I have kept an hour at the start of the day for about thirty years. Not for exercise, not for correspondence, and emphatically not for email. For thinking, with a notebook, about things that are not urgent.
It is the single practice I would recommend without qualification, and the one people abandon fastest, because it produces nothing on the day you do it.
What it is for
Most working days are spent responding. The quiet hour is the only part of mine that is not. Almost every decision I am glad about — leaving a secure post, starting the firm, writing the first book — arrived in that hour, usually after several weeks of it seeming like a waste of time.
The waste is the point. Ideas need a period of apparent uselessness before they are worth anything, and a diary with no slack in it kills them at that stage every time.
How to keep it
Put it before the day can claim it. Defend it badly rather than not at all — forty minutes, three times a week, is not failure. And keep the notebook, because the hour is worth far more in the second year than the first, once you can read back what you were wrong about.
