"I need eight hours to get maybe 20 minutes of work done."

The life of a writer — in this case, David Eggers — is not easy:

... I used to write in the middle of the night. I suppose I was surprised by the sedentary nature of writing: like, wow, most of this is sitting down and typing! So I used to add a bit of adventure by starting at midnight and working until five. That was excitement! But now I have two kids... So it's bankers hours for me.

... Writing is a deep-sea dive. You need hours just to get into it: down, down, down. If you're called back to the surface every couple of minutes by an email, you can't ever get back down. I have a great friend who became a Twitterer and he says he hasn't written anything for a year....

Eggers denies himself internet access. That's what I would do if I really wanted to write a book. Which I guess I don't. I mean, I'm at the level where I (mostly) cut myself off from Twitter because I want to have a blog. What if I cut myself off from the internet for — let's say — the 4 months of summer break? The deep-sea dive. It would probably take me all 4 months just to get into into it.

Oddly, Eggers is motivated by his sense of how short life is. All that time getting going and thinking about how short life is? Oh, the pain. Blogging, by contrast, is the continual relief from that pain.