There are many things I keep in my home office to facilitate a productive writing day: good music, good speakers, photos of my other half Rebekah, books, a comfortable chair and an attractive but not too distracting view. Conversely, a few things have the potential to destabilize my days working from home so much that I’ve instituted a hard “Outta Here” policy. Here’s a bit about what had to go:
1. Chocolate
The desk in my home office has a small top drawer. The drawer is filled with stacks of yellow stickies, scraps of things I’m working on, ear plugs and a photo of Joseph Mitchell for inspiration. I used to keep dark chocolate in there, too. I no longer do.
Some freelance writers and designers might smoke a pack of cigarettes during their work days. Strong dark chocolate is my preferred pacifier. Yes, science says it’s good for you, but science doesn’t mean a bar a day, and I don’t always have enough self-control to keep it close by.
No matter how satisfying a breakfast I eat on my days writing from home, I follow it with chocolate. A big square here. Another square thirty minutes later. Then another and another. The clock ticks and computer keys click, and the taste of cacao lingers. Then I eat more. No matter how much chocolate I consume, I’ll eat and eat until most of the bar is gone by late afternoon. Nibbling over the course of eight hours this way, entire bars disappear with no effort. Pacing myself does little to curb the result. You can’t maintain that level of consumption while writing from home a few days a week if you want to stay thin and not get diabetes, never mind that the chocolate costs three bucks a damn bar, on sale. It’s a habit. The situation got so bad that it meant I had to either quite working from home, or quit keeping chocolate around. Neither scenario sounded appealing.
Instead of banishing chocolate from my office, I initially tried to limit the dose. Like a good addict, I thought I could control myself. I’ll just keep a few pieces in the drawer, I told myself, not the whole bar. When that didn’t work, I moved the bar to a floating shelf behind me, but that only meant I had to reach farther to get it. Moving it to a different shelf across the room didn’t remove it from my mind. I knew it was there, waiting, all delicious and silky sweet. That nagging urge interfered with my concentration. Five feet of air space could never slow me down. The only workable solution was the one I wanted least: keeping the chocolate in the kitchen. This way, I had to abandon my work to walk to the other side of our house to get the chocolate, and because I don’t want to break my concentration while writing, I stay seated. Usually. It works ninety percent of the time. I go into the kitchen to brew tea, though, so I often grab a chocolate square while I’m there. Otherwise, removing snacks from my office has successfully put the cacao out of my mind and kept me focused and from getting fat. All of which is to say that chocolate is the main thing I can’t keep at my writing desk, though I would gladly make a pillow and comforter set out of it so we could spend our nights together.
2. Lighters
Without chocolate to nibble, I put other things in my mouth. What can I say: I have an oral fixation. I’m not ashamed. It’s just a fact, and nonfiction writers need to deal with facts.
The days of smoky newsrooms are over, thankfully. Journalists are no longer chain-smokers doing their best Hunter S. Thompson impressions and boozing at lunch to power them through deadlines—at least, not the effective ones. Nowadays you can hardly smoke on the street for all the regulations, which is great. Some of us want to breathe oxygen. Some of us also miss nicotine.
Addiction specialists advise people in recovery not to challenge themselves. Don’t keep beer in the fridge to prove you can resist; don’t go to parties where people use drugs just to test your will. Abstinence isn’t about will, and people eventually lose these sorts of games. But some of us want our cigarettes around so we can not smoke them.
I keep an ashtray on my desk. It’s filled with crap and talismans that give me power: a guitar pick, a pin featuring Charlie Patton’s face, my granddad’s wedding ring, a jumpdrive, and an unlit cigarette. The old cig is bent and spilling stale tobacco. But it’s there for me to put in my mouth while I write, or to hold between my fingers the way I did during my smoking days, a.k.a. years.
My relationship with tobacco is long and unfortunate. Like many people, I smoked in my teens. I quit but resumed in college, only to quit again for good. The problem is that I love smoking, but I refuse to do it because I’m an avid hiker who bikes and goes to the gym and doesn’t want cancer. So to power on without succumbing, I often put the cig in my mouth while I write. I never light it. I just hang it from my lips like jazz drummer Art Blakey in those bad ass Blue Note album covers where guys in Ray-Bans play music in smoke-filled studios. With the cigarette’s tip suspended under my nose, the smell of tobacco sates the urge to light up rather than temps me to give in. Through some sad, infantile alchemy, having it in my mouth also helps me focus. It sounds crazy, I know, but crazy comes in all shapes, and fortunately mine is functional.
Because I keep the cigarette close, I keep lighters far away. I would never light a cigarette in our house. My wife and I are pretty clean people, but in a moment of stress and weakness or some Don Draper fantasy, I might walk outside to light up before I can come to my senses, and I don’t want to do that. So I banished lighters from the office. The cigarette stays.
Lately, I’ve been trying to move away from the habit. It’s unflattering, and I’m too old to need a pacifier. Instead, I chew on pens. Sometimes I chew my nail. I’ve started experimenting with carrots. They’re long. They’re healthy. They fit between your fingers just like a cigarette, and are packed full of antioxidants, sweetness and fiber. I’m holding a thin heirloom carrot in my mouth right now. The obvious solution is learning to not chew anything at all, but there’s some blockage for me and I’ve struck a bearable compromise. The carrot is a phase that needs to end soon. It’s ridiculous. Thankfully, fall will deliver vegetables too gangly to work.
3. Coffee
Caffeine is to productivity what flour is to pastry, but I can’t handle coffee. I’m energetic enough, and worse, something about coffee’s aggressive chemistry doesn’t jive with my chemistry. Some people are allergic to nuts. Some people have a gene that makes cilantro taste like soap. My disposition melts down from a cup of coffee.
Depending on how you use it, coffee can either be black gold or the devil. I don’t use it. It uses me. When I first drink it, I feel like a god. An hour later I’m nodding out on my laptop or kind of a grump. Coffee sounds useful in theory: Ooh, I have a lot of writing and research to do today, coffee would help. Instead, it makes me disorganized. It disrupts my thinking, turns my sense of narrative architecture to mush, and I walk in circles and write to little end. That magnet that says “Drink coffee: Do stupid things faster with more energy”? That’s me. Because I love coffee’s aroma and flavor, I can hardly stop drinking it when it’s around, so I don’t keep it around when I need to be productive. I brew it in the morning for my wife, who loves and needs it, and I take a few sips in the process. That’s as far as it goes.
Green tea, on the other hand, works well. Japanese sencha and matcha, specifically, energize me without making me crash, and they sharpen my focus without ruining my organizational skills. In addition to good doses of caffeine, green tea contains theanine, an amino acid which effects dopamine, serotonin and alpha waves in the brain, and calms you while improving concentration. That combo helps me write well, and that’s what this post is all about: trying to figure out a system that lets me work as effectively and efficiently as possible. Writing from home, the odds are already stacked against us writers. Home contains so many distractions. So I’m very proactive and disciplined about creating home office conditions that facilitate peak creativity and productivity, and that means banishing certain things from the room. Clearly, it also reveals that I’m fixated on putting stuff in my mouth while I’m seated for long hours.