The Power of Constraints

The writer Ernest Hemingway was far ahead of his time in exploring productivity hacks. Long before the current craze around things like MCT oil or ice baths, he played with a variety of techniques to boost his mental acuity and professional output. Fundamentally, his rituals and protocols were about embracing constraints.

Hemingway woke up at the first light of every morning, regardless of how much he had imbibed the night before, or how late he had gone to bed. He had a well-earned reputation as the last man standing at the bar, so one assumes this must have been a painful wake-up ritual to sustain. But he was uncompromising.

To sharpen his focus, he wrote standing up. He found the extra physical effort to remain upright enhanced his concentration. In the latter stages of his morning routine, when his legs began to yearn for a reprieve, he exploited muscle fatigue to speed up the work, refusing to take the weight off his feet until he had delivered the goods for that day. 

He switched between “analogue” and “digital.” Hemingway penciled his first drafts on paper (analogue), then transitioned to the typewriter (digital) when he felt the content was good enough. Writing by hand promoted generative thought, while typing improved his prose precision. He consciously worked within the limits of each modality.

He set a word count and refused to stop writing until he had met it. He tracked his output with a chart, keeping a meticulous record of how he was performing against this daily quota. At the end of each writing session he felt mentally spent but not insolvent. He used to say, “When you stop you are empty, and at the same time never empty but filling.”

He primed himself for the next session by quitting prematurely. At the moment he understood where he wanted to go next with an idea, he would pack it up for the day. He found that a forced shutdown would trigger a cascade of subconscious processing, so that when he returned to his desk the following morning his thoughts had more clearly taken shape.

He pushed himself to be stylistically direct, rejecting elaborate sentence structures and favoring the power of simple, terse expression. He evoked some of the most stirring images and emotions in modern literature by constraining his language, not by embellishing it.

Constraints are becoming more prominent in a world of increasingly limited time, attention, and resources. However, as Hemingway proved, constraints don’t necessarily impede our potential. They can be the dance partner of greater efficiency and invention.