You've heard it a million times by now. You need to start meditating. Maybe you've tried like I have, but perhaps it just won't stick. Maybe you can't sit still for longer than five minutes, or maybe the whole thing feels a bit too hard. But for Brian Koppleman, the showrunner of hit TV show Billions, meditation and his routines are critical. So what are Brian's daily routines and how do they help his wandering mind stay focused on the
task at hand. My name is doctor amanthe Imber. I'm an organizational psychologist and the founder of behavioral science consultancy Inventium. And this is how I work a show about how to help you do your best work. On today is my Favorite Tip episode, we go back to an interview from the past and I pick out my favorite tip from that interview. In today's show, I speak with Brian Koppleman and we start by talking about his morning pages routine.
I do it exactly as Julia Cameron describes. The only tweak, sorry, the only tweak is I meditate first. And I asked Julia when she was on my podcast, and she'd prefer if I did the pages first. And then meditated. But so I do meditate first. But then the next thing I do in my day is I open a journal and I write three Longhand pages, and I just do not stop my pen from moving. I don't race through it, but I'm I'm keeping my so I take a breath and I'm in it. I'm aware of what I'm doing,
but I am just allowing myself to write. Any thought that comes down, I will not stop moving the pen, and I don't read it over. You know, if an idea come up during it that I think is useful for something, some creative project or something, I'll immediately transfer it. But then I do not go back to those pages, as she says, don't go back for five years, or maybe never go back. And it is a way to get your subconscious going. It kind of I think of it as tipping my subconscious out onto the page. It
also gets rid of the detritus. Man, it's like the I think it's like the mental equivalent of drinking the water first thing in the morning and rehydrating. I somehow just feel better having done it. So that and meditation and also walks, like walking helps, exercising helps all that stuff. That just gets rid of the wanderlust or whatever it is that keeps me from doing the work. Books sometimes, I mean sometimes I'm picking up the guitar and noodling
around and putting on music and reading a book. I mean, you know, straightening up there. Look, No, I don't want to paint a picture that's impossible to attain. Like, it's hard to get yourself to do the work when you're someone with ADHD and your job is to produce pages and television. It's like a hard for me. You know, it's not hard work compared to like real backbreaking work that a lot of people do, But for me, that stuff's hard. But I've gotten better and better at it
and it's something I continue to work at. And I think also having a partner where I have to deliver for him helps because Dave can't hand in the script until my part's done right, so I can't be the person that's making our team suffer. And like when I wrote the one movie that I wrote alone that we made, Solitary Man with Michael Douglas, I wrote that by myself, and it was a much harder process it was before
I meditated. That was twenty two thousand and nine. I think that we made that movie, and I started meditating in twenty eleven.
So.
Maybe that would have helped. But that took me years to write that movie, and partially partially, I think because it wasn't like, well, Dave's going to have his pages one Sunday, so we agreed on that, so I have to get mine one Sunday too.
If you want to hear more about Brian's creative process, check out my full interview with him via the link in the show notes. If you're looking for more tips to improve the way that you work, I write a short fortnightly newsletter that contains three cool things that I've discovered that helped me work better, ranging from software and gadgets that I'm loving through to interesting research findings. You can sign up for that at Howiwork dot com. That's
how I Work dot co. How I Work is produced by Inventing with production support from Dead Set Studios, and thank you to Matt Nimba, who does the audio mix for every episode and makes everything sound so much better than it would have otherwise. See you next time.