Now it's time to review the second concept from last week, the Animal Farm Principle. This is the idea that "All hours are created equal, but some hours are more equal than others."" We talked about trying to figure out the hours of the day during which you do your best work. You can think of these hours as being much more valuable to you than the other ones, which means it will be important to protect them from being squandered. One idea for how to do this comes from the book, Art Thinking: How to Carve Out Creative Space in a World of Schedules, Budgets, and Bosses. It was written by Amy Whitaker, who teaches at NYU and holds an interesting combination of degrees. She has an MFA in painting from the University College London, and an MBA in Strategy from the Yale School of Management. So she's artistic, but she's also really pragmatic. Here's how she describes the aim of the book after noting that creativity and commerce are extremely intertwined. "[Art Thinking] is about how to construct a life of originality and meaning within the real constraints of the market economy. It is about how to make space for vulnerability and the possibility of failure in the world of work, with it's very real and structural pressures to get things done, to win praise and adulation, and to contribute to bottom-line growth." What Whitaker suggests is making a point to regularly have studio time, which she defines as a time to indulge your curiosity. "Do anything you want with that time," she said in an interview with the Financial Times in 2016. "The point is to give yourself ritualized time and space to learn and do." An important characteristic of studio time for Whitaker is that it be a safe place to experiment and fail. But I have found that the idea of consistently building in protected amounts of time for yourself can help with high stakes projects as well. I know lawyers who use versions of studio time to work on really important briefs, even going so far as to schedule recurring meetings with themselves to make sure they have sufficiently big chunks of the day blocked off. I know consultants, and doctors, and social workers who do something similar. Each of them is intentional about what Georgetown computer scientist Cal Newport calls deep work, which he defines as "Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate." Newport contrasts this with shallow work, noncognitively-demanding, logistical style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate. You don't need studio time for shallow work. You can do that between meetings, while commuting, maybe even while waiting in line. But for your really hard, high-value projects, consider Whitaker's idea, even if it is just to set up a mental studio. You don't need a smock, you don't need an easel. You simply need a consistent commitment to focusing your attention and your schedule on something important and, ideally, edifying.