I stopped multitasking first thing in the day. At 7:18 a.m., I make coffee, flip my phone to airplane mode, and set a $12 kitchen timer for 25:00. One Chrome tab, one doc, one line on a yellow legal pad. The funny part: if I allow a single “quick email,” I end up reorganizing labels for 12 minutes and the coffee’s already lukewarm. The real culprit wasn’t Slack pings — it was calendar invites popping open at 8:00, so I shifted all notifications to batch at 8:45. I also killed the “prep ritual” where I color-code and never start; now I write an ugly first draft with just 2–3 bullets. Bottom line: one clean 25-minute block before 8:30 beats 90 fuzzy minutes later. The small scene that sold me was finishing a 640-word memo before the house woke up at 7:52.
I use an iPhone Focus from 7-9 that silences Calendar and Mail; only my signer hotline can break through. I also pulled Mail off the dock so the ‘quick check’ is just annoying enough to skip.
I spun up a separate Mac user called ‘Morning’ with no Mail or Calendar set up and only Chrome plus my template folder; I log into that from 7-9 so there’s nothing to “quick check.” I also park a sticky note on the trackpad that says ‘one tab’ to keep me honest.