A typical workday for freelancer Meryl Davids Landau

For this installment of A Typical Workday, I spoke with Meryl Davids Landau, an award-winning independent journalist and novelist based in South Florida. Landau has been freelancing for 30 years, writing about health, integrative health, psychology, science, climate change and the environment, parenting and general-interest topics. Her byline has appeared in The New York Times, Prevention, National Geographic, O: The Oprah Magazine, Vice, Undark, Glamour, Reader’s Digest, AARP, MindSite News and more. She works from her home office in a spare bedroom.

(This conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.)

Recent article   

I’m most excited about my piece that ran in The Washington Post on Jan. 16 about people who take psychedelics at the end of life. It was about a program in Canada where people can legally access psilocybin when they have a terminal diagnosis. I interviewed people with a terminal diagnosis months before they took the psilocybin, just before and after, and then for months after that to see how it affected their life. It was a long process, which is why I needed, and got, the The Ferriss – UC Berkeley Psychedelic Journalism Fellowship.

One of the main people that I was following died in December. This made it especially important for me to get the tone right because he wanted one of his legacies to be helping other people get better access to these drugs. 

Favorite office equipment 

During the pandemic, I got a new desk from Office Depot; it is from the Magellan collection. It’s an L-shaped desk with a hutch, and it’s big and spacious so I can put a lot of stuff all over the place. It did take my husband and me two full days to put it together. But I love it. 

Also during the pandemic, with all the Zooms, I treated myself to a 23-inch freestanding monitor. The downside of getting used to a big monitor is that it’s now hard to write on my laptop screen. It seems so puny.

Daily routine

I wake up between 6:30 a.m. and 7 a.m. Now that my kids are out of the house, I tend to stay in bed. I’m not a morning person, so if I ease into the day it works better for me. I usually get out of bed after 7:30 am. Once I’m at my desk, usually around 9:30 am, I’ll probably spend the first 15 minutes doing emails and administrative stuff. And then I try to spend a half hour to an hour working on my novel. I have two mindfulness women’s novels out — Downward Dog, Upward Fog and Warrior Won — and I’m currently writing the third, Yoga Bind. I find if I don’t do this first thing, I never have time to get to it during the day.

From about 10:30 a.m. to about 1 p.m., I try to work straight through on my reporting, doing interviews, writing and pitching. I try to attend an online webinar or conference, like a medical conference, several times a week. I’m trying to get story ideas to pitch. I would much prefer to write an article that I’m interested enough in to pitch versus an article that comes to me from an editor where I may not be interested in the topic. I take at least 45 minutes for lunch and tend to wrap up work between 4 pm and 5 p.m. unless I have something specific scheduled later. One of the benefits of being a freelancer is that you can end your workday a little earlier. You’re paid for your productivity and not for the time that you sit at your computer. 

Self-care

I try to do meditation for 15 minutes in the morning. I have an app that I love. It’s Jon Kabat- Zinn’s JKZ meditation app. I highly recommend it to everyone because it’s so customizable, and it’s for all levels. During lunch, I’ll include some stretching if I’ve been sitting a long time, and sometimes I’ll sit outside or watch those home shows on HGTV to [look into the distance and] stretch my eyes. When I come back to my computer, I feel like my eyes are reset. At the end of the work day, and sometimes during the workday, I try to exercise, whether that’s walking, doing an exercise tape or going to the gym. 

Staying focused

Maybe twice a week, in the afternoon, I’ll go to Starbucks or Panera or a place like that and work the rest of the afternoon, for a change of scenery. I’m most productive from mid-morning to mid-afternoon, and that’s why I tend to wrap up work early. If it’s 6 p.m. and I say I’m just going to do this one more thing, it will take me three times as long as if I wait until the next day to just bang it out during my productive time. Also, sometimes, if I have to write something on a tight deadline, I will put my phone in another room, so I’m not disturbed by any calls or texts.

Workload 

In general, I’ll have five or six assignments, but I try to space the deadlines out so that I don’t have to work on all of them simultaneously. I try not to work on more than three articles at a time.

Writer’s block

Because I’ve been doing this for so long, the opening of a piece generally comes to me when I’m starting to write. But if I’m really stuck, or if I’m crafting a complex anecdote for the start of the piece, I will just write at the top, ‘anecdote about Lisa here’ and then jump into what would be the nut graph. And I’ll go back later and craft the anecdote. If I’m having trouble formulating the nut graph — that doesn’t happen very often — it’s because I need to interview more people. 

I feel strongly that we freelancers shouldn’t over-research articles. I don’t start by trying to cover the waterfront interviewing everybody. And so if I’m working on a short piece, and I only interview a couple of people, it’s possible that I may not have enough information and need to interview one more person.

Favorite tool or app

I use TapeACall, and after I tape, I always send it to Otter.ai.  Then I can go to Otter to get the exact quote if I’m going to quote the person. Because I take simultaneous notes while I’m interviewing, I can go to Otter and search for a word [from my notes], find it and listen to the quote. The other tool I love are my Stickies on my Apple computer. I used to have so many Post-it notes all over my desk of story ideas, things I need to work on and things in my life unrelated to work that I need to get done. Now all of that is on different Stickies on my computer. So it has freed up my desk. The other thing I love is my Apple air pods. The quality of them when I’m conducting interviews makes it worth the money.

Tracking story ideas and assignments

For my assignments, I use Stickies. I have a yellow one on the right hand corner of my computer of all of my current assignments and due dates. I can just scroll through in the morning and see which ones I should be working on that day. For pitches, I have an Excel spreadsheet. Those tend to be for ideas I love that the publications I write for regularly didn’t want. I’m going to pitch those to other places, and I need to keep track of that.

Best advice

Years ago, somebody said, ‘Writing is rewriting.’ And I think that is true. I rewrite the drafts of my articles at least three times before I submit them. And I never feel bad if an editor comes back with comments because they usually make the article better.

Avoiding isolation

I interview people on the phone a lot during the day, and that keeps me from feeling isolated. And I keep tabs with several freelancers on Facebook.