Anthony Trollope (24 April 1815 – 6 December 1882) was one of the foremost novelists of the Victorian era. His reputation today largely stems from the prodigious nature of his output—a mind-boggling 47 novels (usually quite long) and piles of short stories and smaller works—rather than the quality of his work.
Regardless of whether you believe Trollope's novels stand the test of time (though he was a bestselling novelist in his day), his output is very admirable given that for the duration of his writing career he worked a full-time job at the Post Office.
So how did he do it?
Trollope maintained a philosophy that:
"A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules."
Trollope's 'small daily task' was to wake up at around 5 a.m. and write from 5:30-8:30 a.m. before going to his day job.
That's it.
It isn't said if he had many hobbies outside of hunting, which he would try to do twice a week.
During his writing time, he would:
"write with my watch before me, and to require of myself 250 words every quarter of an hour…
This division of time allowed me to produce over ten pages of an ordinary novel volume a day, and if kept up through ten months, would have given as its result three novels of three volumes each in the year..."
I don't think many would think of such a simple scheme, and Trollope unwittingly incorporated Parkinson's Law (the idea that a task will expand to fit the time allotted for it).
By giving his work a strict window and further breaking down his task into smaller 15-minute chunks, he managed to become one of the most prolific authors of his age.
Sources:
https://jamesclear.com/anthony-trollope
https://dailyroutines.typepad.com/daily_routines/2008/12/anthony-trollope.html
https://www.csmonitor.com/1993/0201/01111.html
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