Showing up on schedule, especially on the bad days

The advice sounds too plain to need saying, which is part of Seth Godin’s point. In a short post in December, The first rule of doing work that matters, he argued that hard work of any kind, writing or selling or making art, brings regular rejection, and that the day after a rejection is exactly when people decide to take a break. The break feels earned. It also teaches the anxious part of the mind, which Godin has taken to calling the lizard brain, that setbacks open an exit.

His remedy is to set the schedule before starting and not revisit it when things go badly. The decision about whether to work today was made weeks ago. That removes a daily negotiation that the worried mind tends to win.

The value of the rule lies in removing a decision at the worst possible moment. After a rejection the mind produces reasonable-sounding grounds to stop: the market is not ready, the idea needs rethinking, a rest would help. Some of them may even be true, but the day after a setback is a poor time to judge. A fixed schedule postpones that judgment to a calmer week.

The record of prolific people supports it. Anthony Trollope wrote his novels in fixed early-morning sessions before leaving for his job at the Post Office, and kept count of his pages. Isaac Asimov, whom Godin mentions, wrote on a daily schedule and published a remarkable number of books. For a founder the equivalent might be a fixed block each morning for the product, kept even in the week a key customer leaves.

The rule has a failure mode worth naming. Regular attendance can become its own goal. A person can sit at the desk every day, keep every routine, and produce little, because the schedule has replaced the question of what the work is for. Routine protects effort from mood. It does not choose the effort’s direction.

Some creative work also resists a clock. Solutions to hard problems often arrive after a pause, on a walk or after a night’s sleep. A schedule that allows no room for that can grind on a problem that needed distance. The answer is usually to schedule the thinking time too, rather than wait for it.

And people get ill, burn out and have families. A rule this strict has to bend for them, or it stops being a discipline and becomes a way of ignoring warning signs. Godin’s target is narrower than all of this: the voluntary break taken because the work got frightening. That one is almost always a mistake.