He stared at the blinking cursor on the blank page before him.
It was not Microsoft Word, rather an empty Google Doc in the browser. He didn’t have Microsoft Word, nor any of the Microsoft Office staples. Well, he had the full Office suite on his work laptop, but none of the apps on his personal one. He technically could open up the work laptop resting in his bag on the floor and have perfectly good access to Microsoft Word, but then that familiar, shackled feeling of using the work laptop, of being stuck at work, would make this kind of endeavor even more impossible.
The cursor blinked, and blinked and blinked.
“What’s the typical blinking rate of a cursor?” he wondered. This, of course, required further—
He got up from his desk and shuffled into the kitchen. It was time to make some coffee. He could have had coffee earlier, but that would have broken the 90-minute rule. He never broke the 90-minute rule, at least not since learning about it from the highly popular neuroscientist slash quintessential podcast bro, Andrew Huberman. As Huberman posits, the human body’s cortisol levels are highest right after you wake up in the morning. If you consume caffeine too soon after waking, you’ll disrupt the natural cortisol peak and stabilization mechanism that your body so deftly coordinates, resulting in a less effective caffeine boost and the classic afternoon crash. But if you can delay gratification and let your body sort out its work for that first hour and a half, you can surf a smooth caffeine wave throughout the day.
“Oh yeah, cursor blinking rate,” he thought as he returned to his desk and plopped the steaming mug down next to his keyboard. He fired off a prompt to ChatGPT, which volleyed a response back faster than he could finish his sip of joe. The blinking pace of a cursor follows a 500 millisecond cadence. The cursor is visible for 500 milliseconds, then invisible for another 500 milliseconds, making for a cycle of one complete cursor blink per second. Too slow a blink might be missed, while too fast could be fatiguing. Human-computer interaction research on optimal blinking rates that began in the 1980s ultimately led to the one blink per second pace as the universal user interface standard.
The cursor was still blinking, the page still blank.
Soon it was time for him to shower, eat breakfast and head to work. A typical day without too much hassle ensued. His commute home was coupled with the latest Huberman podcast, an intricate foray into the science and research of cannabis consumption. He was greeted by a big, adorable hug from his son when he got home, and a home cooked meal from his loving wife. Not much else could have occurred to make this a better day for him.
The next morning, he sat back down at his desk to face the blank page.
“This time will be different,” he thought.