A 90-minute block for studying, with plain quiet, when you are somewhere noisy

1 Before you start

• Get water now, so you do not have to get up in fifteen minutes.
• Decide what you will do if you get stuck: write the problem out, then move on.
• Make sure your chair is at a height where your feet are flat on the floor.
• Decide that today's session does not have to be good. It has to happen.
• Dim the screen slightly. Bright screens make long sessions harder than they need to be.

2 While the timer runs

• If the task suddenly feels impossible, make it smaller rather than stopping. One paragraph. One function. One row.
• If you feel restless, change your posture rather than your task.
• If you are stuck, say the problem out loud. It changes what you can see.
• If nothing is working, write badly on purpose for two minutes.

3 When it ends

• Leave the file open if you are coming back. Closing it makes restarting harder.
• Write down the question you could not answer, so it has somewhere to live.
• Note what you actually got done, not what you meant to get done.

4What to put on

plain quiet — No added sound at all. If you have a quiet room, that is usually better than any recording of one.