The Joy of Routine

There are many ways of procrastinating. Mason Currey, the author of Daily Rituals, faced with a deadline and wasting time in some of the familiar ways—reading news online, unnecessary tidying of his cubicle—decided to search the Internet for information about the working routines of other writers. Soon he had begun a blog called Daily Routines that collected and shared what he had learned about how creative people organize their lives. Maintaining his blog committed him to a daily routine, which he describes in the introduction: “Nearly every weekday morning for a year and a half, I got up at 5:30, brushed my teeth, made a cup of coffee, and sat down to write about how some of the greatest minds of the past four hundred years approached this exact same task—that is, how they made the time each day to do their best work, how they organized their schedules in order to be creative and productive.”

Initially he included information more or less as he came across it. When time came to turn his collection into a book, he undertook some deeper research. His scholarship is lightly worn, but Daily Rituals is a fascinating collection.

Though most of the one hundred and fifty-five people in his book are writers, there are also philosophers, inventors, architects, painters, and a generous selection of composers. Some of the details are interesting in a way not far from gossip—Auden’s dependence on amphetamines, Patricia Highsmith’s love of pet snails, Nikola Tesla’s dinner break with its eighteen linen napkins, and Schiller’s dependence on the smell of rotting apples (kept in a drawer) to write.

Reading Daily Rituals for advice on how to live like a genius could be confusing. Some of Currey’s people have very strict schedules, while others admit to laziness and disorganization. Some work every day without fail, others only when they have a deadline. Some of them get up no earlier than midday—Jackson Pollock slept until “the early afternoon”—but a surprising majority are very early risers. Jonathan Edwards, for instance, rose at 4 a.m.—of course he was a Puritan; but Margaret Mead got up at 5 a.m. and wrote a thousand words before breakfast. Beethoven rose at dawn and Mozart, though he doesn’t reveal when he got up, says in a letter that his hair was always done by 6 a.m. Victor Hugo rose at dawn, Balzac at 1 a.m. to write for seven hours before permitting himself a brief nap.

Napping, in fact, appears in many of these schedules. Among the dedicated nappers are David Foster Wallace, Georges Simenon, Bernard Malamud, Alice Munro, Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Ingmar Bergman. Nicholson Baker has his nap early in the morning, having risen at four or four-thirty and written for a while until he gets sleepy—so getting up again at 8:30 gives him two mornings in his day. Joan Miró used to break his day for a nap limited to five minutes. Franz Lizst, who suffered from insomnia, napped for at least two hours in the afternoon, and Jerzy Kosinski, who didn’t seem to have that problem and rose at 8 a.m., slept for an almost unbelievable four hours in the afternoon.

Some of the women—particularly Sylvia Plath, Alice Munro, and Toni Morrison—had to schedule their work around child-rearing, reminding readers of what Cyril Connolly in Enemies of Promise called the predicament of “the pram in the hall.” Others, with full-time jobs (e.g., Morrison again) suffered from what he called “the blighted rye”—that is, the necessity of making a living.

The most nearly universal feature of the daily rituals of these widely different creators is walking. There are some practitioners of yoga, and there are runners, weightlifters, and swimmers; but a long walk seems to do more than anything else for the creative mind. Here’s a partial list of those who take daily walks: Beethoven; Kierkegaard...