For “Routine Excellence,” GQ asks creative, successful people about the practices and habits that get them through their day.

“When I was 28, let’s say, I had a lot of opinions about routines,” says Ezra Klein, who writes a column and hosts The Ezra Klein Show podcast for The New York Times. “I was big into optimizing my routine. I’d get up at exactly this time and do exactly this thing… and then I had children. They have their own opinions about my routine, which are different than mine.” 

Though kids may have disrupted his routine, they didn’t seem to disrupt Klein’s industriousness. After spending his early career as an incredibly popular and influential political blogger, Klein co-founded and acted as editor-in-chief of Vox. It was there that he launched his podcast, before bringing it to The New York Times in 2020. 

Though the show is still rooted in Klein’s interest and expertise in politics, some of his most compelling episodes are the conversations with people like author George Saunders or United States Poet Laureate Ada Limón, where he gives glimpses into his own daily practices: his veganism, longtime meditation practice, or voracious and eclectic reading habits. 

Klein says that now, rather than being precious about his routine, he clings “on to the bare fundamentals.” Doing so, he says, has actually freed him up to find more fulfillment than before. “I’m just much more interested in the question of a good day than a tightly managed day,” he says.

GQ: What are the “fundamentals” that you hang onto?

Ezra Klein: When I was younger, I was a bit of a “sleep is the cousin of death” kind of person. I felt like time asleep was time wasted. I spent years mistaking the feeling of being exhausted for the feeling of being stressed or depressed. Now the whole cornerstone of my life is sleep. There is almost nothing that doesn't seem to me to be fully affected by whether or not I'm sleeping well and enough. It’s really shocking to me how much the way I respond to situations, the kind of attention I can bring to a podcast or to my children, or whether or not I'm able to eat a healthy diet comes down to whether or not I’ve slept enough to have a buffer against my own reactivity the next day. Then I have a pretty long-running meditation practice. I try to meditate between 20 and 30 minutes a day. I usually get between 15 and 25, sometimes spread out over the course of a day. I find I really need it for my work. The amount and quality of attention I can bring to a conversation, preparing for a conversation, or reporting for a column is really everything. So I try to orient around how to keep my attention pretty stable. Meditation is a really big part of that.

What does your practice look like?

That changes over time, depending on the space I'm in as a person, or what I need at any given moment. There are times when I do a lot of noting practice, because I'm just trying to stabilize my attention and get that sense that things can pass through the field and I don't need to run with them. There are times when I try to do more concentration-oriented practices, or more meta-oriented practices. There are times when I just sit and try not to do or control anything at all. It is probably not good to switch as often as I do. Some of the really beautiful periods in my practice have been when I've been more committed to one practice. But this is a time when I don't have a lot of energy to be disciplined at that level. There's a difference between meditating for attainment, and for just trying to get through the day. I'm in a “just trying to get through the day” period in my life.

Again, I used to have a lot of thoughts and habits and optimizations. Nowadays, there are four things that are gonna decide if I have a good day. Did I sleep enough? Did I connect deeply with people I love? Did I get some time to myself? Did I make choices for my body that felt good—like, did I take a good walk, did I eat healthy, did I exercise? If I get those four things in place, usually my days are pretty good. The more they begin to fall apart, the worse everything else gets. So those can be built on habits, but they’re not exactly habits. The hard thing is that when they begin to degrade, it actually becomes harder to keep them in place. If you’re more disconnected from people you love, it's harder to sleep. If it's harder to sleep, you're more irritable. So I have to think of things as being less about habits and more about fundamentals.

I sometimes think productivity culture gets obsessed with tweaking, and tweaking is attractive because it offers this constant sense of possible control: “If I just implement the getting things done framework, I'll get all these things done.” And it could be true on the margin. I often keep a little notepad next to me and write things I need to get done down on paper because then it gets them out of my head. So I don't wanna say that tweaks can't be helpful. But you can't tweak your way out of bad fundamentals. And I think that even talking about things in terms of productivity becomes wrongheaded. Often what makes me “productive” has nothing to do with things that would make me look productive from the outside. Taking more quiet walks leads to me having better ideas for columns and podcasts. They don't come from grinding out my to-do list. They come actually from creating space in my mind. Spending a lot of time with people I love is obviously good on its own terms, but is just necessary for me to be in a place where I could show up in a conversation and be grounded in myself.

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So I think that there's a way in which we have developed cramped, linear metaphors for not just what makes a good life, but what helps people create things in their life. I've become very disenchanted with that thinking over time.

Knowing that is one thing—and then being able to practice it in a culture that is still very much obsessed with productivity is a different thing. How have you built in the ability to do the type of practices that allow you to create space in your mind, and do less of the drudgery of answering 50 more emails?

Years ago, I read a book called Fake Work. The idea in that book is that people spend a lot of time doing things that look and even feel like work that don't advance their goals or the goals of their organization. So for journalists [that might be] spending a lot of time “monitoring the conversation” on Twitter, messing around in Slack, or clicking between your email and the front page of The New York Times. All this stuff that, if you stood behind somebody, kind of looks like work but isn't really. It's a simulacrum of work.

Unexpectedly, the most helpful thing about being in an office again is that I have access to an industrial-strength printer. I now just print out basically every piece of paper I have to read. It doesn't look or even feel more or less like work than sitting around doing the same thing on the computer. But the computer has so many distractions that I'm exhausted, but not actually making that much forward intellectual movement. I've become more attentive to things like that. I don't tweet anymore. I have a burner account on Twitter where I can read things if I need to see something. But I don't think I've tweeted anything in a year or at least a better part of the year. I have my grand ideological reasons for this, but the biggest one is simply that I can't spare that much of my own mental space to whatever everyone else is talking about. I have to use that for what I need to be talking about.

People in my profession say all the time that they can't do their jobs without Twitter, and it drives me so crazy because I think most of them are worse at their jobs because of Twitter. The reason is that Twitter, as do other forms of social media, gets you to lose control of what you care about. You lose that intentionality with your own attention. A lot of the work for me nowadays, particularly with having kids, and the fact that I just have less spare room and can't work all night anymore, is just to keep control over my own attention. The more I sit in spaces that are designed to hijack that from me, the worse my work gets. So I’ve really tried to create a lot of boundaries around what I look at and what I don't.

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One thing I always want to be careful about is that it's always more different to be in somebody else's mind than you think it would be. I know many people who do great work and are on social media and Twitter and email and everything all the time. I think it’s just having an actual embodied sense of when you are in control of your attention and in what context you tend to lose control of your attention—and for different people that might be different. It doesn't mean that you will find the same thing distracting that I do. But I think developing that sense is really important.

Is there something that you've learned from not being able to be as strict about your routines as you once were?

I think one thing routines offer is a pleasurable feeling of control when you're at the beginning of one—or the pleasurable prospect that there is something out there that would give you control. It would go too far to say there's nothing you can control at all. I'm obviously describing things that are routines in a way. I try to sleep enough. I try to work out. I try not to be on Twitter. And this might be a question of getting older, but I'm just much more interested in the question of a good day than a tightly managed day. There are many days when I get my work done, but I feel like I wasn't very present as a parent to my children. Not that I wasn't literally there, but I was just too tired to be there with them in the way I wanted to be—and that's a bad day. It's made me think about what needs to be the transition from work to parenting, and how do I have energy for them at the end of the day? How have I not left everything on the field of my work so that by the time I pick them up or come home and see them, I'm not just a shell of myself? How do I make it so my wife and not my podcast get the best sides of me? These are hard questions and they hit with a different force than when you're younger and maybe single or childless, or you just don't have that many other people you're accountable to.

It's been a shift, because what I have now are responsibilities—not just responsibilities, relationships—and the more I understand them, the more I realize they can't effectively be optimized. They are chaotic systems, so to speak—certainly children are. The question is how I’m able to show up in them, and how I'm able to show up in them knowing that I can't control the day that comes before it. I’ve been forced out of the illusion of control. I'm much more interested in the question of, what can I do to make it likeliest that I can meet the situations I'm in with a better rather than worse version of myself—and a more present rather than a more distracted form of my attention? 

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I can only do so much is one of the answers to that. But an overly brittle product productivity system isn't gonna do it. Again, if I can get eight hours of sleep, that's pretty good. If I get six hours, or five and a half, it doesn't matter how well I'm doing moving tasks out of my mind and onto a notepad. I'm just gonna be a shitty version of myself for every one of those tasks. And even if I'm doing things I enjoy, I'm not gonna enjoy them that much. That's been startling to me.

Starling just in terms of how much two hours of sleep can change how you are?

Yeah! You like to think that you are this person, right? “I am me, and the way I move through the world is as me.” But I'm not this one person. I'm a very different me on five hours of sleep than on eight hours of sleep, to the point that it may as well be different people.

It's making me think of how George Saunders has said that there are different selves that come up to the microphone at different times, and it's kind of like, which self am I gonna bring to the mic today? Outside sleep and meditation, what else matters?

How connected I am with the people I love in my life. There's just no version of having those connections in disarray or untended in which I'm going to be happy. When they are solid, that's a huge part of living well for me. It’s more on my mind because I just moved across the country, away from a close best friend who lives in San Francisco and my family in Southern California. Again, the strength and depth and presence of those connections and how much I'm able to be in that routinely is the context in which everything else in my life happens. So again, I can work as hard as I want. If I'm disconnected from people I love, I'm just not going to be happy. I really just try to think as much as I can in terms of these four fundamentals: Am I sleeping enough? Am I getting enough time to myself? Am I deeply connected with the people I love? Am I making fairly healthy choices in my body? If you get that right, I think a lot of things work out.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

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Clay Skipper is a Staff Writer at GQ.XInstagramRelated Stories for GQRoutine ExcellenceMental Health