John Balfe is a freelance sports journalist specialising in MMA and American football. Here, he tells us about his regular commute from his home in Rathmines to coffee shops on Camden Street and Aungier Street.
As a freelancer you don't have an office to go to every day. What is your routine like?
I work on a news beat for the most part, so usually one day day is entirely encapsulated within itself. The good part of my job is that every day when I wake up to start work is usually a clean slate and I never have to finish something from the previous day.
I live in Rathmines so I'm close enough to 'coffee central' in Dublin. I've had to become intimately acquainted with various coffee houses in the area - we're talking first name basis. So as long as I buy a coffee or two I can stop there for four or five hours at a time.
Where do you normally go?
I'm getting further and further away from my house. One of the benefits of being a freelancer is that you can put yourself in places you want to be in, so it's easy to make a change. I've worked in offices both big and small and once you're there you're there - it's the same faces and the same routine.
Generally, Camden Street and Aungier Street is where I tend to go, though given the nature of my job I do a lot of interviews and the odd meeting here and there, so my week stretches out day by day. Tomorrow I very well be in Lucan or I might very well be asked to go to Belfast to cover a fighter. You never really know.
Say you're going to a café on Aungier Street, how would you get there?
I'd walk down - that's one of the benefits of living so centrally.
How do you pass the time?
I'm one of those people who, if I'm outdoors and not with somebody, I almost invariably have headphones in my ears. I listen to a lot of podcasts but they tend to be sports podcasts and I have to pay particular attention to them because they're directly related to what I'm working on.
A podcast for me isn't necessarily an idle, 'walking into town' type of thing where you let it breeze through your ears. Oftentimes there are interviews I have to cover or report on, so more often than not I sit at my desk at home and watch them.
For walking or travelling, I generally let Spotify dictate what they think I like with the Daily Mix. They operate at about a 50% clip, usually - I use the skip button liberally.
What’s the best commute you’ve ever had?
About 10 years ago I managed an internet café, and the distance from my house to the shop was the duration of Bohemian Rhapsody. That was quite a nice one! I do have some sort of strange work association with it now though.
And the worst?
The worst was when I was living near Killiney and working at Entertainment.ie on Great Strand Street in town, just across the Liffey. That required a bus to Dun Laoghaire and then another bus, and it was about an hour-and-a-half each way.
That's three hours of your day - it's only when you don't have to do it that you realise that it's a waste of time and you get so much more time to yourself.
