Fast Company did a piece some while ago about Ernest Hemingway and how very specifically productive he was. I didn’t know any of this and I rather like that some of his methods are word-for-word what I do too. Writer Drake Baer picked out six parts of Hemingway’s methods and I particularly like these two:

4) He attacked the early hours.

Hemingway got up insanely early, greeting the dawn with a craftsman’s devotion.

In his own words:

There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write. You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again. You have started at six in the morning, say, and may go on until noon or be through before that.

5) He protected his time.

Hemingway famously galivanted around Europe as a member of the Lost Generation, typing out novels in Spanish hotel rooms and stories in Parisian lofts. He could work well anywhere, he maintained, as long as the circumstances fit.

As in, he protected his time: “The telephone and visitors are the work destroyers.”

6 Ways to be a Hemingway-Level Productive Badass – Drake Baer, Fast Company (13 September 2013)

Read the full piece to see the other four Hemingway methods, would you?