How Did Famous Creative People Spend Their Days?
31/03/2014.
Illustration
metalocus, INÉS LALUETA
metalocus, INÉS LALUETA
How do creatives – composers, painters, writers, scientists, philosophers – find the time to produce their opus? Anyone who does creative work knows how difficult it can be to structure your day to maximize productivity. Do you wake up and write immediately? Eat a hearty breakfast, go for a walk, and then get to painting? Do you set aside five hours before bed to compose, because that’s when you work best? Other questions arise beyond the work, too: How many hours of sleep do you need a night? How many cups of coffee should you drink per day?
Diagram-schema of the analysis.
Ludwig Van Beethoven, it seems, was obsessive about his coffee, counting out the 60 beans per cup every morning from roughly 1822 to 1827.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. In 1781, Mozart devoted substantial daily time (two hours) to courting Costanze (they were married the following year).
Maya Angelou, seeming to evidence Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own theory, left her home every morning in 1983 to go work seven hours in a hotel or motel room.
Le Corbusier did morning calisthenics.
RJ Andrews’s Creative Routines poster. The poster to discover...
Mason Currey investigated the rigid Daily Rituals that hundreds of creatives practiced in order to carve out time, every day, to work their craft. Some kept to the same disciplined regimen for decades while others locked in patterns only while working on specific works.
Le Corbusier did morning calisthenics (*) and Victor Hugo did “long strenuous exercises on the beach.”
Data are from Mason Currey’s book DAILY RITUALS. Order it from Amazon and learn more at Mason’s site.
Design highlights.
Representing each day as a continuous 24 hour cycle invokes the ever spinning wheel of time, and more simply the face of a clock with midnight placed in the “12 o’clock” position and noon at ”6 o’clock.” Colors mark major categories of activity – work, sleep, exercise, etc.
Thoughts.
Comparing the routines of these creatives is fascinating. Some work in the early morning, some work better late at night. Many begin their day with coffee and use tobacco and alcohol. Considering that our modern concept of exercise was not developed until the mid-20th century, it is fascinating how many of these people spent their afternoons taking vigorous walks.
(*) Calisthenics are a form of exercise consisting of a variety of exercises, often rhythmical, movements, generally without using equipment or apparatus.
