The third coffee

The first two coffees are maintenance — they just get me to baseline. The third one, somewhere mid-afternoon, is the only one I actually taste, and it's the one that decides whether the day's real work happens or quietly doesn't.

I've learned to treat that third cup as a small ceremony rather than a task: leave the desk, no phone, ten minutes. It's less about the coffee than about drawing a line between the morning's busywork and the afternoon's one thing that matters.