The novelist Robin Sloan offers a wise middle way, borrowing a concept from share trading, which he applies to writing, but which seems relevant for many modern careers. Think about your work, he suggests, as divided into “stock” and “flow”. Flow is day-to-day, high-visibility stuff: putting yourself out there, networking at conferences, Twitter and LinkedIn, reminding the world you exist. Stock is substantive, long-term work that lasts – in Sloan’s case, his books. “I feel like we all got really good at flow, really fast,” he writes. “But flow is ephemeral. Stock sticks around. Stock is capital. Stock is protein.”