The Thursday Rule: Containing Everything That Isn't the Work
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- —
Sanderson's core productivity tip for creative professionals is structural rather than motivational: segregate every non-creative obligation into one fixed day with a fixed number of hours, and let nothing overflow. For him that day is Thursday, and it absorbs interviews, meetings, work on his class, YouTube videos and publicity. The whole team knows the container and books overflow into the next occurrence. Paired with this is a set of pre-written refusal rules — a blanket no to dinners with fans, one event a month before Covid — so that saying no is a policy decision rather than a fresh judgment call each time. The stated purpose is protecting the thing he most wants to do: write the books.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Separate creation from everything adjacent to it
List what is actually creating new work versus what merely surrounds it — publicity, meetings, interviews, teaching, admin, videos. The second category is important but infinitely expandable, and it will consume the first if left unbounded.
Watch out You could spend forever on publicity and stop writing books entirely without ever feeling unproductive.
- 2
Pick one fixed day and a fixed number of hours
Choose a single recurring day and cap the hours inside it. Sanderson describes it as ripping off a band-aid: all of these things on the same day, limited to those hours. The cap matters as much as the day.
Pro tip A fixed day makes scheduling a lookup rather than a negotiation.
- 3
Make the whole team enforce the container
Everyone on the team knows those hours are all that non-writing work will ever get, so requests are triaged against the container rather than against your goodwill. The rule holds because it is shared, not because you personally resist each ask.
- 4
Push overflow into the next occurrence
When something genuinely important comes up and the day is full, it moves to next week. The team's line is simply that Brandon's next hole in the schedule is that Thursday, and people in the business world are used to this.
Pro tip Naming a specific future slot converts a refusal into a scheduling fact.
Watch out Making one exception because something is 'totally necessary' is how the container stops existing.
- 5
Write explicit rules and criteria for no
Saying no is very hard, especially when you remember the people who helped you break in and want to pay it back. Pre-set criteria remove that in-the-moment conflict: a blanket no to dinners with fans, and pre-Covid, one event per month, full stop.
Pro tip Do the arithmetic that justifies the rule — he could be at a meal every hour of every day and still not reach everyone.
- 6
Refuse by policy, not by case
When a request falls outside the criteria, the answer is that you have to pass on this opportunity, however good it looks, because taking it costs the other things already committed. The rule does the refusing so you don't have to relitigate your own values weekly.
Watch out Judging case by case reliably ends in yes, because each individual yes always looks affordable.
In the wild
Sanderson allocates one day's work per week to everything that isn't writing: interviews, meetings, work on his class, YouTube videos and all the things beside the core career. Those all fall on Thursdays, with a limited number of hours, and the whole team knows that's all these activities are ever going to get. He describes the switch as ripping off a band-aid, and says his life got better once he made it, because the non-productive but still important work could no longer overshadow the creation of new content.
→ Publicity and admin stopped eating writing time, and scheduling became a team-level lookup.
Before Covid, Sanderson's team ran a hard rule: Brandon does one event per month. If an event was already scheduled and someone asked for another, the answer was that he's booked that month. He also has a blanket no on going out to dinner with fans. He used to accept and try to help out, but the arithmetic is brutal — he could be at a meal every hour of every day of the week, and could sign books every hour for years without getting through everyone's books.
→ Refusals became impersonal policy, and the focus stayed on writing the books.
Common mistakes
Letting important-but-adjacent work spread
Publicity, interviews and community work are genuinely important, which is exactly why they expand without limit. Sanderson's warning is that a creative professional can spend forever on them and simply stop producing the work that made the opportunities exist.
Saying yes to repay the community
The instinct to say yes because someone once gave you a break is a good instinct, but it scales badly. Without criteria it compounds until you cannot continue your own work.
Deciding requests case by case
Every individual opportunity looks worth taking in isolation. Without a pre-written rule to fall outside of, you re-argue each one on its own merits and the container quietly dissolves.
From the transcript
“one productivity tip i have for creative professionals it's worked very well for me is i try to make sure that all of my non-writing…”
“another important thing to practice and learn as a creative professional is learning to say no very hard to say no”
“coming up with certain rules and criteria that allow you to say no is a just a really good plan”
From the episode
Bonus Episode: Originality, Writing and Career Fulfilment with Brandon Sanderson
Brandon Sanderson