Kazuo Ishiguro's Daily Routine

Kazuo Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017, and The Remains of the Day won the Booker Prize in 1989. He wrote most of that novel's first draft in the summer of 1987 on a four-week sprint he and his wife Lorna called the Crash. It was a one-off push after a year lost to distractions, not how he usually worked.

In his own account for The Guardian, he wrote from 9:00 AM to 10:30 PM, Monday to Saturday, with 1 hour off for lunch and 2 for dinner. He didn't open mail or go near the phone, no one came to the house, and Lorna took on his share of the cooking and housework. Sundays were off. Mason Currey points out that the research was already done before the Crash began.

Use it as a sprint template, not a way of life: for a draft, a thesis or a launch where the thinking is done and the words aren't. You get 10.5 hours of writing a day and a head that lives inside the work. Wake time, bedtime, when the meals fell and the shape of Sunday are our estimates.