Hunter Harris On To-Do Lists & Charlie Puth

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In 7 Hours With, we explore the routines of leading professionals in their space to learn the when, why, where and how they work. In each diary, we will look at what they’re doing at seven different check-ins throughout their day. Hunter Harris is a staff writer at Vulture and New York Magazine, where she writes about entertainment and culture, focusing mostly on movies and music.

7:30 AM

I naturally wake up around 7:30 AM on weekdays, but I set an alarm for 8:15 just in case. I’m online and working from home by 8:30, so my first instinct is to reach for my phone. (I check my email, check Twitter, and then open Instagram to see if any of my crushes have looked at my story — so far Timothee Chalamet has not obliged.) At 8:30 I say good morning to my coworkers in Slack, and we start dropping links of stories or interviews we found important or funny or weird — this is very casual pitching.

I am incredibly cranky if I don’t start the day with a little something on my stomach — like, huge attitude. I’ll start the day with an English muffin and some juice, or light leftovers. I take the J train to Canal to get to work, and sometimes pick up a coffee on the way in.

11 AM

The time I get into the office every day really varies. Some days I like to be in the office by 11, some days I have a 10 am movie screening, some days I get so bogged down that I don’t get to the office until 2 PM. (I usually have a 3 PM pitch meeting.) When I get to my desk, I see what mail has been dropped off — usually books that I’ve never heard of and have no intention of reading. What am I gonna do with some random 20-something’s memoir? I have my own group texts.

I’m a staff writer at Vulture/New York Magazine, meaning I write for Vulture.com, and for the Culture Pages in the magazine. I write about entertainment and culture, focusing mostly on movies and music. I just profiled the pop star Charlie Puth and Euphoria’s Alexa Demie, but for the site I can go long and weird on stuff that takes up space in my brain: Why does every teen in every movie always want to go to Yale? Approximately how gigantic is Adam Driver? I write a bigger feature for the mag once a month, write for the site a couple times a week, and also cover movie-related parties and events in the city.

On a day-to-day basis, my schedule is largely the same. I sit down at my computer and spend too much time scrolling through Twitter, send a couple messages back and forth with my editors about the status of assignments, or crazy ideas I just had, and eventually open up a Google Doc and start writing. If I have an interview in the afternoon, I’ll spend the morning finishing prep.

If you want to imagine what my desk looks like, just imagine Diane Keaton sitting at her desk in Something’s Gotta Give except instead of Diane Keaton it’s me and instead of a Nancy Meyers interior it’s a drab office. The white turtleneck is the same, though.

2 PM

My worst habit is that I forget to eat lunch a lot. I’ll have something around 1 or 2, usually from some place near my office. My favorite luxury is ordering a grilled cheese sandwich from Sadelle’s, one of my favorite restaurants in the city. It sounds lame but it’s a bagel turned inside out with cheese in the middle. Delicious. Gives me a dairy zit every time.

3 PM

Most of my meetings are just pitch meetings, and they’re usually Mondays and Tuesdays at 3 pm. Interviews — both in person and over the phone — are the things I have to schedule my day around, and usually they’re at the most inconvenient times. I never block off my calendar totally, but if I need to work on a big feature or am offsite for a longer interview, I really like putting an away message in Slack.

But in terms of getting actual work done during the day, I’m big on to-do lists. I make them every day, in the same little notebook. I have a whole system worked out: I write down meetings, interviews, assignments, even tasks like calling my hair braider or texting someone back. I keep a week of to do lists all on the same page so I can track my progress day-to-day and see the stuff I’m putting off.

4 PM

In the afternoon, I often have interviews. A recent favorite was the Charlie Puth piece — it was a lot of fun, because I think he is genuinely fascinating and I love his music.

I also will edit or write other articles in the works. I don’t watch a ton of TV, but I am really into Succession, and I had a weekly column of power rankings, evaluating who’s up and who’s down after every episode, and I was really proud of that. It took forever every week — I usually watched every episode twice and sometimes even three times — but I was really happy with how it turned out.

Another example is that the movie Hustlers was based on a New York Magazine article, so I went to a day spa with the real woman the Constance Wu character was based on. I also wrote a lot of fun, random stuff out of the Toronto International Film Festival, my first time covering that fest. I also wrote this thing about how weird it is that people in movies keep having relations with their brothers — I got a lot of insane emails in response to that one. Stunningly some people … disagreed??

6 PM

I leave the office between 6 and 6:30 most days. TV people get screeners; movie people have to show up to screenings for bigger movies, and those usually happen at 6 or 7 pm so I’ll leave the office around 5 to grab a bite before. If I’m not seeing something, I’m either meeting a friend for dinner in Chinatown or Nolita after work, or getting drinks with a colleague. I love to call my parents or my favorite aunt on the walk to/from the subway or to/from meeting up with someone, because I feel like it maximizes that time. Also it was always my childhood fantasy to be one of the women who walks around New York City talking on the phone, like Carrie Bradshaw or something.

11 PM

I’m getting better about working at night — sometimes I’ll do some work when I get home, just to make sure I’m prepared for the next day. I do a lot of interview prep at home at night, or watching a screener. IF I cook — and that’s a big IF, because most weekdays I’m too hungry and impatient to go through the whole thing — it’s usually a light pasta. Most of the time I’m ordering something on Caviar or Seamless or picking up something on the way home.

I try to be in bed by 11. Sometimes I stay up late watching something (or FaceTiming one of my friends or just generally being dramatic on the internet), but I’m definitely asleep by 12:30 and getting ready to do it all over again.