The Thing It Landed OnChapter 8 of 145 min
Thirty seconds, before you answer
The email arrives at twenty to five.
It is four lines long and perfectly polite and there is one clause in the middle of it that goes in. You know the feeling: a small drop, somewhere under the breastbone, and a kind of brightening of the attention.
And a reply begins assembling itself immediately. It is already quite good. It is reasonable in tone, it concedes one small thing in order to win the larger one, and by ten to five you will have sent it, and at nine that evening you will be rewriting it in your head anyway.
This chapter is about the thirty seconds you have before that happens, and what to put in them.
The whole practice
Three steps. It takes about as long as the pause between somebody finishing a sentence and you starting yours.
One. Let it land. Do not skip this and do not manage it, and do not — this is the one everybody does — put something over it and call the quiet that follows composure. Something arrived. Notice that it arrived, and where in your body you felt it, which for most people is the chest or the stomach and is the same place every time.
Two. Name what it hit. The question from chapter two, and you have four seconds. That I'm careless. That I'm not needed. That somebody else got there first. One short phrase. If it is the right one you will not want to say it.
Three. Then answer. However you were going to.
That is all of it. There is no fourth step.
What it is not, which is most of what people expect
It is not calming down. You are not being asked to feel differently about the email, and if you wait to feel better before replying you will wait a long time and get nothing but a later reply.
It is not refraining. You may send exactly the message you were going to send. You may be sharp. Some emails deserve sharp. The practice has no opinion about your reply.
It is not a better answer. It is not even, particularly, a slower one. Thirty seconds will not be visible to anybody else, which is the point — a practice that other people can see is a position within about a fortnight.
So what does it do, if it changes neither your feeling nor your words?
It puts one thing between you and the spot. For a few seconds you were not entirely standing on being thought careless; you were the thing looking at it. That is a very small gap and it is the only one on offer, and everything the last chapter pointed at is on the other side of it.
You do not have to do anything with the gap. It does its own work and it does it slowly.
You will forget, for months
I would rather say this now than have you discover it and conclude that you cannot do this.
For a long time you will not remember in the thirty seconds. You will remember at nine o'clock that evening, rewriting the reply in your head, and a small voice will say oh — I was supposed to ask what it landed on.
That counts. It is not a failed attempt at the practice; it is the practice, arriving late, which is the only way it arrives for anybody at first.
Then one day you will catch it half an hour afterwards instead of five hours. Then in the car on the way home. Then, eventually and without you doing anything to make it happen, in the second and a half before you start typing.
Nobody gets to the second and a half by trying harder at the second and a half. You get there by noticing afterwards, several hundred times, without annoyance.
Why thirty seconds and not twenty minutes
Because the machine does not run at seven in the morning on a cushion. It runs at twenty to five, in an email, in a kitchen, in a sentence somebody says in a corridor on the way to somewhere else.
A practice that needs a quiet room meets the problem only in recollection. And more practically: anything that requires setting aside time will be abandoned by about Thursday of the second week, and then you will have a sense of having failed at something, which is one more place to stand and a particularly tiring one.
This costs nothing, needs no equipment, requires no belief, and can be done badly. Doing it badly is most of it.
This week
Pick one. Not every occasion — one. The email, or a particular person, or the half hour after work when things tend to land.
When it goes in, do the three steps. Land. Name. Answer.
Land, not drop it. The first step is the one that sounds like doing nothing and is the whole of it: the thing arrived, and you are not going to tidy it away before you have looked at where it arrived.
And write nothing down. No log, no tracking, no count of how many you caught. The moment this becomes a thing you are doing well or badly at, it has been swallowed, and you will be defending your practice, which is the joke the whole book has been walking towards.
If you get three in a week, that is a good week. If you get none in the thirty seconds and four at nine in the evening, that is also a good week and is the more usual one.
One part of the day has none of this in it yet: the ten or fifteen minutes after waking, before you remember who you are supposed to be. Almost everybody has it and almost nobody uses it.