So I read and wrote this morning and then I got a phone call and then it was all gone, the magic of the morning. This is how it goes though, this is why you need (or I need) to be maniacal about protecting those morning hours. From waking until well after lunch, no internet should be touched / accessed. But I got sucked in. (Thankfully it was after lunch.) Suddenly, a few dozens messages, requests from this person or that person, bills to pay, things to order, plans to confirm or update, and on and on and on, the whole world tumbling forth from the tiny pocket machine of distraction and dopamine. It feels gooooooood, it feels easy to perform these tasks, especially easy in the face of writing the book, because the book is unknown and the tasks within the book are a bit fuzzy and scary and vulnerable and the “deliverables” not to be delivered until … who knows when, if ever. Yet the little phone messages have finite responses, concrete goals, clear deadlines. There is no vulnerability in paying a bill. (At least not the same kind as in writing a book.) In this way, they seduce: The tasks, all the mundane tasks. Which is why you need to be vigilant. Why I need to be vigilant. Have to perform the morning act of pretending none of them exist, that a world of information isn’t lurking on the other side of a black mirror that sometimes glows in the corner of my house.

Which is just a way of saying: Don’t feel bad if you have trouble getting the real work done. The distractions of contemporary life are irrepressible.

— Craig Mod, The buzzards of the net, Zero Milestone, 2026