Maya Angelou's Daily Routine

Maya Angelou wrote I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the first of her 7 autobiographies, and spent decades as a poet and civil rights activist. Her best-known habit had nothing to do with talent. Every morning she left a comfortable home to write in a bare hotel room.

She rented the room by the month and kept it small and plain, just a bed and sometimes a basin, with orders that nothing be changed, she told The Paris Review in 1990. She arrived by 7:00 AM with a dictionary, a Bible, a deck of cards and a bottle of sherry, and stayed until the day's pages were done. Evenings belonged to home: she cooked, ate with her husband and read the work aloud to him, listening for where the language jarred.

It suits anyone whose home is full of pull: kids, chores, a partner working in the next room, a phone that never stops. It also suits people who write, design or study best in long, unbroken stretches and keep losing them to small interruptions.

You get a place your mind ties to one job, a hard stop that keeps work out of your evening and a nightly read-back that tells you what to fix tomorrow. A library desk or a garden shed works as well as a hotel room. The finish at 3:00 PM, the bedtime and the same day all week are our estimates.