Status Updates From Rituales cotidianos: Cómo t...

Day 48: Samuel Johnson. Apparently, Johnson was a night dweller. He would be out until 2AM, and only thereafter would he start working (while the rest of London slept). "My reigning sin, to which perhaps many others are appendant, is waste of time, and general sluggishness" Yet, he added, he was temperamentally ill-equipped for the battle: "I myself have never persisted in any plan for two days together."

Day 47: Jonathan Edwards. “For each insight he wished to remember, he would pin a small piece of paper on a particular part of his clothes, which he would associate with the thought. When he returned home he would unpin these and write down each idea. At the ends of trips of several days, his clothes might be covered by quite a few of these slips of paper.”

Day 46: Margaret Mead. Once, Mead got news that a certain morning session had been postponed. She was furious. “How dare they? Do they realize what use I could have made of this time? Do they know I get up at five o’clock every morning to write a thousand words before breakfast? Why did nobody have the politeness to tell me this meeting had been rescheduled?” A sentiment some of us can very well relate to.

Day 45: BF Skinner. The founder of behavioral psychology treated his daily writing sessions much like a laboratory experiment, conditioning himself to write every morning with a pair of self-reinforcing behaviors: he started and stopped by the buzz of a timer, and he carefully plotted the number of hours he wrote and the words he produced on a graph.

Day 44: Nicholson Baker. “What I’ve found with daily routines is that the useful thing is to have one that feels new. It can almost be arbitrary. You could say to yourself, ‘From now on, I’m only going to write on the back porch in flip flops starting at four o’clock in the afternoon.’ And if that feels novel and fresh, it will have a placebo effect and it will help you work."

Day 43: Steve Reich. “I’m not really a morning person. I would say, if you look at everything I’ve ever written, ninety-five percent of it would have been written between twelve noon and twelve midnight.” Reich believes in taking breaks when problems come up. "The best thing to do is to just leave it and put your mind somewhere else, and not always but often the solution to that problem will bubble up spontaneously."

The real mistery to crack is you.
Bernard Malamud

“intelligentsia—neither a professional intellectual nor a café-society hedonist. ”

Day 42: John Adams. “I confess that I’m not as Zen disciplined or as pure as I’d like,” he says. “Often after an hour of working I’ll yield to the temptation to read my email or things like that. ... if you get tangled up into some complicated communication with somebody, the next thing you know you look up and you’ve lost forty-five minutes of time.”