I mean, I still work alone. Really — I work alone in my house, often in my bathrobe. When a photographer shows up, I dress up, so I have clothes on. And that's how I've always worked.

And what happens for me is that I make a pot of beans on Sunday. And I also make some greens with chard, whatever I have available. And when I come to cook a meal or even to make myself breakfast, I may warm up some of those beans. I put a little tortilla right on the fire. I fill it up with the beans, maybe a little hot pepper, and I eat it. And that takes me exactly two minutes, three minutes, maybe. But it’s knowing how to cook. Those basic things have been taken away from us.

What we've done all of these years is very simple, is use the little tool, which is ask three whys in a row. Because the first why you always have a good answer for. The second why, it starts getting difficult. By the third why, you don't really know why you're doing what you're doing.

Have more than one idea on the go at any one time. If it’s a choice between writing a book and doing nothing I will always choose the latter. It’s only if I have an idea for two books that I choose one rather than the other. I ­always have to feel that I’m bunking off from something.

I like to break up days and structure them. You have breakfast, work for two hours on a project, check your emails, work on another project for another two hours and then lunch. Your day has to be a measurable process, in order to minimize aimless drifting. Of course, you can have some days on automatic pilot, and there’s nothing wrong with drifting in and of itself. But you can’t do that every day—you’ll never get anywhere.

I find that you’re a completely different person as a maker than you are as a listener. That’s one of the reasons I so often leave the studio to listen to things. A lot of people never leave the studio when they’re making something, so they’re always in that maker mode, screwdriving things in - adding, adding, adding. Because it seems like the right thing to be doing in that room. But it’s when you come out that you start to hear what you like.

My favorite method is stopping everything for a moment. It’s amazing how difficult I find it these days to simply sit quietly.