How I work
Thomas Fink describes the routines, rituals and habits that he has developed for his research and writing and running the London Institute.
DAILY ROUTINE
My work breaks down into three kinds: research, writing, and running the London Institute. I try to work on all three every day.
My daily routine is to get to the office at 6:30 a.m. and work till 6 p.m. I spend the first part of the day—6:30 till 1:00—on research and writing, and from 1:00 onwards running the Institute. The first part I’m mainly on my own, and the second part mainly with others. I don’t take meetings during the first half of the day, so I can rest assured that this time is reserved for creative work. I don’t have lunch, but on most days I interrupt my work with a trip to the gym or Mass.
When I arrive in the morning I have a black coffee and a Diet Coke and jump straight into research. This involves a mixture of paper and pencil calculations, testing my ideas in Mathematica, and writing up my results in Latex. I find that when I keep a problem at the top of my mind, my subconscious mind works on it behind the scenes. So when I come back to a calculation, more often than not I’m able to make progress where before I was stuck. But this only works if I come back to the same problem every one or two days. So I try to work on just one or two research projects at a time.
My second kind of work is writing. This includes writing for our website and for the press—but my research papers, which is part of research. I take the view that writing is thinking: by trying to express my beliefs on paper, I figure out just what it is that I believe. (Writing this essay is a case in point.) A distinctive aspect of my writing process is that it’s very iterative: I do a first draft, then a second draft, and so on, sometimes into the dozens. In general I find I can come back to a piece of prose after one or two days and be sure of making it 10% better without too much effort.
At 1:00 I start my third kind of work: running the London Institute. This is a mixture of planned and ad hoc meetings with colleagues; reviewing the work of other members of the Institute; meeting visitors and members of our Council; and corresponding with people outside of the organisation. A big part of what I do is establishing our routines and rituals and protecting our standards—though of course it is for others to enforce them.
In general I don’t work from home. As with exercise, I find it takes a lot more willpower to work from home than in a dedicated space surrounded by like-minded others. So when I want to work over the weekend, I come into the office. I tend to do this at least one day most weekends.
SIMPLICITY
I have adopted a few key habits that simplify my life and allow me to be more productive. The first is that I don’t eat anything until 6 p.m. Before then, I just drink black coffee, Diet Coke and water. I started this years ago when one of my American relatives urged me to try it for a week. To my great surprise, after five taxing days, I stopped feeling any hunger at all. I’ve stuck with the practice ever since. When I do eat, however, I eat a lot, usually the equivalent of two dinners.
This has brought a number of benefits. One is that I save time—it takes a lot of time to find, cook and eat food, and then clean up. Two, I’m more creative, which I suspect is linked to maintaining longer periods of intense focus. Three, I’m more trim—and importantly this diet hasn’t affected my energy levels or performance in the gym.
The second simplifying habit is that I don’t watch the news. This includes TV, newspapers and any other news sources—and I don’t use any social media. So I’m totally unaware of current events, such as who won a major election or when the Olympics were on. Most of what I need to know I learn through word of mouth. Looking back after ten years of news abstinence, I find our obsession with the news to be similar to following our favorite football teams—that meaningful and that meaningless.
This has brought a lot of upside. One, I’m able to focus more fully on the activities that I love: my research, running the London Institute and spending time with others. Two, I save time, probably 45 minutes a day. Three, I’m more likely to engage in what I call “local good moves”. Instead of talking about, say, US politics, I focus on things where I can make a concrete difference: helping out someone in need or visiting a lonely friend. Fourth, I find that notions such as left-wing and right-wing have faded away, and I rely more on common sense in how I see the world. In other words, I find news to be an implicit form of peer pressure, and avoiding it makes it easier for me to follow my conscience.
The third simplifying habit is that I make a point of living close to work. At all of the places where I’ve worked—Caltech, Cambridge, ENS, the Curie Institute and the London Institute—I’ve lived at most a 20-minute walk away.
A long commute could easily eat up 25% of my work day, not to mention deflating my mood. So I’m willing to compromise to be close: living in a smaller apartment and paying more for it. By the same token, I would be wary of working for an organisation located in an undesirable location. I want to both live near work and live in a part of town that I like.
TACTICS
I’ve developed a number of specific tactics to be better at what Cal Newport calls deep work: professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push my cognitive capabilities to their limit.
I sleep for 5 ½ to six hours per night. I’ve experimented with different sleeping routines, and found that a lot depends on habit—I can get used to sleeping anywhere between 5 ½ and 8 ½ hours a night. I normally think of myself as a night owl—in the sense that I like to stay up and am the last to leave a party—but I have found with time that I prefer mornings over evenings for creative work.
To keep my focus when there is noise around, I often resort to two types of noise cancellation. First, I have Apple noise-cancelling AirPods. On top of these I wear ear defenders—the ordinary kind seen on the shooting range. If these interventions don’t do the trick, I play white noise in the form of a thunderstorm through my AirPods. I sometimes listen to music while working, but only when solving equations rather than writing. I’m pretty broad in my musical taste, but my preferred music for working tends to be deep house.
I like to read through a piece of prose or a mathematical derivation, printed out in hard copy. That way, I can jot down quick notes while I read it, so as to preserve the flow.
In my early years I was frequently late, but a friend of mine convinced me that being on time is cooler than being fashionably late. At work I like people to show up on time and meetings to start on time. I also think talks should end on time; it’s only in the academic subculture, where there are no consequences for inefficiency, that it’s considered a feature rather than a bug for talks to run over schedule.
A Cambridge don and journalist once taught me a trick he used to hit tight deadlines. He would light a cigar, start working, and know that he had to finish his article by the time he finished the cigar. This would give him one to two hours, depending on how often he puffed. I’ve used this to great effect, especially for tasks that I tend to put off, such as proof-reading a paper or writing a letter of reference.
I try to avoid being on external committees. For one thing, they cut into my time available for research and running the London Institute. For another, they are almost always boring. Third, the sort of person who thrives on a committee tends to be diplomatic and hold soft views, whereas I am blunt and hold strong views. The best advice I know for how to avoid committees comes from Richard Feynman: adopt an air of unreliability. That way, instead of having to say no to committees, they say no to you.
SPACE
I think a lot about the space in which I work. I spend a lot of time in my office, and its design affects my efficiency and motivation.
I tend not to use a desk, preferring instead a small portable writing table. For meetings I have a pedestal dining table for up to eight people. There is a blackboard above my fireplace, two large bookshelves and two large chests of drawers. Two sash windows open out to Albemarle Street.
Inside my office there is a cupboard under an external flight of stairs, not unlike the cupboard that Harry Potter grows up in. I do most of my creative work in this cupboard. I first started working in it to be more focused—working in my main office, I was too accessible and kept getting distracted by others (at the London Institute we make a point of keeping our doors open). Now I’m still accessible but there is an extra layer of navigation required to find me.
I like working in my cupboard, and spend half of my time at work there. It is 6 ½ feet by 4 ½ feet, with the height of the ceiling ranging from three feet to eight feet. Inside it are a small Georgian writing table and a compact armchair. To my right are three fifteen-drawer cabinets for papers, which I can easily access from my chair. For storing larger things I have a chest of drawers, and on top of the chest is a printer. The cupboard is lit by two lamps.
I keep a lot of books in my office. In the past I would keep most of my books at home, with only my science books at work. But now, if I like a book, I get two copies, one for work and one for home. Partly this is because I take inspiration for how to build and run our Institute from many disciplines. As well as physics and maths books, I also have a lot of books on biography, philosophy, typography, writing, strategy, design, psychology and advertising.
Sometimes for a change of scene I like to get out of the office and work from a coffee shop. I do this a few times a week at a restaurant across the road. The staff know me and are happy to let me work over a black coffee for 90 minutes or so.
When I am visiting the English countryside, or Texas where I grew up, I love to work outside by the fire. In the old London Institute building, in a different part of Mayfair, I had a working fireplace which kept me company during solitary work.
COMMUNICATION
A big part of work involves communication, so I’ve tried to capture how I best communicate.
As I mentioned above, I spend the first part of my day on creative work. While I can be reached by people during this time, in general I prefer to meet after 1 p.m. However, I don’t interpret this rule too strictly—sometimes it makes sense for others to find me for a quick question or if something important comes up.
I prefer speaking over writing with people I know. It’s a much faster way to understand and resolve things. If you know me well or are in the building and send me a long message, it’s unlikely I will read it—better to find me or ring me and talk it through.
In general I prefer small groups to being on stage. I’ve managed to gain a certain proficiency at giving scientific talks to peers. But in general public speaking is not one of my strengths, and I’m happy for others to have the limelight whilst I forge one-on-one relationships or put my ideas in written form for the public.
I don’t like email. This is partly because I don’t like switching between tasks, and partly because most email is shallow work, whereas I prefer to spend my time doing deep work. So I try to minimise my email activity. One way that I’m able to receive fewer emails is by sending fewer emails. Another is that I try to avoid cc-ing others, on the assumption that fewer people will cc me back.
A long time ago I realised that email was the bane of my life. So I took the extraordinary step of hiring someone to manage my email for me. Now that I run a research institute, I usually have an assistant who helps with this. My assistant reads my email and responds as me when possible. For emails that need my input, she gives me the gist of the message and then responds as me according to my overall intention. Occasionally I write emails myself. At work we mainly use Whatsapp instead of email.
I try to avoid video calls, preferring instead to speak on the phone or meet in person. My reasoning is that, if you know someone well, video doesn’t add much, and is sometimes even distracting. It also makes it impossible to simultaneously do mindless chores, such as walking to do an errand or tidying my office (most of my tidying is done on the phone). On the other hand, if you don’t know someone well, a video call is a poor approximation to meeting in person. I find it offers little of the intimacy that comes from physical interaction, but misleads us into thinking we’ve properly met.