UrbanUpdate

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

At the age of 44, Nick Thompson ran a marathon in two hours and twenty-nine minutes, which was 15 minutes faster than he ran it at age 30, and made him one of the top over-40 marathoners in the world. Then, at age 45, he ran an American record over 50 kilometers (31 miles) among runners aged 45-49. This is especially impressive when you consider Thompson’s day job: He’s CEO of The Atlantic. In other words, running is just what he does on the side, while he’s not leading one of the most important and influential magazines in the country. (This after stints as the editor of The New Yorker’s website and the editor-in-chief of Wired.) On top of all that, he still manages to make breakfast for his kids. Here, he talks about how he manages to get it all in. (It involves running his commute—both ways.)

GQ: Do you have specific routines, or is every day a different beast in its own way?

Nick Thompson: Both. I definitely try to have certain routines because it reduces the number of decisions you have to make and allows you to kind of get from zero to 20—or, God willing, zero to 60—a little quicker. But if you have only routine, then you can't handle flexibility, urgent requests, or sudden moments where you need to put a lot more time into something.

Some of my life is pretty structured. I get up every day between 6:00 and 6:15. That's my favorite time to run. But I’m often in a house with sleeping children or with a dog who might wake others up if I left to go for a run. So when I'm at home I basically use the 6:00 to 7:15 time to work quietly on the hardest problems at the Atlantic. Then I make breakfast and coffee. My wife, kids, and I hang out together. I eat the same thing for breakfast every day: oatmeal and nuts. Then I take the kids to school, or camp, and then I'll run to the office. I’ll usually do a speed workout on Tuesday, a tempo workout every Thursday, a long run every Saturday or Sunday, and then recovery runs in between.

At the Atlantic, there's no super specific structure, though I do have my assistant mark out windows where I'm focused on reading. If you don't block out time for reading you can sort of fall behind on one of the essential things you have to understand as a journalist. I'm reading the Atlantic, other stories, trying to expand my mind, and focus on big ideas, but it's a fairly small amount of time. The rest of the day is scheduled just like any other busy person: I make a to-do list. I have a Trello board. I tend to have the next three things I want to do in one column. The next column is the things I need to make sure I do that day. The next column is things I need to do in general. And the next column is the five most important things for the day—big things. Because you don't want to get too distracted by just accomplishing a number of small tasks.

And then I run home, play with the kids. I tell stories to one of the kids when he goes to bed, I play guitar with the other kid when he goes to bed, and then I hang with my wife, do more work, go to bed, and get up and do it again.

When's bedtime?

10:30, 11:00. I try to get a good night's sleep. It's definitely one of the things I've learned. There are a whole bunch of things that have come from running that I think apply to the rest of my life. And if you're going to train at a high level, you have to sleep a lot. It's the only thing that works. In running, you get a clear readout on it because if you don't do it, you get injured doing bad workouts. But it also applies to work. You get four hours of sleep one night and you're less able to do your job. It's not worth it.

How often do you get through everything on your Trello board? The five most important tasks, do you get through those most days?

Well, they're not tasks that I can complete. They're things like, “Fix this big problem.” They're there so that if you're ever distracted in the day, or stuck in minutiae, or you're like, "I don't have anything to do. I should check Twitter,” you look at your Trello board and you're like, "Oh wait, no, no, no, no, I should be working on this thing." There's so many ways you get distracted in minutiae, and they're just there to remind you of what actually matters.

To that point of getting distracted by the minutiae, how do you deal with email, or text messages? Do you have a specific way that you engage with that stuff?

I will often set a timer. “Okay, I’m doing email for 10 minutes.” When the timer goes off, you stop. I have this goal (that I never accomplish) of reading every email only once. When there's an email that requires a very short, easy response, but you read the email like seven times because you can't quite bring yourself to do it, that’s a time sink.

I know you practice something called “The Alexander Technique.” How did you come to that?

In my early twenties, I was a pretty serious musician, I played all around New York. I played in the subways. I cared a lot about it. I put out a couple albums, but I had a very physically straining form of music where I was slapping the guitar, and I started to get really brutal pain in my wrists. I had to stop playing. I did steroidal injections. I would wear a cast on my hands. I started using a Dvorak keyboard, which is a keyboard where your fingers have to move less while you type. I took crazy doses of ibuprofen. I did acupuncture. I brushed my teeth with my left hand. None of it worked.

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Then a friend recommended the Alexander Technique, which is a technique for holding your body and being aware of your body's alignment, making sure that your head is centered above your neck and your neck is centered on your spine and your legs are centered, and your hips are balanced. I went to do a session with this guy and it was one of the craziest things I've experienced in my life. I sat down and I played for him and he was like, "Okay, well look at how you're holding your neck while you play. Look at where your shoulder is. Put your head straight. Ground your feet on the floor and look at all the pressure you've taken off your wrist.”It was probably two weeks where this thing that had wrecked my music for years resolved. It was unbelievable.

So now, if I start to get pain, tendonitis in my knee, I can visualize how my knee is moving. I can think about how I'm standing. I can be more aware of how I am in space. Obviously if I trip on a rock and bang my knee, it's going to bleed like anybody else's, or if I were to run 120 miles in a week I would get plantar fasciitis, or fracture my tibia. But if I'm starting to get a small injury it gives me a much better capacity to figure out how to work through it. So that's how I've kept running at a fairly intense level for a long, long time.

Who or what has most most influenced the way you think about productivity? Because you're someone who seems to get an incredible amount—and a large variety of stuff—done.

Well, I would start by saying there are many more people who get a lot more done and I wish I could get more done.

I guess everyone feels that way.

I know. But to your question, some of it comes back to this idea that was best expressed by [American diplomat] George Kennan. He said something along the lines of, if you look at the arc of American foreign policy, you see that every big mistake had a series of small mistakes leading up to it. And every big success had a series of small successes leading up to it. And in a way, when you think about that, it's incredibly disempowering because you feel like your small mistakes can add up to big mistakes. On the other hand, it's incredibly empowering because it means that even if you're heading in the wrong direction, all you have to do is just turn it around. So I try to focus on that: even if things aren't going well, even if I made a couple mistakes at work, or you messed something important up, pause and then say, "That's okay. Now let's try to do the next thing right."

It’s simple with running. You have a bad workout. You have a bad race. "God, I'm too old. I should be done with this sport." Okay. Hold on. You can try again in two days. Or even in the middle of a workout, right? You're supposed to run a 4 x mile, and you're exhausted and you haven’t hit your splits, that's fine. Just try to do the next one better. Don't linger. Don't get lost in the thing that's not going right. Just stop, pause and try to do the next thing well.

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If you could go back 10 years, what’s something you'd spend less time on and something you'd spend more time on?

That's a good question. Time spent focused reading is super valuable, and time spent engaging in of-the-moment social media is not super well-spent. Not that I'm completely against social media, because it's really important to understand how media's evolving and it's been very useful to learn how it works and to understand its algorithms. But if someone had videotaped the last 10 years and had a total breakdown of the hours I've spent, I can't imagine that I'd wish I had spent more time on Twitter, Reddit, Facebook. I think I would certainly have rather spent more time—and I do spend a fair amount of time—but reading good books, pausing and being able to put the constant electronic machines to the side.

It's been hard because being editor at WIRED, or the editor of The New Yorker’s website, you're on call. There might be breaking news at any moment and you're trying as much as possible to understand digital media. So you've got every incentive to be on your device trying to track what's going on, but you don't really need to do that. And I've set up a bunch of structures to make sure I don't. Systems that turn off Twitter after you've spent a certain amount of time on it, or, during the Trump presidency, blocking the word “Trump” on Twitter so you're less likely to get sucked into whatever the latest nonsense is.

This will be a question to ask me in 10 more years, but I haven't taken a break. I haven't taken a real vacation in 20 years. 2005 is when I started at WIRED and simultaneously I was writing my book on The Cold War. I would work from 4:00 AM to 9:00 AM on the book and I would go to WIRED and work all day at WIRED, and I was running seriously. I took a leave from WIRED at one point, but I spent the whole time on my book. I don't think there's been a moment where I took a break. Now maybe that's good. Because part of what helps you get things done is consistency and staying at it. But I wonder whether I'll look back at my thirties and forties and be like, "Man, I should have taken two weeks to go hiking at some point,” or "I should have taken two weeks doing nothing."

Who or what would you consider your spiritual teacher?

Well, I mean, there are definitely times where if I'm in a complicated work situation, I will try to think about how [New Yorker editor] David Remnick would've handled it. Talk about a guy who's productive—his capacity to write quickly. I felt like spirit, his intensity, was something to model. I don't think it's spiritual. He did this thing to me which is an incredible moment of productivity that I reference sometimes and that helped me a lot as a writer and as a thinker. It was the day of the Boston Marathon bombings. He came into my office and he was like, "Okay, so are you writing about this?" I was like, "I've got to edit the site, I’ve got to coordinate coverage, I’ve got to figure out this big feature, I've got all these other things going on." And he's like, "No, no, Nick. This is what's going to happen: You're going to unplug your phone and I'm going to close the door to this office. And then I'm going to come back in one hour and you're going to take your finished story and hand it to me."

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I'll tell you who's also influencing me right now. I've been talking to a woman named Bobbi Gibb, who is the first woman to run the Boston Marathon. Her journey into the sport is just marvelous. She lived in Boston, saw the Boston marathon happen one year, and she decided she wanted to do it. She drove across the country, and every day, she would park near a different national park or forest and then run for a couple hours and then go back into her van and sleep and then do it again. Her description of how to run and why to run is infinitely inspiring.

The other day, I went on this long run in Acadia National Park, and I ran on these beautiful carriage trails. I was planning to run 20 miles flat, not really stressing it. I was running and there was a sign for West Ridge Trail, Cadillac Mountain. It’s the highest mountain in Acadia National Park. It's 1000 feet of elevation in a mile. And I went, what would Bobbi Gibb do in this situation? She would definitely go run up this mountain. So I took a left turn and ran up the West Ridge Trail to Cadillac, went to the top. And then when I was coming down, I was trying to get myself into the meditative state in running that is best, trying to focus on nature, trying to focus on the sounds of the birds, trying to focus on different kinds of trees, trying to just be more aware and more present in the environment as I ran. Different runs have different purposes. Some you're really trying to improve your fitness, some you're trying to just sort of let your brain relax, let some of the tension go, connect with nature a little better. So it ended up being a wonderful 20-mile run with a weird excursion up and down Cadillac Mountain. It was great. I thought, Well, Bobbi would definitely do this, so I should probably go through this.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

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