Routines are procedures that directly help the London Institute achieve its goals—“the way we do things around here”. We describe our routines using evolvable scripts, which are concise and easily accessible procedural units that can slowly change over time.
Tools
Blackboards
One of the most notable features of our rooms are our blackboards. Most of these are painted directly onto the plaster walls, but a few are portable. ❧ Where possible, our blackboards are 48 inches tall, starting 39 inches from the floor. The black surface of the boards should be neither too rough nor too smooth; we finish the surface with 120 grit sandpaper using an orbital sander. ❧ For blackboards in our refurbished rooms, we are planning to use black honed slate, in the form of 48 inch square tiles laid side by side and built into the walls.
Chalk and erasers
We use Hagoromo Fulltouch chalk, widely considered the world's best. We keep it in ebony wood trays and basalt bowls near our blackboards. Two-thirds of our chalk is white and one-third is coloured. We buy the chalk in 72-piece boxes. The coloured box comes in five colours: 2 ⨉ red, 1 ⨉ orange, 1 ⨉ yellow, 1 ⨉ green and 1 ⨉ blue. For more colours, there is a 12-piece box that has sticks in dark red, red, vermilion, orange, yellow, green, dark green, blue, purple and 3 ⨉ white. ❧ We use Spaceright blackboard erasers, made of wood and red and white felt.
Paper and pencil
When not at the blackboard, much of our work is done with paper and pencil. ❧ For notebooks, we stock ruled and unruled black Moleskine notebooks in three sizes. The standard notebook is 19 ⨉ 25 cm with 120 pages; the small notebook is 13 ⨉ 21 cm with 80 pages; and the pocket-sized is 9 ⨉ 14 cm with 64 pages. ❧ For pencils, we stock the Bic combination pen and pencil, which has a 0.7 mm pencil and black, blue and red ink. For erasers, we stock Staedtler Mars Plastic. ❧ These and our other stationary items are kept in the Old Post stationary cupboard.
Magazines and journals
We subscribe to several journals and magazines in hard copy. ❧ Our journals include Nature and Science, and we would like to receive Physical Review Letters in print, if we could find an affordable way to do so. For popular science, we get Scientific American and Nautilus. ❧ For technology, Wired—which is also a source of inspiration for how to integrate writing and design. ❧ For graphic design and visual culture, we receive Eye and Creative Review. ❧ We keep the last six issues of each periodical and stack them on the trestle table in the Old Post Room.
Tech
Laptops
On arrival and every three years, LIMS offers its employees (but not consultants) a laptop. For those who need a more powerful machine, LIMS will pay for the first £1000 and half of the cost in excess of this. ❧ We urge our members to use an Apple laptop, which runs the UNIX operating system and, like the London Institute, emphasises simplicity and interoperability. ❧ For accounting purposes, laptops depreciate over three years according to (1 − age/3). Employees can treat their laptop as their own and, on departing, have the option of buying it out.
Email is a 35-year-old technology that can feel clunky and is the wrong tool for many tasks. At the London Institute, most of our internal digital communication is done through Whatsapp. ❧ As well as messaging, Whatsapp supports extensive file sharing for documents, images, video and audio. Whatsapp has a desktop version which syncs with the phone app, making communication through the two platforms seamless. ❧ We have a London Institute Whatsapp group called LIMS chitchat. It is for our current employees and consultants and a handful of others.
Software
We offer our employees two software packages: Mathematica and the Adobe Creative Cloud. Both are accessed through an annual subscription fee per person. ❧ Mathematica is a system for symbolic computation, data and function visualisation, and general programming. We encourage both scientists and staff to use it, even for elementary computation. ❧ The Adobe Creative Cloud is a set of applications that includes Illustrator for vector graphics, PhotoShop for raster graphics, InDesign for typography and layouts, and XD for web and mobile app design.
Printers
We have two printers for general use: LIMS Porter Printer and LIMS Cartier Printer. These are located in the Porter Wing and the Cartier Annex and can be accessed wirelessly. ❧ We use HP LaserJet Pro M118dw printers, which print double-sided in black and white. We stock spare toner cartridges in the Old Post cupboard. ❧ We use 80 gsm paper and stock between 10 and 25 reams of it in the Tyndall south cupboard. ❧ For printing in colour or printing special projects, such as posters or pamphlets, we use the nearby Kall Kwik printing firm in St James.
Measure what matters
Tracking discovery
Each year, we set a target for the amount of discovery that we make. As a measuring stick, we use ASNIP points, which is the author and source normalised impact per publication. ❧ There are five stages to publishing a paper: draft; posted on arXiv; submitted and with the journal; submitted and with the author (meaning the author must take action); and accepted. ❧ Our cumulative scores in each stage are updated every Friday on our website and on the Old Post Room blackboard. The aim is to push our limits and remind ourselves of the primacy of discovery.
Tracking income
To ensure that our scientists and staff focus on the most important funding opportunities, we score and track the major grants and gifts that we seek. ❧ Our unit of measurement is expected unrestricted income (see §How we keep score). In setting the score, we try to ascertain the actual success rate from the funder—sometimes asking them directly. ❧ We only track items in excess of £100k of expected unrestricted income, which we call a point. ❧ Our cumulative score for the year is updated regularly on the right-hand blackboard in the Old Post Room.
Tracking soft power
We believe that organisations have soft power in the same way as countries do. The London Institute’s soft power is all of its activity that is not directly connected to discovery and fundraising. It is made up of six categories, all of which we track: our voice, website, relationships, building, convening power and organisational intelligence. ❧ As a benchmark, a seminar is 1–2 points, a new blackboard is 5, and a comment piece in The Times is 15. ❧ Our cumulative scores in each category are updated weekly on the blackboard in the Old Post Room.
Coming and going
Showing up
One of our most important and protected routines is showing up for work. Our scientists and staff are present from 8/9/10 am to 5/6/7 pm. ❧ Showing up has several benefits. One, it creates opportunities for superadditivity, whereby one person’s idea sparks an idea in another. ❧ Two, it’s essential for building organisational culture and a sense of shared adventure. ❧ Three, it enables us to adapt quickly to new opportunities and unforeseen challenges. ❧ Four, the constant buzz in our rooms underpins our reputation as a go-to place for visitors.
Holiday
The Institute does not constrain employees to observe bank holidays, so they can swap bank holidays with ordinary weekdays. The only mandatory holiday, if it falls on a weekday, is Christmas day. ❧ Holidays are arranged through the Timetastic holiday planner. ❧ Half-days of holiday are allowed, but these should be used sparingly. Up to 10 days of holiday can be carried over to the next calendar year. ❧ Regarding sick leave, the Institute pays full salary during the first three sick days per year, then statutory sick pay for any additional sick days.
Talks and meetings
In-person
Apart from our §Theatre talks, which are professionally recorded and put online, all of our talks are in-person only. ❧ There are a few reasons for this. First, we believe that unplanned interactions are key to superadditivity. We build in interaction around all our different talk formats, which is when serendipity happens. ❧ Second, we don’t have students, so we rely on visitors to get to know us and then go back and spread the word. ❧ Third, we occupy the iconic Royal Institution building in central London, so it’s easy to get to and pleasant to be in.
Monday synopsis
Every Monday from 12:50 to 1:05, all our scientists and staff gather in the Old Post Room to share their activity for the week ahead. ❧ In listing our activities, we provide enough detail so that they change each week. Scientists share their research activity as well as their activity for LIMS as a whole. ❧ The office manager starts with a synopsis of upcoming events and visitors. We then each spend under a minute describing our own plans. The goal is to be aware of what everyone is doing and to create opportunities for serendipitous interactions.
Informal seminar
Informal seminars at the London Institute are not advertised beyond our website and are not open to the public. They start at 2 o’clock in our seminar room, also known as the Tyndall Room. ❧ The point of informal seminars is for researchers to give spontaneous accounts of their work, both to elicit feedback and to encourage collaboration. ❧ To keep the seminars light-touch, we encourage extemporaneous presentations and welcome chalk talks. In keeping with this informality, they are described on our website with an abbreviated 420-character summary.
Seminar
Seminars are technical talks that are advertised and open to the academic public. They start at 2 o’clock in our seminar room, which seats 75 (see §Space: Seminar room). ❧ Each seminar is hosted by a LIMS member, who introduces the speaker, fields questions and keeps to time—like the Royal Institution’s Friday Evening Discourses, there is a strict one-hour limit, including questions. ❧ After the talk, people move to the Old Post Room for coffee and discussion. ❧ Seminars are described on our website with a 980-character summary and short speaker bio.
Talk
Talks are less technical than seminars and are intended for a broader audience. They start at 5 o’clock in our seminar room. ❧ As well as members of the Institute and their networks, we invite current and potential LIMS supporters. ❧ Talks are hosted by a LIMS member, who introduces the speaker, fields questions and keeps everything under an hour. ❧ Immediately after, we host drinks in the Old Post Room (see §Drinks parties). This is an opportunity for people to continue the discussion and build new connections. There is no set end time to the event.
Theatre talk
Occasionally we jointly host a public talk with the Royal Institution in its iconic Lecture Theatre. We provide the speaker and get to invite 80 guests for free, whereas the RI provides the Theatre and gets to sell tickets for the rest of the seats. ❧ A key benefit of this collaboration is that the RI films the talk and uploads it to its YouTube channel, where videos garner over 100,000 views. ❧ After the talk, we invite our guests to a private drinks party in our Faraday and Old Post rooms. This is a chance for LIMS to shine and build relationships.
Board meeting
Our board of Trustees meetings are at 4 o’clock on the first Fridays of April, September and December. They are in person—we don’t do hybrid meetings. Following each one, the board joins our Friday drinks at 5:00 or, in December, our Christmas party at 6:00. ❧ Board meetings are attended by the Trustees, the Director (also a Trustee), and the Director’s assistant, who records anything notable. Occasionally others attend parts of the meeting, making sure that scientists attend no less than nonscientists, so we don’t lose sight of our focus on discovery.
Funding
How we keep score
The fundamental unit by which we track our fundraising efforts is expected unrestricted income. This is the expected income, in the statistical sense, that can be used to cover existing costs; it does not include newly incurred costs, such as hiring a postdoc or going on a trip. ❧ Consider an EPSRC grant worth £800k, of which £500k can be used to pay existing costs. Since EPSRC has a 30% success rate, the expected unrestricted income is £150k. We typically express this in units of £100k, which we call points: applying for this grant is worth 1.5 points.
Direct costs
Budgets for research grants and other funding streams are set by the direct costs and support costs of our scientists. ❧ For ordinary posts, our direct costs are 1.25 ⨉ salary. The extra 25% covers National Insurance and statutory pension, and modest computing, travel and publication fees. ❧ For posts associated with our global talent programmes, our direct costs are 1.375 ⨉ salary. As well as the above, the higher rate covers legal fees, the Global Talent visa, the National Health Service surcharge, publicising the programme and running the competition.
Support costs
Our support costs are equal to the direct costs for the first £100k, plus half of any direct costs in excess of £100k. They cover rent for our offices and public rooms, our team of support staff, and our communications crew. ❧ For example, for a salary of £96k, the direct costs are £120k, and the support costs are £110k. ❧ Here is a reality check of our methodology. UKRI assigned us a flat support costs rate of £91k per man-year, based on historical data. The two methodologies give similar values for support costs when averaged over all our scientists.
UKRI unrestricted funds
UKRI only funds 80% of the cost of a grant, with the remainder coming from student fees or the REF. As an independent institute, we have access to neither. So getting sufficient support costs out of UKRI is a challenge. ❧ To solve this, we analysed the methodology used to set UKRI grant budgets and derived an equation for the unrestricted fraction. We found this fraction can vary widely, and gave a strategy for maximising it: more PI time and less postdoc time lead to fractions approaching one. This can make UKRI funding profitable even at 80% coverage.
Foreign currencies
As well as a sterling account, the Institute has a dollars account and a euros account. We use Transferwise for currency exchanges between them. ❧ For accounting purposes, whenever we do currency translations, we use the average exchange rate of the previous calendar year. This is an unbiased estimator of the real-time exchange rate. ❧ So, for all transactions in 2025, we use the average exchange rates for 2024, which are £1 = €1.181 and £1 = $1.278. For transactions in 2024, we use the average rates for 2023, which are £1 = €1.149 and £1 = $1.244.
Trips
Overview of travel
Sometimes our scientists need to meet collaborators and present their work to others. When possible, we try to arrange for collaborators and audiences to come to us rather than us going to them, for a few reasons. ❧ First, being relatively unknown, it’s a way for others to get to know LIMS and spread the word at their home institutions. ❧ Second, we have invested in iconic offices in the centre of London, and have plenty of space for visitors. ❧ Third, we have funding to support some kinds of visitors, such as Russians, and are raising funds for others.
Work travel budget
In addition to their 28 days of §Holiday, London Institute scientists can travel for work for up to 28 days a year. The Institute provides an annual travel budget of £1,500 per scientist. This is in addition to any travel support won through a research grant. ❧ The £1,500 is used for §Actual reimbursement, whereas as grant support is used for §Per diem reimbursement. ❧ Some of the reasons to put a cap on travel are in §Overview of travel. Another is that we rely on our scientists to grow and enhance the Institute as much as their own reputations.
Actual reimbursement
For scientists who don’t have a travel budget associated with a grant that they won, LIMS pays the actual cost for trips. This is charged against each scientist’s annual travel budget of £1,500. This is a gift, not a right, and budgets cannot be carried over across years. ❧ With a fixed budget, scientists have skin in the game, and it’s in their interest to minimise the cost of their travel. ❧ Costs that can be claimed include travel, lodging and meals. Pictures or pdfs of receipts should be submitted with the request to our accountant, Liz Whitby.
Per diem reimbursement
For trips that can be charged to a travel budget associated with a grant, and some trips on LIMS business, we use per diems. We pay the actual cost for travel to the destination, but a fixed amount per night for lodging, meals and local travel. ❧ We use the EU nightly rate, which depends on the destination country. Let n be the number of nights away, and r the relevant nightly rate. Then for Fellows the per diem amount is (n + 1/2) r. For postdocs and Junior Fellows, it is two-thirds this. Note that a day trip (0 nights) incurs a cost of 1/2 r.