Patterns in the Daily Routines of Creative Geniuses

A well-read friend of mine recently posted this simple graphic from the software company Podio. The days of 26 unique authors, philosophers, painters, scientists, and composers are visually represented by different colors in a bar graph based on the time of day they spent on creative work vs. on sleep, exercise, and other activities. We know they honored their daily routines in this manner because of the diaries they left and letters they sent, in most cases.

There are a few ready observations that can be made from a cursory study of this chart. Voltaire slept an average of four hours and pursued creative endeavors an average of 15 hours every day. Strauss was only awake an average of 14 hours. Kafka was a polyphasic sleeper and had to work at an insurance bureau. Most slept at night. 

After these, another pattern becomes easy to discern: there is no pattern. Perhaps it could be argued that the creative minds represented here more often worked in the morning and leisured in the afternoon, but plenty counterexamples exist for each proposed pattern.

I take great joy out of this nonconformity. Primarily, it demonstrates the outstanding flexibility and inventiveness of creative humans working on their own time (for the most part). There is no one right way to approach creativity and learning. You know best what schedule your body and mind are best suited for - that is, if you're paying attention, and if you've experimented enough to know what truly works vs. what you're simply attuned to.

Another key point to be gleaned from a meditation on this chart is that each of these famous individuals, many whose very names are godlike in the reverence they command - Voltaire, Franklin, Kant, Mozart, Freud - were ultimately mortal humans just like the rest of us. They had to sleep, eat, and even reluctantly divert their attentions to a day job. Buzzfeed posted a similar series of pie charts depicting "the work patterns of a number of geniuses." It's intriguing to think of "geniuses" in such a quotidian manner, and I think doing so may give budding renaissance men some comfort in knowing that you don't have to be superhuman to create beauty. You just have to be excited and passionate about the creation.