Free Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey Page A

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    Johnson readily admitted that he suffered from procrastination and a lack of discipline. “My reigning sin, to which perhaps many others are appendant, is waste of time, and general sluggishness,” he wrote in his diary, and he told Boswell that “idleness is a disease which must be combated.” Yet, he added, he was temperamentally ill equipped for the battle: “I myself have never persisted in any plan for two days together.”

James Boswell (1740–1795)
    “As soon as I am awake, I remember my duty, and like a brisk mariner I give the lash to indolence and bounce up with as much vivacity as if a pretty girl, amorous and willing, were waiting for me,” Boswell boasted in his journal in 1763. In fact, the great British diarist and biographer often had a terrible time getting out of bed in the morning, and frequently fell prey to the “vile habit of wasting the precious morning hours in lazy slumber.” For a while he even considered trying to rig up some sort of anti-oversleeping mechanism: “I have thought of having my bed constructed in a curious fashion. I would have it so that when I pulled a cord, the middle of the bed would be immediately raised and me raised with it and gradually set up on the floor. Thus I should be gently forced into what is good for me.”
    Yet, at other times, Boswell seemed perfectly content to laze about in bed before confronting the day. The fullest description of his routine comes from February 1763. “My affairs are conducted with the greatest regularity and exactness,” he wrote in his diary.
    I move like very clock-work. At eight in the morning Molly [the maid] lights the fire, sweeps and dresses my dining-room. Then she calls me up and lets me know what o’clock it is. I lie some time in bed indulging indolence, which in that way, when the mind is easy and cheerful, is most pleasing. I then slip on my clothes loosely, easily and quickly, and come into my dining-room. I pull my bell. The maidlays a milk-white napkin upon the table and sets the things for breakfast. I then take some light amusing book and breakfast and read for an hour or more, gently pleasing both my palate and my mental taste. Breakfast over, I feel myself gay and lively. I go to the window, and am entertained with the people passing by, all intent on different schemes. To go regularly through the day would be too formal for this my journal. Besides, every day cannot be passed exactly the same way in every particular. My day is in general diversified with reading of different kinds, playing on the violin, writing, chatting with my friends. Even the taking of medicines serves to make time go on with less heaviness. I have a sort of genius for physic and always had great entertainment in observing the changes of the human body and the effects produced by diet, labour, rest, and physical operations.…
    As I am now in tolerable health, my appetite is very good, and I eat my slender bit of dinner with great relish. I drink a great deal of tea. Between eleven and twelve my bed is warmed and I go calmly to repose. I am not at all unsatisfied with this kind of existence.
    This was Boswell on one of his good days. Other mornings he woke in a foul mood, “dreary as a dromedary,” convinced that “Everything is insipid or everything is dark.” Or, in the middle of a good day, depression would suddenly steal upon him out of nowhere. There seemed to be little he could do to control these black moods. To comfort himself, Boswell liked to wash his feet in warmwater (“It gives me a kind of tranquility”) or drink a cup of green tea, which, he wrote, “comforts and enlivens without the risks attendant of spirituous liquors.” And then there was his Inviolable Plan, an elaborate and somewhat portentous pep talk and statement of purpose that he wrote to himself in October 1763. The Plan is full of resolutions large and small—to avoid idleness, to remember “the dignity of human nature,” to exercise