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- 49. What we learn from the routines of celebrated creatives
49. What we learn from the routines of celebrated creatives
And, importantly, what we *don’t*
There are a lot of things on LinkedIn that really irk me, but one of the most odious has to be the “daily routine” posts from entrepreneurs and CEOs. Generally, they go something like this:
4:28am: Wake before 4:30 alarm, having perfected a lucid dreaming protocol that offsets dream world from real world by 2 minutes so I wake up to the alarm in my dream (does not spike cortisol like real alarm!)
4:30 - 4:45am: Vigorous Wim Hof breathwork session in bed (wife hates this hahaha)
5 - 5:30am: Run 14 miles while completing both kickboxing and hot yoga classes
5:30 - 5:45am: Freezing needle shower followed by sauna session followed by cold plunge followed by sipping lukewarm CBD herbal tea
6 - 6:01am: Push away flicker of self-doubt that everything I do is ultimately meaningless
6:01am - 6:00pm: Work in unbroken 12-hour streak wherein I actually accomplish 3 days’ worth of work
6:15pm: Second workout
I exaggerate, but they all do start extremely early (yuck) and involve just the most unpleasant-sounding workouts and wellness trappings. This isn’t to knock anyone who wakes up early and works out or loves a sensible cold plunge. My problem with these “routines” is that they’re either fake, disturbingly rigid, and/or necessitate a privileged level of money, time, and spare resources to accomplish. Nobody is doing laundry in these daily routines. Nobody is getting their kid from school. Nobody is talking to their mom or best friend or spouse when they call everyday to complain about the same thing.
I hate these kinds of LinkedIn posts because they don’t actually serve any purpose except to make you feel like there’s some aspirational routine that if only you, too, could perform as easily and automatically as This-Here-Successful-Whoever-the-Eff, you’d unlock some secret motivation or power to accomplish everything you dream of, creatively and professionally. All they do is induce shame that you aren’t complying to your own routine, which either makes you avoid the routine entirely, or grit your teeth and follow through despite your other needs or desires. Boo all around.
Are routines helpful? They can be! It depends on who you are, your personality, your temperament, the way your brain is wired, your stage of life, your external circumstances, etc. We’ve talked about the power of constraints and ways to structure your creative time as strategies you can apply to your creative practice, and indeed, routines do create constraints and structure. You may find this works great for you!
Or maybe you’re like me and the idea of having a routine makes you want to scratch your own skin off. I could go on and on about how capitalism is incentivized to keep us all in routines, how the glorification of early-rising and morning routines is not an innate moral value but one invented by, again, capitalism, which needs workers to be productive during certain confined windows…
But instead of railing against all that, I wanted to look at a few daily routines not of tech bros and girl bosses and CEOs, but of artists and creatives. Maybe there’s something different to discern or appreciate about these routines that might actually be useful? What can we glean?
Sci-fi author Ursula Le Guin
Le Guin was a brilliant, award-winning science and speculative fiction writer, known as much for her works and strong socio-political commentary as her wry, quirky personality. Her “ideal” daily routine was published in Ursula K. Le Guin: The Last Interview: and Other Conversations:
She also mentions that she goes to bed around 10pm, and if she happens to be at the beach, there would also be a couple beach walks thrown in there, too.
Yes, the woman wakes up early, but notice how many hours a day she works (less than 5), and the sort of general, hand-wavy way she describes large blocks of her time, including generous windows for leisure (“reading, music”), making and eating dinner, and just unstructured nonsense before bed. She’s engaged in her daily life admin, too (“correspondence, maybe house cleaning”).
Honestly? Goals. A routine that doesn’t totally feel routine because there is so much flexibility built in. (And nary a cold plunge in sight!)
Pop artist Andy Warhol
In an article by Artsy summarizing Mason Currey’s book Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, we get an even more idiosyncratic routine from pop artist Andy Warhol:
Each weekday morning between 1976 and 1987, Andy Warhol woke up and had a phone call with his friend Pat Hackett around 9 a.m., to dictate the previous day’s events. (The conversations were originally intended to create a careful record of the artist’s expenses—the Internal Revenue Service audited his business each year beginning in 1972—but they eventually became the basis of The Andy Warhol Diaries, an intimate memoir by the pop powerhouse and Hackett.)
These calls could last up to two hours, after which Warhol would shower, get dressed, and take his two dachshunds downstairs to the kitchen where he breakfasted with his housekeepers. Then, he spent the rest of the morning shopping—on Madison Avenue, at auction houses, in the Jewelry District, or in the Village antique shops. Warhol always had a few copies of Interview on hand, which he either left with store owners to encourage them to advertise or handed out to admiring fans.
I am loving the Monday-to-Friday 2-hour call with the bestie. It also makes sense for an artist like Warhol, whose work comments on the cultures of consumerism and celebrity, to spend his days literally luxury shopping and promoting his own magazine to fans who recognized him! The man was on brand.
Prolific novelist Stephen King
Even if you’re not a fan of Stephen King, you likely know who he is and a few of the titles of his 60-something novels. According to a blogger who researched King’s routine while trying to craft his own, King:
Wakes up at 6am and takes a long walk
Listens to loud music on repeat while he writes
Aims to write ~2,000 words a day
Revises yesterday’s work at the start of each day
Makes sure life comes before writing
I don’t know what it is with the waking up early, but I’m comforted by the fact this this is less a routine than a kind of general ~*vibe*~. Other than his wake up, there’s no time blocking, and even his word count is something he “aims” for rather than adheres to as a rule. And this last piece about making sure life comes before writing? That’s a whole philosophy that could, at any moment, disrupt all of the above—and he’s cool with that.
Performance artist Marina Abramović
Famous especially for her 2010 work, The Artist Is Present, Marina Abramović demonstrates how a strict routine, for a limited period of time to meet certain goals and obligations, is necessary.
Her works are often provocative tests of human endurance and attention, and The Artist Is Present was perhaps the most extreme example of this. Abramović sat, silently, at a table in an open space in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City for seven to 10 hours a day without breaks, six days a week, for 11 weeks straight. Museum patrons queued up to sit in front of her for a few minutes at a time, making unbroken eye contact with her.
The intensity of this piece necessitated a strict routine. Since she didn’t eat or drink or go to the bathroom during the performance, she had to drastically alter her schedule. As reported in the same book by Mason Currey:
Abramović ended up adopting a nighttime routine in which she woke up every 45 minutes to drink a small glass of water. She rose at 6:30 a.m. each day of the show’s run, and at 7 a.m., she had her final drink of water. Breakfast consisted of rice, lentils, and a cup of black tea.
A car arrived at 9 a.m. to take the artist, her assistant, and her photographer to MoMA, where she donned her signature high-collared dress. Over the next 45 minutes, she used the bathroom four times. Then, she marked the previous day’s completed performance on the wall and sat alone for 15 minutes before the museum opened its doors.
This sounds worse than the Tech Bro Special, I have to admit. But it does illustrate how routines can be, in certain moments, a matter of survival—and an enabler of the creative work itself.
Composer Ludwig van Beethoven
To throw it all the way back to the routines of the late 1700 - early 1800s, composer Ludwig van Beethoven was another annoyingly early riser, but still left plenty of time for faffing around.
He woke up at 6am at the latest, had a short breakfast, and then worked until around 9am. Then, he’d take a quick walk and then start on his paperwork hustle; he was a freelance musician, after all, so he was constantly trying to find new clients and communicating with the ones he had. After lunch, when he often received guests, he would set off for an extensive “inspo walk,” writing down any ideas in a notebook he carried with him and stopping at coffeehouses. He’d apparently end up at an inn or attending a concert, in “convivial company” and listening to the popular music of Vienna.
Beethoven’s routine involves surprisingly little time spent composing each day and a huge dose of social interaction—obviously something he craved and valued that fed his creative engine. His routine is delightfully similar to the more modern creatives above; lots of walking, lots of semi-structured time, and less time than you think plugging away at his art.
What can we learn?
In a review of Mason Currey’s Daily Rituals for The Guardian, writer Oliver Burkeman, who attempted elements of many of the routines in the book, reflects:
Two big insights have emerged. One is how ill-suited the nine-to-five routine is to most desk-based jobs involving mental focus; it turns out I get far more done when I start earlier, end a little later, and don't even pretend to do brain work for several hours in the middle. The other is the importance of momentum. When I get straight down to something really important early in the morning, before checking email, before interruptions from others, it beneficially alters the feel of the whole day: once interruptions do arise, they're never quite so problematic.
What strikes me in all of the examples above is that the routines of these creatives are less about “accomplishing X in Y time” every day, which is how we tend to think of a routine, and much more about dedicating time for particular semi-structured activities—writing, reading, shopping, walking—that allow for a variety of different experiences to occur. They go “fill up” their creative cups with the rest of their lives so they ensure that when they sit down at their desks, they have enough creativity to pour into their work.
And, in case none of the above appeals to you, as Mason Currey writes, "there's no one way to get things done.”
Over to you…
What do you find to be helpful or hurtful when establishing a routine? Have you ever used one for your creative practice? Let us know in the comments or by hitting reply!
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