How I work

Efficiency

I’ve spent the vast majority of my working life as a freelancer, working from home. This has made me quite obsessive about efficiency. Since there are so many possible distractions, and very little accountability, I’ve had to crack the whip myself. I bring these habits with me to the London Institute. And because I only work here on Mondays and Tuesdays, I feel I have to push myself to make the most of my time.

Turning up. I want to arrive at work early, after getting as much sleep as possible, so I try to optimise my early morning routine. My alarm goes at 06:30 and I’m out of the house 35 minutes later. I dictate my diary on the cycle ride to the station. I do admin on the train ride into London, sometimes interspersed with reading a book.

Fuel. I’m very dependent on food, so I normally eat twice in the office, at 12:00 and 16:00. This avoids the sugar lows that would otherwise make me bad-tempered. I’ll have a coffee at home, a coffee on arrival at work, and a coffee after my first lunch, which I’ll take with a regular Coke. Otherwise, I’ll stick to sparkling water.

Concentration. I aim for three levels of concentration, depending on the task. 1) Shallow concentration. For light, bitty tasks, I mainly work in the Tyndall Room without headphones. 2) Medium concentration. If there’s ambient noise, I don Sony WH-CH520 Wireless Bluetooth On-Ear Headphones, which are light, comfortable and cheap at about £30. I listen to a nine-hour playlist of familiar, soothing music, which I have put together over several years (sample song: Simple Twist of Fate by Bob Dylan). If I have my headphones on, that means I can be interrupted but only if it’s quite important. 3) Deep concentration. When I’m ready to write something, I’ll usually move to the cupboard off our central corridor and close the door. At these times, I am very resistant to being interrupted, which I regard as being similarly disruptive to being shaken awake. Deep concentration is a close relative of deep sleep and just as necessary for a good, productive life. I don’t feel self-conscious about working in a cupboard. After all, I once wrote an entire novel that way. You can find it here.

Writing

Making notes. I write in the note app of my laptop and/or iPhone, always in (16-point) Market Felt, which was the default font on the iPhone note app from 2007 to 2013, when I first developed this habit. The first note I’ll take on a subject will be a brain-dump, followed by a general accumulation of material. I’ll read through the material, emboldening the points of most interest. Then I’ll make a note at the top of this note, including these key points in a shorter summary. Then I’ll make a “masternote”, above that note, which will summarise it in the shortest possible form. Then I’ll plan the skeleton structure of the piece, making sure that all these key points are included. Then I’ll launch into the actual writing.

Talking it out. If I’m co-writing something, or need direction, I’ll discuss it with a colleague, and sometimes with my wife. This is also a way of testing out how an idea sounds, and seeing which parts resonate. If I’m feeling stuck, trying to summarise the argument in person will often release the logjam. Talking is a skill that’s older and more developed than writing. This is true both individually and historically. As a result, talking an argument out can be a muscular way to overleap an obstacle at which pure thought has fallen.

The three whys. Before embarking on writing a piece of journalism, I find it helpful to check I have answers for the three whys. Why now? Why you? What’s new? Newspapers will rarely run a piece if there isn’t something timely about it, such as a breaking trend or an anniversary on which to hang it. It helps if you have a special expertise in this area, or some other reason why you are the best possible person to write the piece. There will usually need to be something original in the reportage or argument. Sometimes, too, I will add a fourth question to the three whys. What did you do? In other words, it will make the piece more compelling if I have been somewhere, or interviewed an expert, or run an experiment, or all of the above.

Inspiration. Good prose style is catching, so if I have time, I spend ten minutes reading the best, before I write something myself. Before my Finals in Classics, I used to read Hamlet for this purpose. These days, I tend to read one article from Martin Amis’s essay collection, The War Against Cliché.

Iteration. If I’m co-writing a piece, I find it works best if each of us successively produces complete drafts, as opposed to each writing designated parts. Then we’ll read it aloud, since hearing the words often draws attention to awkward phrasing, or logical weaknesses, which have become invisible to the reading eye. If I’m writing a piece alone, and have a deadline, I’ll try to get it finished a week or two before it needs to be sent out. That leaves time for coming back to it, day after day, and improving it.

Curiosity-driven journalism. I don’t follow the convention of most journalists, which is to pitch an article first. What this means is that they try to write a short, compelling précis of the article they think they want to write, and then email it to an editor who they believe might be interested. Assuming that they’re right, they then develop the idea with the editor, before writing it up, assured that, at the end of the process, it is 90% likely to be published. But this isn’t my approach. Instead, I work out, by myself, the piece that I want to write, and then I write it, without first pitching it. The justification is that, like curiosity-driven scientific research, a curiosity-driven article, which is directed entirely by the interests of the writer, will have an integrity of its own. The end result will be a better article, which is arguably just as likely to be published, and guaranteed to be more satisfying to the writer.