Authors' Sleep Patterns and Productivity

This post originally appeared on ShortList.com on 1/28/14.

Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and a better author. Wait, that’s not right.

The influence of daily routines on creative output has always been a mild obsession of Maria Popova, a New York-based Bulgarian writer and blogger.

Such was her interest in successful writers’ sleep habits that she commissioned illustrator Wendy MacNaughton and information design team Accurat to create this rather superb infographic, charting authors’ sleeping patterns and their literary productivity.

Having researched each author’s wake-up time from journals, biographies and interviews, the chart illustrates their preferred hour of rising with a clock-like marker. The author’s productivity is indicated with a small count for each of their books, poems or works, adjacent to the time. Literary awards are indicated with a coloured smudge around the author’s portrait. The writers are ordered according to their hour of rising.

It makes for an interesting read, demolishing any notion that there’s a ‘perfect hour’ to rise. We’re all for adopting Charles Bukowski’s approach to mornings…
 

Click here to view the infographic, along with instructions for how to read it.