The following excerpt is from Austin Kleon’s Keep Going, a book that is quickly turning into an absolute treasure.

“Creativity is about connection – you must be connected to others in order to be inspired to share your own work – but it is also about disconnection. You must retreat from the world long enough to think, practice your art, and bring forth something worth sharing with others. You must play a little hide-and-seek in order to produce something worth being found.

Silence and solitude are crucial.”

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In my experience, the potency of the internet to annihilate a creative bubble is dangerously great. It seeps in like a virus, seeking to wreck havoc amongst a delicate, creative space. To create something meaningful, disconnection with the world is just as important as connection with the world.

In particular, I’ve found that how I spend the first hour of your day is a pretty good indicator of how the rest of the day will go. If I scroll Facebook as soon as I wake up, my brain becomes ‘primed’ to seek instant gratification activities for the rest of the day. On these days, almost no productive work – and certainly no creative work – gets done at all. The saddest part of it is, there is almost no benefit to checking my devices when upon waking. As Austin puts it,

“There’s almost nothing in the news that any of us need to read in the first hour of the day. When you reach for your phone or your laptop upon waking, you’re immediately inviting anxiety and chaos into your life. You’re also bidding adieu to some of the most potentially fertile moments in the life of a creative person.”

And so the solution to a creative space is to frantically defend your inputs. To find a “bliss station”: a time or place where you can just be alone with yourself and to free yourself from any distractions. For me, that’s the first 30 minutes of the day. I get up, make my bed, drink some water, pee and sit down to journal my morning pages (drinking tea is optional). Devices are absolutely prohibited. This time is defended obsessively, like how I would treat an exam or a job interview. It sounds neurotic but if this bliss station is defended sufficiently, I consistently emerge a better person – both to myself with my work, and to others with being more present.

You can be woke without waking up to the news.

Austin Kleon, Keep Going