Honoré de Balzac's Framework

The most extreme day in Mason Currey's Daily Rituals, and the one to try if your best hours are the ones nobody else wants. Balzac ate a light dinner at six and went straight to bed. At one in the morning he rose and wrote for seven hours without a break, in a white monk's robe, on cup after cup of strong black coffee, by one estimate fifty a day. At eight he allowed himself a ninety-minute nap, then worked again from half past nine until the middle of the afternoon. What was left of the day went to a walk, a bath and visitors, then dinner and the cycle began again. The week here runs that cycle every day, as Currey presents it during his writing campaigns. It is a seven-hour night in two pieces, a fourteen-hour working day, and almost nothing else. Adopt it as a short sprint rather than a life. Balzac told a friend in 1830 that the days melted in his hands like ice in the sun, and he was dead at fifty-one.