Maya Angelou's Daily Routine

Maya Angelou was a poet, civil rights activist and the author of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the first of her 7 autobiographies. She did her writing in a hotel room she rented by the month, lying across the bed.

She told The Paris Review in 1990 that she rose at 5:30 AM, had coffee with her husband at 6:00 AM and was in the room by 7:00 AM. She brought a dictionary, a Bible, cards and a bottle of sherry and wrote until 3:00 PM, then went home to reread the pages, shower, cook and eat a quiet dinner. At 7:30 PM she read the work aloud to her husband, not for critique but to hear where the language jarred.

Adopt it if home is full of distractions and you need one place where only the work can happen. You get a long morning of writing, a proper dinner and an evening read-back that tells you what to fix tomorrow. Our estimates: writing until 3:00 PM where she said about 2:00 PM, the 10:00 PM bedtime, and the same day all week.