Daily Rituals: How Great Minds Make Time, Find Inspiration, and Get to Work by Mason Currey (2013) is a compilation of how well-known people structure their day to do their ‘best work’ – how they organize their schedule to be productive and creative.
This includes everything from eating to doing mundane tasks to sitting at their desk to prepare for work. It is about daily routines – not the random, ad hoc, or variety of activities in people’s exciting lives – but the everyday, small, incremental habits that get a job done. It is often about willpower.
There are about 170 people mentioned in this fascinating book, with their routines and regular habits, from full-time creatives to those who have regular jobs; from artists to designers to engineers; from family people to loners.
Their routines range from word counts to counting hours; working at home to working outside; dressing up or staying in pyjamas; with the aid of alcohol or the aid of lists; rising early to working all night; to eating well to forgetting about food; with bursts of activity to still, silent hours of thinking; taking regular breaks or working right through to the end of a task; surrounded by staff or proactive and secretive; living in luxury or living like a monk.
For many, it is the repetition, the schedule, the known, the certainty of the day that gives their mind the peace and harmony to work. ‘The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mine,’ says writer Haruki Murakami.
For many, it is the time of day that is important. ‘For me, light is the signal in the transaction. It is not being in the light, it’s being there before it arrives. It enables me, in some sense,’ says writer Toni Morrison. Iventor Nikola Tesla also ‘worked best in the dark and would raise the blinds again only in the event of a lightning storm.’
For many, it is the solitude and lack of distraction. ‘I have never been able to compose unless sure that no one could hear me,’ says composer Igor Stravinksy. Pablo Picasso’s girlfriend, Fernande, said of the painter, ‘He rarely spoke during meals; sometimes he would not utter a word from beginning to end. He seemed to be bored, when he was in fact absorbed.’ Caricaturist Al Hirschfeld, except for the telephone, ‘remains isolated’ and the virtuoso pianist Glenn Gould described himself as Canada’s most experienced hermit.
For some, genius comes from exercise. ‘While swimming I produce a lot of things, especially in the sea. Less so in the bathtub, but there too,’ says philosopher Umberto Eco. For others, it comes from stillness. The typist for writer Ayn Rand says she stayed at her desk: ‘She seldom left her desk. If she had a problem with the writing … she solved the problem at her desk; she didn’t get up and pace around the apartment,’ sometimes she was ‘looking out the window, smoking, thinking.’
The book is interesting and inspiring. The excerpts are short – a few paragraphs – for each person; just enough to get a snapshot of the person’s ordinary life while producing something extraordinary.
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| Al Hirschfeld |
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MARTINA NICOLLS
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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international human rights-based consultant in education, healing and wellbeing, peace and stabilization, foreign aid audits and evaluations, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).
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