Daily Reps Before Anything Else
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 7
- Confidence
- —
Nat Eliason's working routine as a full-time writer with two young children. The structure rests on a single non-negotiable daily quota — 2,500 new words when drafting, doubled to a 5,000-word chunk when editing — which must be completed before anything else happens: no food, no other windows open, no meetings. Finishing early buys the rest of the day; finishing late simply takes longer. Mornings before the block are input only, never writing. Afternoons are deliberately left open and deliberately under-stimulated, because walks and gym sessions without music or podcasts are where the ideas actually arrive. Because long-form work produces no external feedback for months, he pairs the quota with private session tracking to supply the sense of progress that publishing would otherwise provide.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Set one non-negotiable daily output number
Define the rep in units of produced work, not time. Nat's is 2,500 new words in drafting mode, doubled to a 5,000-word chunk when in editing phase.
Pro tip Doubling the quota for editing keeps a single rule across both phases of a project.
- 2
Open with input, not output
Get up early and read — yesterday's pages, the outline, a book on writing, or fiction whose style you are trying to emulate — but do no writing at all before the block.
Pro tip Reading a writer you are emulating primes the voice before the session starts.
- 3
Put the block at a fixed hour
Anchor the session to a repeating start time inside your childcare or work coverage. Nat writes from about 9:30, at a cafe or on a treadmill desk in the office, inside a 9:30 to 4:30 window.
- 4
Block everything until the quota is met
No eating, no other windows on the computer, no meetings, nothing at all until the words are down. If it takes until 11 you are free at 11; if it takes until 1 it takes until 1.
Pro tip The variable finish time is what makes the rule enforceable — the quota never moves, only the clock does.
Watch out Allowing any exception converts the quota into a target, which it will then stop being.
- 5
Leave the afternoon deliberately open
Take as few meetings as humanly possible, keep no phone calls, and leave the post-quota hours for the gym, walks, or an unrelated creative project.
Pro tip Lunch with someone is the one meeting format worth keeping — good ideas come from chatting about random things.
- 6
Stay slightly under-stimulated
On walks and at the gym, no music and no podcasts. Nat's claim is that this is when a lot of the real work happens and when ideas surface, so the input has to be kept out.
Pro tip Carry a notebook or take voice notes to catch what comes up.
Watch out Filling the low-stimulation hours with content removes the conditions the ideas depend on.
- 7
Track sessions to replace the missing feedback
Long-form work gives you nothing to publish for months. Log each writing session so you can see you did something today even when nobody in the world knows you did anything this week.
Pro tip Nat used a spreadsheet during the book, then built an app so writers could see and cheer each other's sessions.
Watch out Without a substitute progress signal, the pull toward short-term publishing dopamine becomes very hard to resist.
In the wild
Nat gets up around six, reviews the previous day's pages and his outline, and may read a book on writing or fiction he is emulating — but writes nothing. He preps school lunch, makes breakfast and coffee, gets the kids up and his older daughter to preschool. A nanny arrives at nine for the younger one, and from 9:30 he writes, increasingly at a treadmill desk, until the 2,500 words are done. The afternoon is gym, a walk or a side project with no audio input. Preschool pickup at 4:35, dinner and kids until bed, then reading or an episode from seven until 9:30.
→ No morning or late-night work, a completed book, and a routine so predictable that its main downside is days blending together.
Coming out of crypto and active blogging, Nat's feedback loop was fried — he was used to immediate responses to anything he wrote. Book writing offered none: months alone drafting, editing and tweaking with nothing published along the way. The only satisfaction available was a spreadsheet where he logged every writing session. Looking at it let him say he had done something that day even though nobody else in the world knew he had done anything that week. He later built the same mechanism into an app so writers could post sessions and cheer each other on.
→ A workable substitute for public feedback, which he credits with reducing the pull to pick up short-term projects.
Common mistakes
Letting the daily quota float
If the number can be renegotiated on a bad day, the block loses its function as a gate and the rest of the day starts competing with it.
Filling the recovery hours with input
Music and podcasts on walks and at the gym crowd out the low-stimulation state where the ideas actually surface, so the afternoon stops feeding the morning.
From the transcript
“my rule is that I have to get 2500 new words down when I'm in drafting mode”
“I don't let myself eat or do anything else open any other windows on my computer have any meetings literally anything until those words are…”
“I won't listen to music I won't listen to a podcast or have anything like that because that's when like a lot of the real…”
From the episode
Chasing Success vs True Fulfilment - Nat Eliason
Nat Eliason