• How many hours a week does your ‘adventure’ life require you to work at a desk / on a computer? – Kazz
• What is your writing routine? If you’re stuck, distracted, or feeling blue, what do you do to get over it and get on with the writing?
• Why do you work in a shed? Is it to add hardship to the task of writing? – Simon
• How do you keep on top of the deluge of messages, emails and comments? Keeping people happy and engaged but still managing to carve time for writing etc. – Katie
• You do a brilliant job on social media (all channels). How long per day are you spending on it. Or do you have a team to do that for you? I’m not sure when you’re fitting in the adventuring in amongst the real work! – Claire
• You post stuff up from one trip over the course of weeks to make it look like you are ‘adventuring’ all the time. It’s not a real job or something that will pay a continuous wage. – Anonymous

So with the caveats that I am permanently frustrated about how much time I waste, how inefficiently I work, and how I am such a control freak that I am terrible at delegating, here’s how I get stuff done…

I am very fortunate. My job is my hobby. I love settling down to work at 9am on Monday morning. The only trouble is that it’s hard to stop. I don’t dash out of the office on a Friday and forget about work for the weekend. So it becomes a bit of an obsession.

I’ve almost always worked from home. At times I’ve worked in spare bedrooms or from a sofa in the living room. I’ve set up a desk in a conservatory (hiding under an umbrella when the sun was too bright to see my computer screen). I’ve written blog posts whilst eating breakfast, I’ve edited book chapters on the loo.

But I began yearning for a specific workspace of my own. A place where I could think “this is where I work. Today I am going to grind out some creativity and get 1000 words written no matter how little I feel like it.” [There’s a big difference between grinding out creativity and the sparking of creativity which comes on long runs, visiting new places, chatting to interesting people.]

I needed to leave home, go to work, and then come home again and properly relax, like normal people do. And so I spent the first chunk of my advance for writing Microadventures on a shed, wallpapering the walls with the maps I had used during the writing of that book. (Article about building my shed here.)

My working life has swung the full range between being outdoors for weeks on end then writing the odd article or doing a talk, all the way to my current situation of working as manically as I can from 9am to 3pm, Monday to Friday, being ‘Dad’ the rest of the time, and having to be very canny about blocking off time in my calendar to actually get out on ‘adventures’ for work or personal fun.

Here is my current routine…

I try to resist the tyranny of the email inbox (“An inbox is a to-do list to which anyone in the world can add an item…”) and instead get to work on what, at the end of the previous day, I had deemed to be my three most important tasks and stuck to my monitor on a Post-It note.

These vary, of course, but most of the time they entail getting 1000 words written. I try to blitz this before I get tired or distracted. Distraction and procrastination are nightmare foes in the age of the internet (comedy video, anyone?). The website Freedom is the only way I get anything useful done.

That’s pretty much all I have to say about ‘how to write a book‘: Don’t check your emails. Don’t wait for the muse to strike. Write 1000 words at the start of the day. 90 days later you’ll have finished the first draft of your book.

After that — late morning — I treat myself to the little dopamine hits of opening my emails and answering my Twitter @replies.

This is a wonderful era to be a working adventurer because it is so easy to reach an audience of people who are interested in what you do… (Partly for interest and partly out of blatant procrastination I’ve just looked up where in the world everyone reads these newsletters: hello world!)

This is fantastic: it is fun, helpful, informative and plain nice to hear from fellow adventurous souls. You know though that there’s about to be a ‘But’, don’t you?

In fact, for many years of me trying to earn a living as an author and an adventurer there was no ‘but’ at all to being in contact with a slowly growing audience of adventurous souls (1000 true fans and all that). For years I worked hard to answer every email, every Facebook comment, every Tweet, to help people, to build relationships. But (😉) as the numbers grew and the breadth of social media platforms spread, this eventually became unworkable. I could spend every day chatting with people, or I could write my next book. I could not do both. 

And so, with reluctance, I began reining in my communication. I say ‘with reluctance’ because I feel that if people are commenting on something I’ve written or asking me questions then it is rude not to answer. It’s a similar feeling which explains why I’ve never hired a PA to pretend to be me and answer my emails or do my social media stuff – it feels a bit icky somehow.

My approach now is to spend the most time communicating with people who have spent the most time connecting with me in the first place. For example, I’ve made a blanket decision to ignore all Instagram messages. It takes 10 seconds for someone to write, ‘Yo dude. Love your content! What equipment do I need to cycle around the world?’ It would take me an hour to do justice to that answer.

I opted not to just pick and choose the messages I reply to because once I have seen a message I feel guilty and compelled to answer. So I make it easy for my brain by simply never looking (that’s my version of Obama wearing the same suits every day).

I stopped answering Facebook messages or comments simply because there came a time when I was getting too many. It took me a while to not feel like a rude diva about this.

I continue to answer Twitter @messages because they are very quick for me to reply to.

I do my best to answer all the emails I receive, though with brevity (and, I hope, gratitude). Canned responses are very helpful, as is turning frequently-asked questions into FAQ pages.

I particularly appreciate canned responses to help me say ‘no’ to things that guilt or wimpishness make me inclined to say ‘yes’ to.

Saying ‘no’ more is perhaps the number one magic trick for getting important stuff done. 

My approaches to email come and go, but the essence is always about doing it in speedy batches, not drip by drip (except when I’m being pathetically lazy and looking for excuses to not do proper work). Often that is twice a day. When I get fed up with life it becomes once a week. I dream of deleting my email account altogether… Yet I also know that email (and the content on my website) is the key gateway to almost all of my paid work. The day I retire, however, the email’s going!

In order to keep organised and efficient, I schedule my life via Google Calendar and defend my time as tightly as I can. 

I block off non-negotiable chunks of time (an hour a month to climb a tree, two days here to film a microadventure, a precious bigger chunk for a bigger adventure).

I try very hard to avoid meetings and do them as phone calls instead. I try very hard to avoid phone calls and do them as emails instead. I try very hard to make email exchanges brief and ‘actionable’.

If I do need to go to a meeting then I try to batch a bunch of them on the same day and drink beer on the train home. I try to ensure that everyone at a meeting is aware of what we need to get out of it. When I do have to do phone calls I batch them all on the same day if possible. Otherwise I find they really hang over me and distract me from writing throughout the day.

I often use the Schedule Send / Snooze function on Gmail to deal efficiently with emails on the correct date. (For example, I scheduled every episode of my podcast many months in advance. At the same time I scheduled a personal email to each podcast guest for the morning their episode was released to let them know.) I do boring things like sending invoices (Debitoor), sorting out tax things, putting together PowerPoint presentations or booking train tickets in batches too. I hate those sessions!

But I am getting better. I work with an agent to manage my speaking enquiries and another agent for my work with brands. I also have a literary agent, but that role is very different to the more hands-on, sort-out-Al-the-idiot work done by the very patient and capable Caroline and Jo. (I’m going to write a separate post about the role of agents at some point.)

I have an accountant, and I urge anyone who goes self-employed to spend their first ever pay cheque on hiring an accountant! I wish I had done that.

I did hire an intern a while ago to help me think differently. Unfortunately she was so awesome that she quickly got head-hunted by a company that could pay her much better than me! 😂

I also work on an ad-hoc basis with a range of clever freelancers who design my website, fix my website, set up newsletters, design book covers, layout self-published books, edit podcast audio, give a fresh eye to my writing, make logos, ship books and jobs like that. They are better than me, they work quickly, free up my time to do the stuff that only I can do, they bring fresh ideas into my shed. All I have to do is make sure I pay their invoices at top speed.

I began this attitude in about 2008 when I realised the only way I could make a living from adventure was if people knew about me. I started treating my blog like a ‘half-time job’, working hard to schedule regular blog posts month by month. (This 31 day course by ProBlogger was invaluable – I repeated it every 6 months for several years.) So I now treat social media as a ‘job’ and keep it well-stocked with scheduled content in various ways:

• I try to be a hub of useful, relevant articles on Twitter, Facebook (my page, Microadventures page, Grand Adventures page) and LinkedIn by reading lots of articles in my spare time and sharing the good ones. I schedule them using Buffer. The Instapaper app and Chrome extension is key for doing the research.
• When I write blog posts I share them online and also ‘Buffer’ them for a future airing.
• I schedule photos and musings for Instagram using Later. I find it helpful to think thematically when I do this. For example I try to share an interesting book every month. As of now I’ve got a dozen already scheduled, so that’s 3 months of interesting Monday material already sorted. I decided to use the somewhat lame #tbt [Throwback Thursday] hashtag as an excuse to reshare old photos and stories. It’s worth remembering that just because you did a trip 5 years ago does not mean that the tales and lessons are not interesting again today. After all, you’ve watched Top Gun more than once, right? I’ve currently got these lined up for the next 5 months, meaning that I do not need to visit Instagram.com at all (I don’t have the app either) and therefore can focus on writing my book.
• I also use Later to spread the story of an adventure out evenly. One of the questions at the top of this article was a criticism of me “making it look like you are ‘adventuring’ all the time.” I don’t try to pretend that my adventures are longer and mightier than they actually are. But I do make an effort to ‘use’ the stories efficiently from a ‘work’ perspective. Imagine, for example, that I abseil off a big cliff, leap into an icy river, and meet a kind stranger… all within 10 minutes. I could post 3 fantastic pictures and cracking stories within 10 minutes. Or I can spread them one a day in order to maximise the audience they reach, the way the engagement-algorithms promote them and so on. Additionally, I very much prefer to post to social media retrospectively rather than interrupting my adventure to post stuff. Once you forfeit the immediacy of ‘now’ I think you might as well schedule your story to reach the widest audience you can.
• All the pictures that go on Instagram automatically go to Facebook as well, thus spreading the message effortlessly. With a little tweak you can also make them show up properly on Twitter too. Whilst there are good arguments for putting different content on the different platforms (they have very different demographics), there’s also a lot to be said for amplifying your message without doing extra unnecessary work.
• The majority of social media content is, of course, current and day-to-day, so I squeeze in that stuff around the rest of life, trying my best to resist the temptation to dive down the rabbit hole of browsing endlessly as I do so…

So that’s generally how I get things done. Do you know what’s funny and ironic about me writing this whopping long newsletter? I did it specifically because I was feeling too lazy to do the proper writing that getting my book finished demands!

I hope you have found it helpful.