of one of the general patterns we identified earlier in the lives of the great scientists: he took his time. He allowed the creative development of his play to unfold slowly in the seven years that followed its initial performance.

When you spend two years reading and critiquing and admiring work by other young writers pushing their prose in new and interesting directions, your standards for what writing can achieve sharpen.

When you approach a project without the hurried need to tend many barely contained fires, you enjoy a more expansive sense of experimentation and possibility.

Scottish crime novelist Ian Rankin, describing the onslaught of the mundane that so often keeps him from his writing: “The phone rings, the doorbell sounds, there’s shopping to be done or an urgent email demanding a reply.”

To gain this credibility, I recommend, at first, when considering a new project, you estimate how much time it will require and then go find that time and schedule it on your calendar. Block off the hours as you would for a meeting. If you’re unable to find enough blank spaces in your schedule in the near future to easily fit the work, then you don

These included Celeste Headlee’s Do Nothing, Anne Helen Petersen’s Can’t Even, Devon Price’s Laziness Does Not Exist, and Oliver Burkeman’s delightfully sardonic Four Thousand Weeks.

I think that’s where the burnout really hurts—when you want to care about something but you’re removed from the capacity to do the thing or do it properly and give it your passion and full attention and creativity because you’re expected to do so many other things.

This sudden interest in workplace experimentation is both welcome and needed, as much about how we work in the knowledge sector today is ossified into tradition and conventions, some of which are arbitrary and some of which are borrowed from different, older types of work. The proposals making waves at the moment, however, feel somehow insufficient

I might have published more academic papers than you last year, but this might have been, in part, due to a time-consuming but important committee that you chaired. In this scenario, am I really a more productive employee?