One fixed hour a day in one fixed small space, alone, no input, no task, no leaving. At the end, one tag for which of the eight thoughts came. Evagrius named them in the fourth century, and his list still fits on a row of buttons.
Before the first hour. The people who invented this practice were unambiguous that it produces a specific unbearable state, at a specific hour, on purpose. Their answer to it was that God was in the room. If that answer is not available to you, the hour can go somewhere worse than boring, particularly if you are already low, and there is nothing on this page to catch you. Start with twenty minutes rather than sixty. If the hour turns into a case against yourself, leave the room; that is the method reaching its limit and not you failing it.
The hour
60:00
Sit in the room. Nothing to read, nothing to make, nowhere to go. If you leave, the hour is over.
Which of the eight came
Evagrius' eight thoughts, in his order. Pick the one that sat with you longest, or none. The page keeps the tag and draws no conclusion from it.
Hours
The honest limit, stated first. The desert was not a retreat. It was a competitive austerity culture with documented deaths from fasting and exposure, self-mutilation, and states that a clinician now would read as psychosis and severe depression, which the tradition named as demonic assault. Its most systematic psychologist, Evagrius, was condemned as a heretic a century and a half after his death, which is why his work survived under other men's names. The cell's central discovery is acedia: that sitting alone in a room produces, at a specific hour, a specific unbearable listlessness. The tradition's answer was stay anyway, God is in it. Remove God and the answer is missing, and this page does not fill the hole with a slogan about boredom being the practice. It keeps the hour and the tag, and leaves the hole open.