Early-morning Work

Charlotte Walker-Said, a history post-doc at the University of Chicago, works between 6 a.m. and 9 a.m. on a book about the history of religious politics in West Africa. She reads journal articles and writes pages before dealing with her teaching responsibilities. “Once you start looking at email, the whole day cascades into email responses and replying back and forth,” she says. These early morning hours devoted to scholarship are key for staying true to her long-term plans. “Every day I have a job,” she says. But “in the morning, I think I have a career.”

That is from this WSJ article by Laura Vanderkam on the advantages of starting the day early, which reminds me of this great novelist and this great economist.