Daily Rituals: How Great Minds Make Time, Find Inspiration, and Get to Work

"You’ve got to have a curveball! Daily Rituals is one of those books where you wish you had the idea. He looks at thinkers, artists, writers, philosophers, scientists and asks how they work. Well, no, not necessarily, because he’s not interviewing them. A lot of them are dead. It’s based on people’s accounts, so some of them might be relying on their own testimony, but a lot of the time, there’s evidence of what people did. It’d be less interesting if he’d just interviewed a lot of people, and they said how they work because then you would probably get a lot of self-mythologizing of a negative or a positive aspect. Today I was listening to a radio program with a couple of writers talking about how they procrastinate so much, and they just feel sick at the sight of the keyboard. And I think, ‘You’re exaggerating, because you’ve written loads of stuff, and you also write to deadlines.’ This book highlights that when we think about how to think, we often think about the mechanics of it, or even the virtues of it. What we don’t think so much about is the social situation of it, the conditions of it. I don’t have a chapter in my book about how to lay out your office, or how to make sure you get a good night’s sleep, but, I do mention those briefly, actually, because people’s ability to think well depends a lot on those things. Now, there are certain things it depends on which are not the subject of this book, for example, around having certain material conditions, not having to look after a child 24 hours a day, and so on. That’s not part of it. But he talks about people’s habits. Of course, everybody’s different and there is lots of variety, but after a while, you do discern certain patterns. There are outliers, but the majority of these people work between three to five hours a day. And they have built into their days times where they are doing something that’s nothing to do with their work. That might be having lunches with their friends, it might be going for long walks. That makes perfect sense to me. If you’re going to do anything that involves your mind and thinking well, there’s only a limited amount of space you can give to that. In order to think well, you need to then make sure the times when you’re not doing it are giving you the opportunity to let things stew, to work away in your unconscious, in the background of your mind, or give you the rest and relaxation so when you come back, you’re rejuvenated. The advice for people who want to think well which isn’t given so much is: think about what, for you, creates the conditions where your mind is most productive and interested. It’s going to vary for different people, but one thing we have to fight against is the temptation to constantly be trying to stuff our heads. I know a lot of people who if they are traveling will always listen to a podcast or an audiobook . Now, it may work for them. They may be the kind of people who are just infinitely capable of absorbing information without limit. Lucky them. But I suspect for some of them, this is a mistake. They are trying to teach themselves things all the time and they don’t give their mind the downtime to process and think or make connections. Everyone’s different and has to work this out for themselves, but I think this is something people should be thinking about as well. I do have an ideal routine, I just don’t manage to stick to it a lot of the time. I’d wake up at sevenish, I would have a coffee and I would be doing some kind of work almost straight away. I would then have breakfast a bit later and do a bit more work. Then, by mid to late morning, I’m running out of steam. I’ll go for a walk or have a coffee. I would then come back and work a bit more before lunch. For me, the afternoon is generally quite crap. First thing in the afternoon, I’d probably want to switch off completely, and then probably do a little bit more later in the afternoon. In the evenings—I learned this the hard way—I shouldn’t work. Reading is okay but if I try to work after dinner, all it means is the next morning, I’m not as fresh. I’m not as productive. So that’s the kind of routine. I discovered it many years ago. For bizarre circumstantial reasons I won’t get into, I ended up in Salamanca working on my first proper book. I didn’t know anyone in Salamanca, it was winter, and I had no distractions. I worked in the morning, I went for a swim and then being Spain, of course, I had a long lunch. I was incredibly productive. Exactly. People have different rhythms. Now, an old neighbour of mine who is a different kind of writer, a playwright and a poet, is a lifetime night owl. He won’t even start work till 9 or 10 and then works until 3 or 4. He gets up really late, but he’s not lazy. That’s just when he works. Going back to the theme of the Daily Rituals , the number of hours per day he was working is not the eight-hour working day. This is the kind of book you dip into, it’s not something you read from cover to cover in one sitting. You could keep it in your lavatory, if you’re the kind of person who does that."