"An extreme example is the case of the novelist [[Danielle Steel]], who in a 2019 interview with Glamour magazine revealed the secret of how she’d managed to write 179 books by the time she turned seventy-two, releasing them at the rate of almost seven per year: **by working almost literally all the time, in twenty-hour days, with a handful of twenty-four-hour writing periods per month, a single week’s holiday each year, and practically no sleep**. (“I don’t get to bed until I’m so tired I could sleep on the floor,” she was quoted as saying. “If I have four hours, it’s a really good night for me.”) "[[Danielle Steel|Steel]] drew widespread praise for her “badass” work habits. But it’s surely not unreasonable to perceive, in this sort of daily routine, the evidence of a serious problem—of a deep-rooted inability to refrain from using time productively. In fact, [[Danielle Steel|Steel]] herself seems to concede that **she uses productivity as a way to avoid confronting difficult emotions**. Her personal ordeals have included the loss of an adult son to a drug overdose and no fewer than five divorces—and work, she told the magazine, is “where I take refuge. Even when bad things have happened in my personal life, it’s a constant. It’s something solid I can escape into.” --- **Tags** -- [[quotes]], [[attention]], [[distraction]], [[work-life-balance]], [[discipline]], [[self-control]], [[grief]], [[teaching-anecdotes]] **Source** -- [[202410130434 - B - Four Thousand Weeks]]