Stoicism has plenty to say about how to work. Most of it gets flattened into “focus on what you control”, which is true and not much use at nine in the morning with a full inbox. So here is something more concrete, and a companion to the daily work routine series: a way to start a work session, a way to hold your attention inside it, and a way to close it. Some of this is ancient. Some of it comes from meditation teachers rather than from the Stoics, and I will say so where that is the case.
What Counts as Work?
Work here does not have to mean a job. It might be sketching in a notebook, an hour of Brazilian jiu-jitsu, or a blog nobody reads yet. If you take it seriously and you want to get better at it, it counts. That distinction matters for what follows, because a ritual built only for office work is no use to most people for most of their day.
Pre-Work Ritual: Six Points to Set Your Mind
These six points are not Stoic. They come from John Yates' “The Mind Illuminated”, which is a meditation manual, and they are the six things he has you settle before you sit down. They transfer to work almost unchanged, so I have kept his six and simply changed what they are pointed at.
- Overall motivation. Why are you doing this work at all? Not today's task, the whole thing. Money, craft, the people it serves. You want that answer available before you start, because it is what you reach for when the session turns unpleasant.
- A goal for this session. Five hundred words. One drill. One hour on the thing you have been avoiding. Something specific enough that you will know at the end whether you did it.
- Expectations. Notice what you are quietly expecting: a good session, a bad one, a breakthrough. Name it, then set it down. Yates' point is that an expectation you have not noticed will quietly grade the session for you while you are still in it.
- How hard you are actually willing to work. Ask it plainly and answer honestly. Half a session admitted in advance is worth more than a full one you promised yourself and abandoned at minute ten.
- Distractions. Name the ones likely to turn up. Your phone, a conversation you are dreading, a room that is too warm. Then decide now what you will do when each arrives, rather than deciding in the moment, which is the moment you will lose.
- Body and room. Clear the desk, sit up, put what you need within reach. This sounds trivial and it is the step people skip most.
The Power of Enjoyment and Meditation as a Precursor to Work
Find a way to enjoy the work itself. That sounds soft next to the usual productivity advice, but it is the difference between a practice you keep and one you quietly drop in March. Meditators learn this early: a sit you dread is a sit you skip.
Consistency does the rest of it. Not intensity, consistency. A modest session you actually do four times a week beats a heroic one you manage twice a month and then talk about.
Performance Statement: Your Personal Affirmation
Decide in advance what you will do when the session goes wrong, and put it in one sentence. This one is not Stoic either, it comes from the same meditation tradition, but it earns its place. A performance statement might be: every time I get distracted, I note the distraction and go back to the task.
The sentence is doing something quite specific. Without it, a distraction turns into a small referendum on whether you are the sort of person who can concentrate, and you lose another two minutes to that. With it, there is nothing left to decide. You noticed, you noted it, you are back. The judgement never gets made.
Work as Meditation
Every time you notice your attention has wandered and bring it back, that is the repetition. Not the staying, the returning. It is the same in meditation, where beginners think the wandering is failure and experienced practitioners know it is the exercise. A work session in which you got lost forty times and came back forty times was a good session.
There is a line of Marcus's that always gets quoted here, usually as “if you seek tranquillity, do less”. That is a modern rendering, and it is worth seeing what he actually wrote, because he is arguing with the man he is quoting rather than agreeing with him.
Occupy thyself with few things, says the philosopher, if thou wouldst be tranquil.—But consider if it would not be better to say, Do what is necessary, and whatever the reason of the animal which is naturally social requires, and as it requires. For this brings not only the tranquillity which comes from doing well, but also that which comes from doing few things. For the greatest part of what we say and do being unnecessary, if a man takes this away, he will have more leisure and less uneasiness. Accordingly, on every occasion a man should ask himself, Is this one of the unnecessary things?
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 4.24, translated by George Long (1862). “The philosopher” is Democritus, and the “do less” half of the saying is his, not Marcus's.
The correction is worth having, because the popular version gets the advice backwards. Doing less is not the target. Doing what is necessary is the target, and doing less is what falls out of it. Then Marcus hands you the test, which is the most useful sentence in the passage and the one that almost never gets quoted: on every occasion, ask whether this is one of the unnecessary things.
Reflect After Work
Close the session deliberately. Two minutes is plenty. What went well, what you would do differently, then stop.
Weight it towards what went well. Not as self-congratulation, but because a review that is only a list of failures trains you to dread the review, and then you stop doing the review at all. Alan Watts' line applies here: when you get the message, hang up the phone. Take the one useful thing and close the notebook.
Working with Others: The Stoic Way
Most work involves other people, which is where a private routine meets its real test.
Empathy first, because it is the one people drop the moment they are annoyed. Assertiveness second, because empathy without it just collapses into being walked over. Respect throughout, including when you happen to be the one who is right. None of this makes other people reasonable. It keeps your own conduct off the list of things going wrong.
Premeditation of Adversity
Before the session, spend thirty seconds on what could go wrong. The meeting overruns. The file is corrupted. The idea you were excited about turns out to be thin. Decide roughly how you would meet each one.
Marcus opens the second book of the Meditations by doing exactly this, rehearsing the difficult people he will run into that day before he runs into them. It is worth being straight about the provenance, though. The practice is ancient and well attested, but no surviving Stoic text sets out a method for doing it. Every step-by-step premeditation protocol in circulation today, including the thirty seconds I have just described, is a modern reconstruction built on a genuine ancient warrant. That does not make it worthless. It makes it something to test rather than accept on authority.
The reason it is not pessimism is that you are rehearsing your response, not the disaster. A pilot who has drilled engine failure is not gloomy about flying. He is unusually calm.
Conclusion: Building a Routine That Lasts
Strip it back and very little remains: settle six things before you start, keep one sentence ready for when you drift, ask whether what you are doing is necessary, and close the session on purpose.
The claim is not that this makes work pleasant. Some work is dull and stays dull. The claim is narrower and I think more defensible: how you enter a session and how you leave it are both genuinely up to you, and both are cheap to improve, which is more than can be said for most of a working day.
The full episode is here:
The aim is to turn work from something you get through into something you practise.