I drink two cups of chai a day. Morning, and around four. This has been stable for years, which for me is unusual.

I've realised they're doing completely different jobs.

The morning one

The morning cup is chemistry. I'm not awake, I'd like to be awake, this helps. If you replaced it with a tablet that had the same effect I would be mildly sad but I'd adapt.

The four o'clock one

The afternoon one has almost nothing to do with the drink.

It's the only point in my working day with a hard edge on it. I stand up, I leave the desk, I walk to the stall, I wait, I stand there, I walk back. Twelve minutes, maybe fifteen. For that whole time I cannot do any work, because I am holding a very hot glass with no free hands.

That constraint is the entire value. I have tried to replicate the break without the walk and it does not work, because without the physical impossibility of typing I simply go back to typing.

What happens in those twelve minutes

A surprising amount of my actual thinking.

Not the focused kind — the other kind, where a thing you were stuck on at two o'clock resolves itself while you're looking at traffic. I've stopped treating that as a coincidence. The stuck feeling is usually a sign of being too close to something, and you cannot get further away from a problem while still staring at it.

I used to think of the walk as the cost of the chai. It's the other way round. The chai is the excuse for the walk, and the excuse is necessary, because "go and do nothing for twelve minutes" is a thing I will not do without a cover story.

The part I'm slightly embarrassed by

I need an object to justify a break. A grown adult cannot simply stand outside for ten minutes; a grown adult holding a beverage is doing something socially legible.

I've decided not to fight this. If a small prop is what it costs to get the thinking, that's cheap.