Daily Rituals is sort of inspiring

Sunday January 19, 2014

Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work.

Somehow I saw that Sam Harris was recommending this book. It looked interesting, so I bought and read it, though much of the material can be read on the blog it started as. It seems to have enjoyed some success now, getting press coverage here and there.

There are a lot of idiosyncrasies described, but the most common thread seems to be one that is rather at odds with the bite-sized micro-sectioning of the book: many many productive people are productive by focusing on work for stretches of three or more hours at a time, as close to undisturbed and undistracted as possible. Nobody seems to write novels while reading buzzfeed lists and watching videos on youtube.

Another interesting tendency is that a lot of people consume a lot of caffeine, and a fairly large number even use amphetamines (it isn't just Erdős). I'm not sure I'll start going in for the harder stuff, but it makes me feel better about drinking Red Bull every now and then.

This post was originally hosted elsewhere.