Get faster by running easier. Eliud Kipchoge's training week is mostly easy runs, a daily nap and lights out by 9:00 PM.
Keep a few quiet hours for your hardest thinking. Barack Obama's daily routine: family dinner at 6:30 PM, then 4 to 5 hours alone.
Write a novel around a full-time job. Anthony Trollope wrote 47 of them before breakfast, at 250 words every 15 minutes.
Get your 4 hours of writing in before lunch, not after work. Kurt Vonnegut's writing routine in 1965 started at 5:30 AM.
Fit training and family dinner into one day. Mark Wahlberg's 2018 schedule held 2 workouts, golf and dinner with his family.
Finish something every day, not someday. Casey Neistat's daily routine in 2015 had one deadline: a new vlog posted at 8:00 AM.
Keep learning after a full day's work. Thomas Edison's daily routine in 1901: a day at the lab, then 4 evening hours of study.
Build a fitness habit that survives a busy life. Katie Ledecky's training schedule barely changes: up at 5:00 AM, a nap between swims.
Get great work out of about 3 hours a day. Charles Darwin's daily routine: two focused sittings from 8:00 AM, with walks and a nap.
For builders who could keep going all night. Andrej Karpathy works from about 9:00 AM, Monday to Friday, and keeps weekends off.
Work with a night owl's clock, not against it. Pablo Picasso shut himself in his studio from 2:00 PM and painted on into the small hours.
For minds that compose best before dawn. Blind, John Milton built Paradise Lost in his head from 4:00 AM, then dictated it to an aide.
For anyone whose day fills up before their own work starts. Mahatma Gandhi's writing routine began at 4:00 AM, with silence every Monday.
Work 7 hours a day and still see your friends. Simone de Beauvoir's writing routine: two shifts with a long social break between.
Write all morning and keep the afternoon. Ursula K. Le Guin's writing routine: from 7:15 AM, then reading, music and an early night.
For anyone who ends the day busy but behind. Cal Newport plans every minute of his workday and stops at 5:30 PM.
For people who never quite reach the life after work. Jason Fried splits his day 8 hours for work, 8 for sleep and 8 for himself.
Make room for your own work at both ends of a job. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart composed before teaching and again at night, often until 1:00 AM.
Group your meetings and give the making one long stretch. Paul Graham's 2009 essay on the maker's schedule came from a day split at dinner.
For a heavy workload and a calmer day. Oprah Winfrey's daily routine: movement, a meditation at 8:00 AM, a gratitude journal at bedtime.
Finish a first draft by clearing a month. Kazuo Ishiguro wrote most of The Remains of the Day in a 4-week sprint called the Crash.
Hold one hard problem in mind as long as it takes. Isaac Newton's daily routine was almost all work, plus 6 weeks at the furnace twice a year.
Start slowly and finish work early. Georgia O'Keeffe's daily routine: a half-hour walk before breakfast and supper at 4:30 PM.
For anyone making things in a busy shared home. Jane Austen wrote in the family sitting room, after making breakfast at 9:00 AM.
Give each weekday one kind of work. Jack Dorsey gave every weekday a theme, from management Monday to company culture Friday.
Spend your first hours thinking, not reacting. Daniel Ek's daily routine: family, a workout and a walk before work starts at 10:30 AM.
Give one subject your best 3 hours. Paul Erdős's daily routine was built around mathematics, with some 1,500 papers to show for it.
Do great work in a 40-hour week and sleep in. David Heinemeier Hansson's daily routine: no alarm, and work from 11:00 AM.
Decide your start time once and never again. Hayao Miyazaki's daily routine in 2013: at the studio at 11:00 AM sharp, six days a week.
Set a daily minimum that doesn't depend on motivation. Octavia E. Butler's writing routine: at least 4 hours of writing before her day job.
Write in the quiet while everyone else sleeps. Honoré de Balzac's writing routine began at 1:00 AM and produced some 90 novels, stories and essays.
For people whose best ideas arrive after dinner. Brian Chesky's daily routine: no meetings before 10:00 AM and late evenings for thinking.
For hard workers who forget to rest. Simone Biles trained about 7 hours a day for Tokyo, with a nap and every Sunday off.
For anyone writing around a full-time job. Franz Kafka's writing routine: a long sleep after work, then writing from 11:00 PM.
Guard an hour of thinking before the workday starts. Immanuel Kant's daily routine: wake at 5:00 AM, think and write, then lecture all morning.
Go to bed early and the morning becomes yours. Bryan Johnson's daily routine: asleep by 8:30 PM, his health work done before the workday.
Make 3 focused hours a day enough. Flannery O'Connor's writing routine started at 9:00 AM and left the afternoon for rest and her peacocks.
Anchor a long week on a few fixed meetings. Steve Jobs's daily routine at Apple: an executive meeting at 9:00 AM every Monday.
Keep life orderly so the work can be bold. Gustave Flaubert woke at 10:00 AM and wrote at a round table, afternoon and night.
Have dinner at home and still get quiet hours for hard problems. Demis Hassabis's daily routine: a second workday starting at 10:00 PM.
For parents with a full-time job and a book in them. Toni Morrison's writing routine began at 4:00 AM, before her children woke.
For productive days with no breathing room. Albert Einstein's daily routine at Princeton: a walk to work at 10:30 AM, then a lunch nap.
Make your hardest calls while you're sharpest. Jeff Bezos's morning routine: no meetings before 10:00 AM and 3 good decisions a day.
For anyone whose best thinking comes before the inbox. Thomas Mann's writing routine: 3 hours behind a closed door from 9:00 AM.
For anyone who wants a week that holds steady. Queen Elizabeth II's daily routine: a piper at 9:00 AM, the Prime Minister on Wednesdays.
Finish your creative work before mid-afternoon. Ludwig van Beethoven's daily routine: 60 beans to every cup of coffee, then composing until 2:30 PM.
Put hard thinking first and exercise in the middle. Lex Fridman's daily routine runs in a fixed order, with two 4-hour deep work blocks.
Write well without an early start. Kingsley Amis's writing routine: 2 sittings from 9:30 AM, with a pub lunch and a nap between them.
Do your hardest thinking before lunch. Victor Hugo's writing routine ended at 11:00 AM with icy water poured over himself on the roof.
Spread your writing across a long, unhurried day. Vladimir Nabokov's writing routine: 3 blocks, 2 walks and Scrabble in Cyrillic.
For people whose days drift, start with one question. Benjamin Franklin's schedule opens at 5:00 AM by asking what good he'll do.
Finish the big project by repeating one day. Haruki Murakami's writing routine: up at 4:00 AM, the same day for 6 months to a year.
Write somewhere that isn't home. Maya Angelou's writing routine: a bare hotel room by 7:00 AM, with a dictionary, a Bible and a deck of cards.
Get your best ideas on a walk, not at the desk. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's daily routine: a 2-hour walk, never cut short by even 5 minutes.
For people whose days belong to other people. Sigmund Freud's daily routine saved his own writing for after 10:30 PM.
For people whose minds wake late. William Styron's writing routine: 4 hours from 4:00 PM, until 200 or 300 words were done.
End the day on a question, not an answer. Alexander Graham Bell's daily routine: night work from 9:30 PM, then a problem set in his mind before sleep.
Audit your day before you fix it. Andy Grove logged one working day, meeting by meeting, in High Output Management, down to a 3-hour staff meeting.
Get two working days out of one, with a nap in the middle. Winston Churchill's daily routine: sleep from 3:00 PM, then work after dinner.
Build a side project without quitting your job. Brian Armstrong built Coinbase around a day job, 3 or 4 nights a week from 8:00 PM.
Cut the meetings and make time to play. Mark Cuban's daily routine runs on email, with an hour of basketball every morning.
For long working days that need one fixed point. Nikola Tesla dined at 8:00 PM sharp in 1896, with a stack of 18 napkins.
Own your first 2 hours before the meetings start. Tim Cook's daily routine: up before 5:00 AM for email and sales data, then the gym.
Think the story over on foot. Charles Dickens's writing routine: 2,000 words by 2:00 PM, then a three-hour walk.
For anyone crowded out by other people's requests. Le Corbusier painted alone every morning and reached his atelier at 2:00 PM.
Ease back into work after burnout. Richard Strauss's daily routine on his 1892 rest cure: 4 hours of composing and a 10-hour night.
Get words down by talking, not typing. Voltaire's writing routine: dictating to a secretary from bed and not dressing until noon.
For early thinkers who want a hard stop. W.H. Auden's writing routine gave his sharpest morning hours to work and ended at 6:30 PM sharp.