Why the day goes dry

Nobody decides to spend the day dry. The day goes dry because of five things that are each reasonable, and I want to give them their due before I take them apart, because they're not silly and a book that treats them as silly won't help you.

The first is that water is dull. Coffee has a smell and a ritual and a warm cup and, if you're honest, a lift. Tea has most of that. Water has none of it. Nobody's ever looked forward to a glass of water at their desk the way they look forward to the ten o'clock coffee. The wanting isn't there, so the drinking isn't.

The second is that thirst is quiet. Hunger arrives and interrupts. It growls, it makes you irritable, it makes the sandwich shop visible from across the road. Thirst mostly doesn't do that. It sits at a low level and waits to be noticed, and if you're busy, it isn't. Chapter 3 is about this, and there's a study that measured it.

The third is that coffee is what's there. The kettle's in the kitchen, the machine's on the corridor, the person going to the café asks what you want, and the answer is coffee. Water isn't offered. You'd have to get it yourself, from a tap you've stopped seeing, in a glass you'd have to find.

The fourth is that the flat hour doesn't say what it is. If the heaviness at three came with a label, you'd act on the label. It doesn't. It feels like tiredness, or a sugar dip, or the meeting you've just sat through, and the reach that follows is the reach for whatever fixes tiredness, which is the coffee and the biscuit.

The fifth is the loo. If you drink more, you'll go more, and going more is a nuisance, in meetings, on the train, in the night. This is the objection people are least likely to say out loud and most likely to be acting on, and chapter 10 takes it seriously.

Each of those is a real reason, and a solution that ignores them, drink two litres a day, carry a bottle everywhere, will fail on the first busy Tuesday. The one in this book doesn't ask you to want water, to hear thirst better, or to stop drinking coffee. It attaches the water to things you already do.