Articles in this series:
The Limitations of the Deep Work Hypothesis – Introduction
How Women Find Time for Their Work Projects (part 1)
How Women Find Time for Their Work Projects (part 2)
As I mentioned in the previous article, the focus of this article is adding more examples of women (who usually either experience gender stereotyping or are caregivers or both) to the deep work philosophies Cal Newport identified in his book Deep Work.
To recap some work strategies, Newport categorized four types of work philosophies suited for deep work:
- The monastic philosophy, the most focused form of deep work as it involves spending almost all working hours on deep work and minimizing all other types of work
- The bimodal philosophy where we can obtain a high amount of deep work by arranging a year, months or weeks, into chunks of deep and non-work
- The rhythmic philosophy, an ideal strategy for those with a reasonably static work schedule as we can block hours for deep work with breaks for shallow work, thus obtaining a daily “rhythm”
- The journalistic philosophy where we accommodate deep work whenever we can into our schedule
My research was mostly based on Mason Currey’s excellent books, Daily Rituals (also used by Cal Newport for his book) and Daily Rituals: Women at Work.
Unfortunately, examples of women in Deep Work are kept to a minimum, as this gender analysis shows. I won’t debate the rights or wrongs of this situation, as Mason Currey acknowledges that he also has a small percentage of women in his first book, hence the second book Currey wrote.
As Currey remarks in the introduction of his second volume,
the problem with disproportionately focusing on famous and successful men is that the obstacles they faced were frequently mitigated by devoted wives, paid servants, sizable inheritances, and, oh yes, centuries of accrued privilege. For the contemporary reader, this blunts their usefulness as models… Switching the focus to women, by contrast, opens up dramatic new vistas of frustration and compromise.
The Monastic Philosophy
Pioneering photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White said that
I keep an odd schedule that would be possible only for someone with no family demands – to bed at eight, up at four.
She was also a writer, and she needed long uninterrupted periods. Bourke-White acknowledged this could be difficult for others to accept:
I’m afraid my closely guarded solitude causes some hurt feelings now and then.
A friend of hers recalled what happened when she invited Bourke-White to lunch:
She told me she was writing a book and there was no hope of a lunch for several years.
Poet Edna St Vincent Millay recalled that
When I am working on a book, I work all the time … I think of my work even when I am in the garden or talking to people. That is why I get so tired. When I finished [the poetry collection] ‘Fatal Interview’, I was exhausted. I was never away from the sonnets in my mind. Night and day, I concentrated on them for the last year and a half.
Her husband, Eugen Boissevain, supported Millay’s career and managed their domestic activities. In an interview, Millay told the reporter how her husband took care of their household:
Eugen does all that kind of thing. He engages the servants. He shows them around. He tells them everything. I don’t interfere with his ordering of the house. If there is something I don’t like, I tell him… It’s this concern with my household that protects me from the things that eat up a woman’s time and interest.
The Bimodal Philosophy
Author Zora Neale Hurston remarked:
Every now and then, I get a sort of phobia for paper and all its works. I cannot bring myself to touch it. I cannot write, read, or do anything at all for a period… Just something grabs hold of me and holds me mute, miserable and helpless until it lets me go. I feel as if I have been marooned on a planet by myself. But I find that it is the prelude to creative effort.
But once she got back to writing, she could work with astonishing speed. Neale Hurston said in her autobiography:
[her best-known novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God] was dammed up in me, and I wrote it under internal pressure in seven weeks. I wish I could write it again.
Writer Isabel Allende starts a new book on January 8. According to an interview,
My life is busy, so I need to save some months of the year to be in a retreat. I need time and silence, or I will never be able to write. Having a start date is good for me and everybody around me. They know that on January 8, I’m not available anymore.
She started this tradition on January 8 1981, when she started writing a letter to her dying grandfather. This letter became her first novel, The House of Spirits. This routine has served Allende well, as she published 26 books over four decades.
Before she dedicated herself to full-time writing, she worked as a school administrator. As she was also caring for her children, she
would write only at night, although I am not a night person, and on the weekends.
The Rhythmic Philosophy
Author Ursula K. Le Guin was a prolific writer who created incredible fantasy or sci-fi literature. She managed this by doing her writing between 7:15 AM and noon.
Writer Maya Angelou described her writing routine in an interview as so:
I usually get up at about 5:30, and I’m ready to have coffee by 6, usually with my husband. He goes off to his work around 6:30, and I go off to mine. I keep a hotel room in which I do my work—a tiny, mean room with just a bed, and sometimes if I can find it, a face basin. I keep a dictionary, a Bible, a deck of cards and a bottle of sherry in the room. I try to get there around 7, and I work until 2 in the afternoon. If the work is going badly, I stay until 12:30. If it’s going well, I’ll stay as long as it’s going well. It’s lonely, and it’s marvellous. I edit while I’m working. When I come home at 2, I read over what I’ve written that day and then try to put it out of my mind. I shower, prepare dinner so that when my husband comes home, I’m not totally absorbed in my work. We have a semblance of a normal life. We have a drink together and have dinner. Maybe after dinner, I’ll read to him what I’ve written that day.
Contemporary visual artist Julie Mehretu, a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship (often referred to as the “genius grant”), declared in an interview:
Motherhood, Mehretu tells me, has led her to adopt a rigorous daily routine: in the studio by 8.30 AM, back home around 6. “I’m a mom! When you’re not a mom, you can get up in the middle of the night, paint, sleep all morning … you can’t do that when you have two children!”
Currey wrote about the fine-art photographer and educator Catherine Opie that as of fall 2016, she could only create new bodies of work during spring, summer, and winter breaks from school. Opie said that:
I suppose that I would actually like to not have a daily routine. I would like to have more wandering. But because I’m a professor, a mother and an artist that runs a full studio, I end up having to have a really incredibly rigid routine.
There hasn’t been any point where I haven’t been able to make work. It’s just, you schedule that like you schedule the rest of your life. It doesn’t happen by chance.
Writer Anne Rice wrote during the night and slept during the day for her first novel, bestseller Interview with the Vampire, as she needed “utter freedom”, with no friends calling. After her son was born, Rice switched to daytime writing. Regardless of the time of writing, for Rice,
it’s always a search for the uninterrupted three- or four-hour stretch.
Barbara Oakley, a professor, author and creator of a few well known MOOCs such as Learning How to Learn or Mindshift, is present in quite a few of my articles. So, I researched Oakley’s writing routine :
Usually, I try to block out some time during the day. If I’m first starting on a book, I’ll try to block out perhaps two to three hours; if I’m in the throes of finalizing a book, eight hours. Optimally, I try to write early in the day. But all-too-often, I’ll wake up to critical emails, so my writing slides into mid-morning or even mid-afternoon. Some days, as when I’m teaching or in heavy travel, I can’t write at all.
The Journalistic Philosophy
Toni Morrison, the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, remarked: “I am not able to write regularly”. She worked a day job as an editor, taught university literature courses and raised her two sons as a single parent.
It does seem hectic. But the important thing is that I don’t do anything else. I avoid the social life normally associated with publishing. I don’t go to cocktail parties, I don’t give or go to dinner parties. When I sit down to write, I never brood. I have so many other things to do, with my children and teaching, that I can’t afford to brood. I brood, thinking of ideas, in the automobile when I’m driving to work or in the subway or when I’m mowing the lawn. By the time I get to the paper, somethings’s there – I can produce.
For Agatha Christie, writing was a task,
which I performed in spells and bursts. I never had a definite place which was my room or where I retired to write. All I needed was a steady table and a typewriter.
Many friends have said to me, “I never know when you write your books because I’ve never seen you writing, or even seen you go away to write”. I must behave rather as dogs do when they retire with a bone; they depart in a secretive manner, and you do not see them again for an odd half hour. They return self-consciously with mud on their noses. I do much the same. I felt slightly embarrassed if I was going to write. Once I could get away, however, shut the door and get people not to interrupt me, then I was able to go full speed ahead, completely lost in what I was doing.
Kate Chopin began her career at her doctor’s suggestion after losing her husband, her business, and her mother in only three years. While caring for her six children, Chopin wrote about one hundred short stories and novels. According to her daughter, Chopin preferred to write in the sitting room with her children “swarming” around her.
Harriet Jacobs’ harrowing Wikipedia page describes her life as a slave in North Carolina, enduring sexual harassment, having her children separated from her, or hiding for seven years in a tiny garret.
Later, Cornelia Willis, an employer for which Jacobs worked as a nanny, bought her freedom, and Jacobs continued to work for the Willis family, caring for the family’s children. Jacobs published Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl under the Lynda Brent pseudonym and wrote in the preface that:
Since I have been at the North, it has been necessary for me to work diligently for my own support, and the education of my children. This has not left me much leisure to make up for the loss of early opportunities to improve myself; and it has compelled me to write these pages at irregular intervals, whenever I could snatch an hour from household duties.
At 58, Penelope Fitzgerald began to write books. As a star student at Oxford, she was expected to have a fulminant writing career. Marriage to an alcoholic husband and caring for three small children delayed her literary dreams for decades. After her family houseboat sank, losing all their possessions, she would be living for years in a council flat.
Working as a teacher, she wrote in a letter that
I have a sensation of wasting my life, but it’s too late to worry about this anyway.
She started writing here and there,
during my free periods as a teacher in a small, noisy staff room, full of undercurrents of exhaustion, worry and reproach.
Once her youngest child was preparing to leave the house and her marriage became a friendly companionship, Fitzgerald finally found time to begin her literary career. She would be heralded as “the best English novelist of her time”.
Contemporary poet and professor Nikki Giovanni said:
You have to realize, my generation was the Black Power generation. We were always on the go, we always had something to do, someplace we needed to be. So we got used to writing on the go.
In Learning How to Learn, Barbara Oakley told the story of Mary Cha, who joined the army. Cha was happy with her work but had little in common with her coworkers.
This often left me feeling alienated and alone, so I studied math in my spare time to keep the ideas fresh in my head. – my military experience helped me develop good study habits. Not as in stare intently for hours, but as in only got a few minutes here, gotta figure out what I can! Some issues or others were always rising, which meant that I had to do my work in short bursts.
That’s when I accidentally discovered ‘magical math marination’ – the equivalent of diffuse-mode processing, I’d be stuck on some problems – really stuck, with no clue about what was going on. Then I’d get called out to respond to some explosion or another. While I was out leading the team or even just sitting quietly, waiting, the back of my mind was simultaneously musing over math problems. I’d come back to my room later that night and everything would be solved.
Remarks
Four neat philosophies can’t fully capture the immense complexity of a woman’s work experience. There is no unique size fits all, as not all women had access to the same opportunities, upbringing or education. Each woman is unique and has her pattern of living her life. Undoubtedly, women from privileged backgrounds had a head start, as they didn’t have to worry about money, cleaning, preparing meals or being harassed about their skin colour.
We can’t have the same routine across years as our lives will undeniably alter. Anne Rice expressed this concept as such:
I certainly have a routine, but the most important thing, when I look back over my career, has been the ability to change routines.
Sometimes, as Isabel Allende showed, one has to work in the slivers of time, here and there, and after some success, they could afford to work full time on their projects.
Other times, it is the other way around. Once one got successful following a rhythmic routine, they would have to adapt to new routines. For example, author Francine Prose used rhythmic, bimodal or journalistic approaches following the changes in her life.
Back in the day, when my kids were little, and I lived in the country, and I was an unknown novelist, I had a schedule so regular that it was practically Pavlovian, and I loved it. The school bus came, I started to write. The school bus returned, I stopped. Now that I’m in the city and my kids are grown and the world, it seems, will pay me to do anything BUT write … my routine is more haphazard. I write whenever I am able, for a few days or a week or a month if I can get the time. I sneak away to the country and work on a computer that’s not connected to the Internet. When the writing is going well, I can work all day. When it’s not, I spend a lot of time gardening and standing in front of the refrigerator.
Possibly Mrs Patrick Campbell, one of the most famous English actresses at the beginning of the 20th century, quipped the best line about the blurred “indistinction” between work and household chores that women usually must support. As one acquaintance remembered:
Domestic details maddened her, and I can see her now, entering [her daughter’s] bedroom, her great tragic eyes smouldering, and declaiming passionately – ‘They tell me there is no more toilet paper in the house. How can I be expected to act a romantic part AND remember to order TOILET PAPER!‘
After reading about Penelope Fitzgerald, I can’t help but wonder how much of her talent was robbed? As Fitzgerald wrote in The Bookshop:
She had a kind heart, though that is not of much use when it comes to the matter of self-preservation.
To employ monastic routines, women would either need to have no family to take care of or somebody else shouldering the household responsibilities.
But for women that have to care for their families, neither monastic nor bimodal approaches are possible. Some have to employ strict routines. However, for most women, deep work is not only about neatly time-blocking but also about finding reliable childcare, negotiating time and space boundaries with family, or surviving sleep deprivation as some women manage to get work done only at night or in the early morning when the house is asleep.
Especially in pandemic times, we need to revise our work methods, because as I said in another article, “Sometimes, it is about thriving. Sometimes, it is about surviving. We would be wise to adjust our strategies accordingly”.
In the following article, I will write in more detail about some other techniques that women chose to do (either becoming celibate or child-free) to follow their work aspirations. Some had to renounce their work (composer Gustav Mahler told his future wife, Alma Schindler, a composer in her own right, that there can only be one composer in the family and so, Alma had to drop her composing aspirations).
Note: I intended to include Jane Austen in the journalistic philosophy but I decided against it. Jane Austen lived her entire life with her mother, sister, a close friend, and three servants. Her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh wrote a memoir about his aunt where he proclaims that Austen
was careful that her occupation not be suspected by servants, or visitors, or any persons beyond her own family party.
There was “a swing door which creaked when it was opened” and “gave her notice when anyone was coming,” helpfully warning her to hide her work. He concludes,
I have no doubt that I, and my sisters and cousins, in our visits to Chawton, frequently disturbed this mystic process.
Based on this, Mason Currey affirms that Austen wrote in the family sitting room, “subject to all kinds of casual interruptions”.
However, after doing some research and considering the characters Austen created, it is perhaps a myth that Jane Austen was shy about revealing herself as an author to others. Austen indeed published her books anonymously. As her Wikipedia page states:
At the time, the ideal roles for a woman were as wife and mother, and writing for women was regarded at best as a secondary form of activity; a woman who wished to be a full-time writer was felt to be degrading her femininity, so books by women were usually published anonymously in order to maintain the conceit that the female writer was only publishing as a sort of part-time job, and was not seeking to become a “literary lioness” (i.e a celebrity).
Digging further into the Wikipedia page, it becomes evident that Pride and Prejudice‘s author identity was an open secret, as Austen got hints from the Prince Regent’s librarian to dedicate the forthcoming Emma to the Prince. Of course, Austen being Austen, wrote as a response the Plan of a Novel, according to Hints from Various Quarters, a satiric piece of the “perfect novel” based on the many suggestions for a future novel Austen received from the librarian.