Guiding Question (asked by a parent): How do we help intellectuals understand that the efficient completion of the boring fundamentals of life are necessary to the successful execution of their big goals? In fact, bring them to the point of understanding that if they develop extraordinary efficiency with day to day activities (quick morning/bedtime routines + quick breakfast/lunch/snacks), they can have even more time to spend on their intellectual pursuits?
Guiding Quotes
“Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” -Gustave Flaubert
“I know a person who will poke the fire, set chairs straight, pick dust specks from the floor, arrange his table, snatch up a newspaper, take down any book which catches his eye, trim his nails, waste the morning anyhow, in short, and all without premeditation—simply because the only thing he ought to attend to is the preparation of a noonday lesson in formal logic which he detests.” – William James (speaking about himself)
“Make yourself do unpleasant things so as to gain the upper hand of your soul.” – W.E.B. Du Bois
The Practical Creative
Taking an interest in the mundane is essential for producing exceptional projects. Discipline (in regards to doing boring things) and freedom (for loftier things) might appear contradictory. But they actually go together. Getting serious about daily routines isn’t about restriction; it’s about using time effectively so your mind can be freed up for greater things. By cultivating positive habits (such as organizing your schedule and workspace), you can create space for both practicality and creativity.
Sometimes this awareness comes with maturity and life experience. Sometimes… it doesn’t.
Regardless of age (someone once asked the same guiding question in regards to their husband), helping intellectuals understand the importance of efficiently completing the fundamental aspects of life can be approached in a couple of ways:
- Appeal to their goals: Intellectuals often have ambitious goals and dreams they want to accomplish. Highlight how mastering the mundane tasks of daily life can serve as a foundation for achieving these larger aspirations. Point out how having streamlined morning and bedtime routines, as well as quick meal preparation strategies, can lead to increased focus, reduced stress, and greater overall productivity.
- Highlight the opportunity cost: Recognize the opportunity cost of neglecting mundane tasks. Explain that time spent on procrastination, disorganization, or inefficient routines detracts from the time and mental bandwidth available for pursuing intellectual interests. Encourage them to consider what they might achieve with the additional time and energy gained by mastering these fundamentals.
- Lead by example: If relevant, lead by example. Demonstrate your own commitment to efficiency and routine optimization. Share your experiences and insights. Show them how prioritizing the fundamentals of life has positively impacted your ability to pursue your own goals and interests.
- Encourage experimentation: Encourage them to experiment with different approaches to routine optimization and time management to find what works best for them. Emphasize that small changes can yield significant results over time. Encourage them to approach the process with curiosity and a willingness to learn and adapt.
- Use Biographies of Eminent People (See Below): Share real-life examples of successful high achievers who prioritize efficiency in their daily routines. Show how these individuals structure their days to maximize productivity while still attending to essential tasks like self-care, nutrition, and organization.
“Eventually, everyone learns his or her own best way. The real mystery to crack is you.” – Bernard Malamud
Learning From Biographies
As someone who writes about the “First Creative Dollars” of fascinating individuals, I’m deeply interested in how people build mental models by learning from the stories and experiences of others.
1. Notice Daily Routines Are a Choice:
- Daily routines are a series of conscious decisions
- Daily routines can be systemized to use limited resources (like time) wisely
- Great daily routines take into account self-knowledge (such as when the person has the most discipline and willpower)
2. The Unspoken Goal: Mental Stability
- A solid routine creates a familiar neural pathway for things that are bound to happen
- It aids stability and prevents mood fluctuations
- Put recurring tasks on autopilot and you can free up space in your mind
The following information and quotes come from the book Daily Rituals by Mason Currey:
Charles Schulz (1922-2000):
Charles Schulz created almost 18,000 Peanuts comic strips over the course of fifty years. His schedule was disciplined. He dedicated seven hours a day, five days a week in an attempt to create six daily strips and a full Sunday page. Schulz began his day at daybreak, attending to family matters before settling into his private studio (a building near his house) to draw. He would brainstorm ideas, often drawing from past experiences in his life, before executing his work with intense focus. Lunch consisted of a ham sandwich and milk, consumed at his drawing board. He would continue to work until his kids got home from school around 4pm. The routine provided structure and helped him manage his lifelong anxiety. Like many artists and creatives, he expressed that creating comic strips was essential to his well-being, stating he would feel empty without it.
Jane Austen (1775-1817):
“Austen rose early, before the other women were up, and played the piano. At 9:00 she organized the family breakfast, her one major piece of household work. Then she settled down to write in the sitting room, often with her mother and sister sewing quietly nearby. If visitors showed up, she would hide her papers and join in the sewing. Dinner, the main meal of the day, was served between 3:00 and 4:00. Afterward there was conversation, card games, and tea. The evening was spent reading aloud from novels, and during this time Austen would read her work-in-progress to her family.”
Isaac Asimov (1920-1992):
“The overriding factor in my life between the ages of six and twenty-two was my father’s candy store…I must have liked the long hours, for in later life I never took the attitude of ‘I’ve worked hard all my childhood and youth and now I’m going to take it easy and sleep till noon.’ Quite the contrary. I have kept the candy-store hours all my life. I wake at five in the morning. I get to work as early as I can. I work as long as I can. I do this every day of the week, including holidays. I don’t take vacations voluntarily and I try to do my work even when I’m on vacation. (And even when I’m in the hospital.) In other words, I am still and forever in the candy store. Of course, I’m not waiting on customers; I’m not taking money and making change; I’m not forced to be polite to everyone who comes in (in actual fact, I was never very good at that). I am, instead, doing things I very much want to do – but the schedule is there; the schedule that was ground into me; the schedule you would think I would have rebelled against once I had the chance. I can only say that there were certain advantages offered by the candy store that had nothing to do with mere survival, but, rather, with overflowing happiness, and that this was so associated with the long hours as to make them sweet to me and to fix them upon me for all my life.” – Isaac Asimov
Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971):
“I get up at about eight, do physical exercises, then work without a break from nine till one,” Stravinsky told an interviewer in 1924. Generally, three hours of composition were the most he could manage in a day, although he would do less demanding tasks – writing letters, copying scores, practicing the piano – in the afternoon. Unless he was touring, Stravinsky worked on his compositions daily, with or without inspiration, he said. He required solitude for the task, and always closed the windows of his studio before he began: “I have never been able to compose unless sure that no one could hear me.” If he felt blocked, the composer might execute a brief headstand, which, he said, “rests the head and clears the brain.”
Charles Dickens (1812-1870):
Dickens maintained a highly structured routine, demanding complete silence in his study that he meticulously adorned with writing materials and specific decorations (including goose-quill pens, blue ink, a paper knife, a vase of flowers, and two bronze statuettes (a man swarmed with puppies and a pair of toads fighting). His work spanned from 9:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m., yielding about two thousand words, followed by a three-hour contemplative walk. Evenings were reserved for dining and socializing. Despite occasional unproductive days, he remained steadfast in his schedule, ensuring consistent productivity.
“No city clerk was ever more methodical or orderly than he; no humdrum, monotonous, conventional task could ever have been discharged with more punctuality, or with more business like regularity, than he gave to the work of his imagination and fancy.” – Charles Dickens’ oldest son
Oliver Sacks (1933-2015):
“I get up around 5 A.M. or so—not out of virtue, but because this is the way my sleep-wake cycle goes. Twice a week, I visit my analyst at 6 A.M., as I have been doing for forty years. Then I go for a swim. Swimming gets me going as nothing else can, and I need to do it at the start of the day, otherwise I will be deflected by busyness or laziness. I come back hungry from my swim, and have a large bowl of oatmeal and the first of many cups of tea, hot chocolate, or coffee which get me through the day. I use an electric kettle, in case I get preoccupied with writing and forget to turn it off.
Getting to the office—a two-minute commute, because my office and my apartment are in adjacent buildings—I look through the mail (hugely abundant now, especially with e-mail) and answer what seems to need an answer. (I do not use a computer, so I write or type my own letters.) I then have patients to see, sometimes, and writing to do, at all times. I may sketch out thoughts on my typewriter, but I generally prefer pen and paper, a Waterman fountain pen and long yellow paper. I often write at a standing desk, sometimes perched on a stool, to spare my bad back from too much sitting.
I take a brief lunch break, walk around the block, practice piano for a few minutes, and then have my favorite noon meal of herrings and black bread. The afternoon is spent writing, if I am up to it. I sometimes fall asleep, or into a deep reverie, lying on my couch, and this may put my brain in an “idling” or “default” mode. I let it play with images and thoughts on its own; I come from these altered states, if I am lucky, with energy renewed and confused thoughts clarified.
I have an early dinner, usually tabouli and sardines (or if I have company, sushi), and play music (usually Bach) on the piano or a CD. Then I settle down to “pleasure” reading – biographies, histories, letters, occasionally novels. I hate television, and rarely watch it. I go to bed early, and usually have vivid dreams, which may haunt me until I reconstruct and (if possible) deconstruct them. I keep a notebook by my bed for memories of dreams, or night thoughts – many unexpected thoughts seem to come in the middle of the night. On the (rare) occasions when I get into a really creative mode, my daily structure is completely ignored, and I write non-stop, sometimes for 36 hours at a time, until the burst of inspiration has completed itself.”
William James (1842-1910):
“Recollect that only when habits of order are formed can we advance to really interesting fields of action—and consequently accumulate grain on grain of wilful choice like a very miser—never forgetting how one link dropped undoes an indefinite number.” – William James writing in his diary (in 1870 at the age of twenty-eight-year-old)
Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986):
“…On the other days one is hurrying through the other things one imagines one has to do to keep one’s life going. You get the garden planted. You get the roof fixed. You take the dog to the vet. You spend a day with a friend… You may even enjoy doing such things…. But always you are hurrying through these things with a certain amount of aggravation so that you can get at the paintings again because that is the high spot—in a way it is what you do all the other things for…. The painting is like a thread that runs through all the reasons for all the other things that make one’s life.”
Go Deeper/Resources
– “Daily Rituals” by Mason Currey
– “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens” by Sean Covey
– “Slow Productivity” and “Deep Work” by Cal Newport
– “Discipline is Destiny: The Power of Self-Control” by Ryan Holiday
– “Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones” by James Clear
– “Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time” by Brian Tracy
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