90-minute focus session for language practice with rain on a window, before something difficult

1 Before you start

• Put your phone in another room, or in a drawer you cannot reach without standing up.
• Plan to leave the last two minutes for writing down where to pick up next time.
• Make sure your chair is at a height where your feet are flat on the floor.
• Accept that the first five minutes will feel like wading. Wading counts.
• Decide now what you will do when the timer ends. Otherwise the decision will eat the first five minutes.

2 While the timer runs

• If nothing is working, write badly on purpose for two minutes.
• If the task suddenly feels impossible, make it smaller rather than stopping. One paragraph. One function. One row.
• If your attention keeps sliding, shorten the next block rather than abandoning this one.
• When you catch yourself re-reading the same sentence, stop and write down what you were looking for.

3 When it ends

• Write down the question you could not answer, so it has somewhere to live.
• Roll your shoulders and your neck before the next block.
• Note what you actually got done, not what you meant to get done.

4What to put on

rain on a window — Steady rain is broadband noise with a slow natural rhythm. It masks speech and keyboard clatter without being interesting enough to listen to.