The document discusses different types of schedules and work habits of creative people, including workaholics who work constantly without schedules, extremely orderly people who follow rigid daily schedules, people who work 2-3 hours per day, and disorderly people who write sporadically without fixed routines. It provides examples like George Gershwin and Kierkegaard for workaholics, Kant and Proust for orderly schedules, Anthony Trollope and Henry James for 2-3 hours of work, and Jane Austen and F. Scott Fitzgerald for disorderly habits. The document also outlines six lessons for productivity, such as being a morning person, taking walks, sticking to schedules, and learning to work anywhere.

1. How Do You Spend Your Day?
Michael Edmondson, Ph.D.

2. “Don't say you don't have enough
time. You have exactly the same
number of hours per day that were
given to Helen Keller, Pasteur,
Michaelangelo, Mother Teresa,
Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson,
and Albert Einstein.”
H. Jackson Brown Jr.

3. The workaholics: these
people don’t need
schedules because they
don’t find it too hard to
work and they’re always
working. Exs: George
Gershwin, Federico
Fellini, Ingmar Bergman,
Kierkegaard, Voltaire, and
Henri Matisse.

4. The extremely orderly:
these people kept to rigid
schedules that they
followed every single day.
They also tended to be
somewhat reclusive
(which makes sense, since
a rigid schedule doesn’t
really allow for the
interruptions caused by a
social life). Exs: Simone
de Beauvoir, Kant,
Benjamin Franklin, Proust,
Flaubert, Juan Miró, and
Philip Roth.

5. The 2-3 hour a day folks:
These are people who
were content to do just
two or three hours a day
(and, usually, they
believed it was
counterproductive to do
more than this). Exs:
Anthony Trollope, Henry
James, Martin Amis,
Thomas Mann, Richard
Strauss, Henry Miller, and
Graham Greene.

6. The hopelessly disorderly: people
who write according to no fixed
schedule (and often suffer months
where they produce little or nothing).
Here I also include people whose
writing habits are incredibly bizarre
and idiosyncratic (Gertrude Stein, for
instance, would drive out into the
country and look for a cow, because
she liked to look at cows while she
wrote. Then she’d sit on a rock and
maybe get half an hour of writing
done before she was tapped out for
the day). Exs: Jane Austen, Frederic
Chopin, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott
Fitzgerald, Ann Beattie, and Tom
Stoppard.

7. There is no one way to get things done.
Six lessons
1. Be a morning person
• Mozart, Georgia O’Keefe, Flank Lloyd Wright and Jonathan Edwards
2. Don’t give up the day job
• William Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying in the afternoons, before commencing
his night shift at a power plant
• TS Eliot’s day job at Lloyds bank gave him crucial financial security
• William Carol Williams, a pediatrician, scribbled poetry on the backs of his
prescription pads.
3. Take lots of walks
• Tchaikovsky – believed he had to take a walk of exactly two hours a day and
that if he returned even a few minutes early, great misfortunes would befall
him.
4. Stick to a schedule
• Le Corbusier, Immanuel Kant, and William James
5. Practice strategic substance abuse
• Ayn Rand and Graham Greene (Benzedrine)
• Beethoven counted 60 beans for each cup of coffee
• Balzac drank 50 cups of coffee a day
6. Learn to work anywhere
• Agatha Christie, Jane Austen and Somerset Maugham

8. http://www.fastcocreate.com/3028428/infographic-see-the-daily-routines-of-the-worlds-most-famous-creative-people