Start before the sun

There's a quiet at six in the morning that belongs to whoever shows up first. It isn't productive quiet. It's permissive quiet: nothing has asked for you yet, and nothing has broken. Most of what I like about my days, I can trace back to protecting about forty minutes of it.

The trick isn't getting up early. It's not spending those minutes on anything that has a notification attached. Coffee, a notebook, the window. Everything else can wait for the part of the day that's built for it.