An interruption costs more than the minutes it takes. It costs the shape of the thought you were holding, which does not come back in the same form, and occassionally Spelling “occassionally” may be misspelled occasionally occasional Ignore Remember does not come back at all.

So I have made the room boring. There is nothing on these walls. The window faces a brick wall two metres away, which sounds like a punishment and is in fact a gift, because there is nothing out there to look at and so I look at the page.

People assume the point is discipline. It is not. The point is to make the right thing the easiest thing, so that discipline is never called upon, because discipline is a small and unreliable fuel and it runs out at around eleven in the morning.

There is a thing that happens when you let the morning break in half. The second half is never the first half continued. It is a new morning, shorter, with the good hour already spent, and you will spend it trying to remember what you were about to say.

I keep a card by the door with one line on it, in my own handwriting, so that I cannot pretend somebody else set the rule: nothing before the work. Not the post, not the news, not the small useful errand that would only take a minute.