How I work

Routine

My work breaks down into three kinds: admin, content management and design. Admin involves placing orders, managing supplies, troubleshooting equipment and keeping the office running. Content management means keeping the different sections of the website current. Design covers digital (images and page layouts for the website and slides for presentations) as well as print (documents, brochures and invitations).

Morning. I wake at 8 am and leave the house by 9:15 am. I aim to get into the office by 10 am, and then stay until at least 7 pm.

Commute. I travel by electric bicycle. I used to take buses and the Tube, but this was subject to road closures, delays and other factors outside my control. Cycling avoids all that. I'm in charge of the time.

Phone. Every day, including weekends, I set my phone to Do Not Disturb from 11:30 pm until 9 am. Only two family members can get through. I used to find that waking up to a screen full of missed calls and unread messages was a guaranteed way to start the day feeling stressed.

Day structure. I start with admin: placing orders, and responding to colleagues’ requests, which can be anything from sourcing equipment to sorting subscriptions or writing something like this page. I try to get rid of the most boring tasks first. From there, I move to website content management: posting new papers, events and updates. Lastly, I turn to design tasks. Around 3 pm or 4 pm I go to the gym for an hour. When I return, I deal with anything outstanding. Before leaving the office after 7 pm, I go around the rooms, tidying up and restocking daily supplies.

Space

The space I work in affects my mood, so I pay close attention to it. My desk is 180cm wide and 70cm deep. It’s built of solid wood with no drawers. At the centre sits a 32-inch 4K monitor connected to a 14-inch MacBook Air with M5 chip and 32Gb ram. I keep the laptop closed while it’s connected to the monitor, as I’m not a fan of two monitors. I type on a Lofree mechanical keyboard with low-profile MX linear switches, and use an external Apple Magic Trackpad. On the desk is a small collection of design books held between two wooden bookends, with a lamp at each end.

A cluttered or messy space makes it harder to think clearly and enjoy being at work. Cable management is one expression of this. I have mounted a plug extension on the side of the desk, and all my cables run underneath, secured with velcro straps. This means the whole setup can be reconfigured without cutting anything. Cables left hanging or trailing on the floor collect dust and dirt and the visual noise of them bothers and distracts me.

Also on the desk, I have a small pocket notepad. I use a simple circle notation. An empty circle means a task is to be done; a filled circle means it's done; a half-filled circle means it's blocked or only partially complete; and a cross means it was abandoned. A quick scan down the page or back through previous weeks shows immediately what is unresolved. I started this to get an honest picture of what I actually spend my time on.

On the windowsill I have a plant. I don't know its name but I'm proud that when I got it, it only had three leaves, and now it has grown into something considerably larger, and it hasn’t died—at least, not yet.

Tools

Design. For most of my work, I use Figma, where mocking up a page or prototyping a UI is fast and intuitive. I use InDesign for print, whether that's documents, booklets or brochures. Adobe's interface hasn't improved much in years, but there’s no real alternative for print layout. I use Lightroom for mild photo editing, and Photoshop for harder editing jobs, such as removing objects from images and cleaning up photographs. On rare occasions, for complex vector graphics, I use Illustrator. For web design, I've recently moved to Framer. Our website is custom-coded by our developer, but designing it in Framer helps me to think like a developer: understanding how the web is structured, what is and isn't possible, and how components and interactions are built.

Content management. We develop most of the text for our website by collaborating in Google Docs. When it’s ready, I run it in on Payload, which is the headless CMS our website runs on.

Communication. For sending messages amongst ourselves, we use WhatsApp, which keeps things fast and simple.

Focus

I receive a stream of requests throughout the day: content to add or edit, supplies to order, subscriptions to set up, printers that have stopped working, furniture to move. This is part of the job but it’s important to me also to preserve some time for creative work. Then, when I need to block out noise and concentrate, I put on noise-cancelling earphones and listen to music. The genre depends on my mood, the time of day and the nature of the work.

If I don’t fight it, the demands of shallow but urgent tasks can take over my day. To avoid them building up, I try to get them done as quickly as possible. If all goes well, I’ll have a healthy amount of time in the afternoon for more satisfying creative work.