I’ve been slowly making my way through Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey, and I keep returning to the same thought over and over again, “Well, if they can do it that way, then anyone can”. The book profiles 161 creative minds. From novelists, scientists, and painters, to philosophers, composers, and poets, Currey documents their daily working routines. It’s one of those books you can open to any page and immediately disappear for a few minutes at a time. Each entry is short, usually two or three pages, and filled with the kind of specific, humanizing detail that makes historical figures feel like real people. What time did they wake up? Where did they write? What did they drink (and what did they drink while working)? Did they walk? Did they have a rigid system or none at all?
What struck me almost immediately is how wildly different every single routine is. These are some of the greatest minds in recorded history, and there is no discernible pattern. No universal secret. No single habit they all share. The takeaway I’m getting is that you can be brilliant in your own way, on your own schedule, with your own strange rituals. There is no standard path.
Let me walk you through some of the more striking examples.
Benjamin Franklin: The Man with the Plan (Who Couldn’t Keep the Plan)
Benjamin Franklin had what might be the most elaborately structured daily routine in the book. He also openly admitted that he often failed to adhere to it.
Franklin’s ideal daily schedule divided his day into six meticulous time blocks, beginning at 5:00 a.m. with the question “What good shall I do this day?” and ending at 10:00 p.m. with the reflection “What good have I done today?”
Here’s the part I love: Currey notes that Franklin himself struggled enormously to stick to his daily schedule. “He was not naturally inclined to keep his papers and other possessions organized, and he found the effort so vexing that he almost quit in frustration. Moreover, the demands of his printing business meant that he couldn’t always follow the exacting daily timetable that he set for himself.”
Benjamin Franklin, inventor of the lightning rod and one of the founding fathers of the United States, couldn’t follow his own productivity system. So, if you’re struggling to keep to your ideal routine, take comfort in the fact that Franklin did too.
Charles Darwin: Three Walks and a Nap
If Franklin represents the aspiration toward rigid structure, Charles Darwin represents something closer to what most of us might be able to actually achieve (if we made our own schedule and had a country house in Kent). In fact, when I read his schedule to my daughter, we both agreed it was a schedule we could personally get behind.
Darwin’s routine, as described by his son Francis, was built around three 90-minute work sessions per day, interspersed with walks, letters, meals, and rest. His first and best work period began at 8:00 a.m., after a short morning walk. By 9:30, he’d break to read his correspondence and listen to a novel being read aloud by his wife, Emma. He worked again from 10:30 a.m. to noon when he would declare, “I’ve done a good day’s work,” and head out for a walk.
The walk was not incidental. Darwin had a quarter-mile gravel path that he called his “thinking path”, the Sandwalk. He walked it three times a day, rain or shine. It helped him complete his work by allowing him the time to ponder ideas without sharply focusing on them.
After lunch came letter-writing, another nap, another walk, and a final work session from 4:00 to 5:30 p.m. Then dinner with family and an early bedtime.
By today’s standards, this looks like a workday that would get you fired. And yet, in those three daily 90-minute sessions, on that leisurely schedule, Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species, possibly the single most influential book in the history of science.
The routine wasn’t laziness. It was the pace at which Darwin’s mind did its best work. There’s science that shows that most of us would do our best work on this routine too. He knew it, and he honored it.
Jane Austen: Brilliant in the Margins
Here’s a routine that I find both inspiring and a little heartbreaking: Jane Austen wrote some of the most enduring novels in the English language in stolen moments, surrounded by people, on small sheets of paper she could quickly hide because to most people of the 18th century, women writing a book was an absurd occupation.
Austen never lived alone and had no expectation of privacy. She shared her final home in Chawton with her mother, her sister, a close friend, and three servants. Austen wrote in the family sitting room, “subject to all kinds of casual interruptions,” her nephew recalled. She was careful that her occupation should not be suspected by servants or visitors. When anyone arrived, she would hide her papers and join in the sewing as if nothing were happening.
Her routine was to rise early, before the other women were up, and play the piano. At 9:00 a.m. she organized the family breakfast which was her one major household task. Then she settled into the sitting room with her mother and sister sewing quietly nearby to write until the household day took over. She had to negotiate her creativity around the constant domestic demands of her life.
Between 1809 and her death in 1817, Austen revised Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice for publication. She also wrote three new novels: Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion. In eight years at Chawton, in the margins of a full household, hiding her papers from the servants. Brilliant!
Toni Morrison: Before the Light
For a woman with a very different set of constraints (single mother and full-time editor at a publishing house) Toni Morrison found her creative window in the pre-dawn quiet that most of us sleep through.
Morrison described her ritual in a 1993 interview: “I always get up and make a cup of coffee while it is still dark — it must be dark — and then I drink the coffee and watch the light come… And I realized that for me this ritual comprises my preparation to enter a space that I can only call non-secular.”
I certainly understand why a single mom would have to write in the early morning. The demands of raising children and editing other people’s books all day takes over everything. Morrison won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Her routine wasn’t elaborate. It didn’t involve thirteen virtues or a gravel thinking path. It was just darkness, and coffee, and showing up.
Franz Kafka: The Night Writer Who Didn’t Sleep
On the other end of the clock entirely: Franz Kafka worked all day as an insurance official and then came home, napped, had dinner with his family, and began writing often until 3:00 a.m.
In a letter to his fiancée, Kafka wrote: “Time is short, my strength is limited, the office is a horror, the apartment is noisy, and if a pleasant, straightforward life is not possible then one must try to wriggle through by subtle maneuvers.”
He was describing his own life, but it reads like a description of everyone’s modern lives. No ideal conditions. No room of his own. Just a determination to do the work anyway.
Kafka published a modest amount in his lifetime and famously asked his friend Max Brod to burn his manuscripts after his death. Brod didn’t. The result: The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika. Kafka is now considered one of the most influential literary figures of the twentieth century. Everything written at night in a noisy apartment after a full day at the office.
What Mason Currey Is Actually Telling Us
In between the accounts of everyone’s routines, Mason Currey doesn’t offer any commentary, he simply exposes the rituals of artists’ daily lives and leaves us to ponder them. You read about Darwin’s structured walks and Franklin’s elaborate virtue-tracking, and you could come away feeling like you’re doing it all wrong.
But then you read about others artists’ frenzied work through the night with long stretches of drinking in between (I’m looking at you, F. Scott Fitzgerald) and begin to think that the secret is simply that there isn’t one. Franklin couldn’t stick to his own schedule. Darwin’s workday would get him fired today. Austen hid her manuscripts from the servants. Kafka wrote in a noisy apartment after midnight. Toni Morrison found her window in the dark before anyone else woke up.
Every brilliant person in this book found the way that worked for them. The variation is the point. You have permission to work the way that suits you best.
That’s the whole book. And it’s a fascinating window trained on the brilliant humans of our past.
So, whether you work best in the dark, light, early, late, noisy, quiet, or somewhere in between, there’s a routine for you. Find it. Build in the walk if you need the walk. Ask yourself “what good shall I do today” if that helps, or don’t.
Just make the time, and show up to it.
Mason Currey published Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey in 2013. A sequel, Daily Rituals: Women at Work, was published in 2019 and profiles 143 women in creative professions which I have not yet read, but look forward to.
