Hayao Miyazaki's Daily Routine

Hayao Miyazaki co-founded Studio Ghibli and directed My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away and The Wind Rises. In 2013, while he finished The Wind Rises, the documentary The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness filmed his days at the studio. His daily routine ran to the minute.

The Daily Beast reported that he worked Monday through Saturday from 11:00 AM to 9:00 PM and spent Sunday mornings helping clean a local river. Vice said he arrived precisely at 11:00 AM and left at 9:00 PM all year, and showed him doing radio calisthenics with his staff. Neither says much about his mornings or nights at home, so we left most of that blank.

It's for anyone doing long creative work who wants the hours fixed, so the effort goes into the work and not into deciding when to start. It's a good fit if starting is the hardest part.

You get a start time you never have to decide again, a few minutes of group movement to begin, and one free morning a week for something outside the work. Ten-hour days, six days a week, are a lot, so copy the fixed hours, not necessarily the length. His sleep, lunch and the hours of the Sunday clean-up are our estimates.