Keeping a List of Places
For the first two years I found places, enjoyed them, and forgot them. Then on a free afternoon I would stand in the hall unable to think of anywhere to go, and end up in the same cafe.
The list fixed that. It is not complicated and it is the highest return thing on this entire site.
What goes in an entry
Four things, and only four, because anything longer does not get written.
The name and roughly where it is. How long it takes to get there, door to door, which is more useful than distance. When it is quiet, which is the whole point of the entry. And one line on what it is like, written soon enough after that it is accurate.
An example from mine, in full: St Anne churchyard, behind the market. 18 min walk. Empty before 11 and after 2, packed at lunch. Four benches, walls on all sides, big planes, gets last light in winter.
That is enough to decide from six months later, which is the test.
Sort it by time, not by type
The change that made mine actually useful.
I originally grouped by category: gardens, churches, indoor, outdoor. That is how you think when you are collecting places and it is not how you think when you have an afternoon free.
What you actually ask is how long have I got. So the list is now in three sections: under twenty minutes away, under forty, and a whole afternoon. Within each I can see at a glance what is open and what the weather suits.
Record the failures too
Half my list is places that did not work, and it is the half that saves the most time.
The garden with no bench. The reading room that turned out to be full of typing. The churchyard that is locked except on Sundays. The museum room that was quiet until they moved a popular exhibit next door to it.
Without these I re investigate the same disappointments every year or two. With them, a place I have ruled out stays ruled out, and I can see why.
Where to keep it
Mine is a note on my phone, which is not elegant given what I have written elsewhere about phones, and is the only version I have kept up for more than a few months.
A paper notebook was better to write in and never with me when I needed it. A spreadsheet was better structured and I stopped opening it. The note works because adding to it takes twenty seconds while standing in the place I am describing.
Whatever you use, the test is whether you can add an entry without sitting down.
Re checking
Places change and the list goes stale in a way that is not obvious until you have walked forty minutes.
Cafes close. Institutions change their hours. A quiet room gets rediscovered. A garden gets a grant and a visitor centre.
I now put a date on each entry and treat anything older than about two years as unverified. That has caught four or five changes that would otherwise have been wasted trips, and it costs nothing to add.
Not publishing it
I have written about most of the categories on this site and named almost nothing, and that is deliberate.
The best places on my list work because approximately eleven people know about them. Writing about how to find that kind of place seems fine to me. Writing down which specific bench is not, and I would encourage anyone keeping their own list to be similarly unhelpful in public.
How the list changes what you do
The effect I did not anticipate is that having a list makes you use places you would otherwise never return to.
Before the list, my behaviour was to find somewhere good, go back three or four times over a fortnight, and then drift away from it. Everything was driven by whatever was most recent. Places I had loved a year earlier were simply gone from my mental map.
With a list of thirty entries, an ordinary Wednesday afternoon presents a genuine choice rather than a default, and the rotation means each place stays fresh instead of being worn out over a fortnight and abandoned.
How many entries is enough
Mine has about thirty and I use perhaps twelve of them regularly.
Below ten it does not do the job, because the whole point is having an option that fits the time and weather you actually have. Above about forty it becomes something to maintain rather than use, and I stopped adding for a while when it got there.
The useful density is several options in each time bracket, spread across indoor and outdoor, with at least three that work in rain. That last category is the one most people are short of and it is the one that determines whether you go out in November.
Starting one
The obvious mistake is to begin by researching. That produces a list of places you have not been, which is a different and much less useful document.
Start with the places you already go, even if there are only four, and write down when they are quiet. Then add one entry each time you find somewhere. After six months you will have twenty and the six months will have happened anyway.
The one thing I would do differently is to have started recording the failures from the beginning rather than a year in.
