[Link] Famous Writers From John Steinbeck to Maya Angelou All Swore By This Weird Productivity Trick. You Should Steal It

These literary greats solved the riddle of work-from-home productivity decades before the rest of us.

by Jessica Stillman

John Steinbeck may have won a Nobel Prize but he still preferred to write at an unstable little desk on his fishing boat. Another giant of American letters, Maya Angelou, liked to rent out hotel rooms and write perched on the bed. Peter Benchley, who wrote Jaws, outdid both of them -- he penned the thriller from the clanging back room of a furnace factory. 

All of which might make you conclude that writers are a bunch of odd ducks. That might be true, but according to a thoughtful recent New Yorker piece from best-selling author and Georgetown professor Cal Newport, that's the wrong lesson for less literary types to take from these writers' unusual approach to productivity. 

Newport insists that decades before our recent switch to remote work these authors discovered something many of us are going to learn in the coming months and years: Working close to home beats actually working at home. 

Read the full article: https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/productivity-remote-work-john-steinbeck-maya-angelou.html