The daily routines of creative people vary wildly, but the documented ones share a few habits: a protected block of hard work (usually early), a walk or other physical break, a firm stopping point and a long, unhurried evening. Haruki Murakami writes from four in the morning, Maya Angelou wrote in a rented hotel room, and Charles Darwin walked the same gravel loop at Down House for decades. None of them waited for inspiration, and a small body of research now helps explain why some of their habits work.
Daily routines at a glance
One protected block. Most documented routines put the hardest work in a single long session, often three to six hours, before meetings and messages arrive.
A trigger, not a mood. Many artists begin with the same small act every day, so starting no longer needs a decision.
Movement. Walking turns up again and again, from Darwin’s daily circuits to Murakami’s afternoon run.
A deliberate stop. Several writers stop while they still know what comes next, so the next session starts easily.
Rest as part of the work. Sleep and undemanding activity are where some problems get solved.
The best single collection of real routines is Mason Currey’s Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, which profiles 161 writers, composers, painters and thinkers (2013). He followed it with Daily Rituals: Women at Work, 143 profiles of women writers, artists and performers (Alfred A. Knopf, 2019). Read together, the two books are a useful corrective to the idea that there is one correct creative day. The second volume in particular shows how many artists built their working hours around childcare, paid jobs and other people’s schedules.
Routines from the record
Haruki Murakami
Asked by the Paris Review in 2004 to describe his working day, Murakami said that when he is writing a novel he gets up at four a.m., works for five to six hours, then runs ten kilometres or swims 1,500 metres in the afternoon, reads, listens to music and goes to bed at nine. He keeps to it “every day without variation” and calls the repetition “a form of mesmerism”, according to the passage reproduced by Open Culture. He did not start running until he was 33, and in June 1996 he finished a 100 km ultramarathon around Lake Saroma in Hokkaido, according to his Wikipedia biography. It is a reminder that a very early start can last for decades, provided the evening is built around it.
Maya Angelou
From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings onwards, Angelou kept the same “writing ritual” for many years. She rose early and checked into a hotel room, where staff were asked to take the pictures off the walls. She wrote on legal pads lying on the bed, with a bottle of sherry, a pack of cards for solitaire, Roget’s Thesaurus and the Bible, left by early afternoon, and edited 10 to 12 pages down to three or four in the evening, as her Wikipedia biography records. The lesson is less about hotels than about a room with nothing in it but the work.
Twyla Tharp
In The Creative Habit the choreographer describes waking at 5.30, dressing for the gym and hailing a cab to the Pumping Iron gym at 91st Street and First Avenue for a two-hour workout. Her point, quoted at length by James Clear, is that “the ritual is not the stretching and weight training”: “the ritual is the cab”. Once she has told the driver where to go, the day has started and the decision cannot be reopened.
Ernest Hemingway
In “Monologue to the Maestro”, an October 1935 Esquire piece (catalogued by the University of Maryland archives), Hemingway gave the advice now repeated in every writing class: “The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day when you are writing a novel you will never be stuck.” The same article tells writers to reread what they have written before starting again (Farnam Street).
Darwin and the daily walk
The Sandwalk at Down House, January 2017. Photo: Marathon / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0
Darwin lived at Down House in Kent with his family for 40 years and wrote On the Origin of Species there; the house is now run by English Heritage, and visitors can still walk the Sandwalk. The path is often called his “thinking path”, but Darwin Online notes that no source has been found for Darwin using that name: he called it the “path”. He rented the strip of land from J. W. Lubbock in 1846 for £1 12s a year, planted it with hazel, alder, lime, hornbeam and birch, and bought it in 1874 for £300. His wife Emma noted the number of circuits he managed when he was ill (“4 times Sandwalk” meant he was feeling better), and his observations of plants along the path fed into a short paper on the vitality of seeds in 1855.
The walk mattered because it was ordinary. It fitted between work sessions, needed no planning and gave his mind something to do while his attention drifted.
What the research says
Three studies are worth knowing because they match habits that artists arrived at on their own.
Walking. In 2014 Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz at Stanford ran four experiments on walking and creative thinking (paper, PDF). Walking on a treadmill raised scores on a divergent-thinking test (thinking up alternative uses for objects) for 81% of participants, but improved scores on a convergent test with a single right answer for only 23%. People who sat down after walking kept some of the boost, and the effect held for outdoor walks. Walking helps you generate options; it does not do the editing for you.
Mind wandering. Benjamin Baird, Jonathan Smallwood, Jonathan Schooler and colleagues reported in Psychological Science in 2012 that an undemanding task during a break led to “substantial improvements” on creative problems people had already seen, compared with a demanding task, rest or no break at all (University of York research database). This is the case for washing brushes, wedging clay or filing receipts in the afternoon.
Sleep. A 2004 study in Nature by Ullrich Wagner, Jan Born and colleagues at the University of Lübeck trained people on a task with a hidden shortcut, then gave them eight hours of night sleep, night wakefulness or day wakefulness. More than twice as many found the hidden rule after sleep as after staying awake (Nature). Sleep did not help people who had not done the initial work, which is a fair summary of the whole subject.
How to build your own routine
Find your best three hours. Track for two weeks when the hard work actually goes well. For many people it is the morning, but Currey’s books include plenty of night workers.
Protect them in half-days. Paul Graham’s 2009 essay Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule argues that people who make things “prefer to use time in units of half a day at least” and that “a single meeting can blow a whole afternoon”. Put calls, emails and studio visits in the other half.
Choose a trigger. Pick one small act that starts the session every time: Tharp’s cab, a walk to the studio, laying out the palette, opening yesterday’s last page.
Use timed intervals if starting is hard. The Pomodoro Technique, developed by Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s and named after his tomato-shaped kitchen timer, breaks work into intervals of typically 25 minutes with short breaks. Cirillo’s own site now sells courses on the method; the basic version needs only a timer. Short intervals suit editing and admin; many artists find them too short for deep drafting.
Stop on purpose. End mid-task with a note of the next step, as Hemingway advised.
Schedule the walk. Put it between sessions, not as a reward at the end.
Give the afternoon low-stakes work. Framing, printing, contact sheets, invoices: the kind of undemanding task Baird’s study suggests leaves room for ideas.
What to check before copying someone else’s day
Famous routines are usually reported from the writer’s best years, often by the writer, and sometimes with help at home that the routine does not mention. Check:
The source. Many quotations circulate without a reference; look for the original interview or book. The “thinking path” label is a good example of a story that outgrew its evidence.
The context. Murakami’s routine applies when he is writing a novel, not all year.
Your constraints. Paid work, caring and health shape a day more than any habit. Currey’s second volume is full of artists who wrote in the gaps.
The output. A routine is working if the work gets made over months. If it isn’t, change one element at a time.
Frequently asked questions
Do most creative people work in the morning?
Many of the best-documented ones do, including Murakami, Angelou and Tharp, but not all. The common thread is a fixed, protected block, not a particular hour.
How long should a creative work session be?
Documented routines range from two to six hours of focused work a day. Angelou left her hotel room by early afternoon; Murakami works five to six hours. Start with what you can sustain for a month and lengthen it later.
Does walking really help creativity?
The Stanford experiments found that walking improved idea generation for most participants, and the effect partly carried over to sitting afterwards. It helped much less with problems that have one right answer.
Next steps
Read one of Currey’s books with a notebook and mark only the routines of people whose lives resemble yours. Then write down your own current day honestly, hour by hour, and change one thing: the start trigger, the stopping point or the walk. Our sister title artculture.uk covers how artists work across film, books and theatre.
