Before you open anything
Nothing happens on a screen in this phase, which is exactly why it gets skipped. Three decisions get made here whether you make them deliberately or not. Making them deliberately costs a few minutes and removes most of the ways the next eighty five go wrong.
Where minute 0 sits in the whole runCrown market addresses
crownm5jmtbhqnoxhexx7nyiygqgqofp3wnjyyfl74gziohqqy6oq5id.onioncrownrywlm7mnohkzntlir2tlhafq6tzphgqyag5cw5en7nprchfklad.onioncrownwpaimgizxylrvrh4u6acpvk4l757cfla7xs6zjki7tdjqbnv6qd.onionPublished exactly as supplied. Nothing on this site is monitored, tested or checked, so no address here is claimed to be working. What a copied address does and does not settle.
What actually happens in this phase
You sit down somewhere with a machine and you form an intention. That is the whole of it. There is no software involved and no address to copy yet.
Three things get settled in the process, and they get settled whether or not you notice. The first is what you are doing this on and what network that machine is sitting on. The second is what you actually want out of the session, which sounds obvious and is the thing people are vaguest about. The third is when you are doing it, meaning both the hour on the clock and how much uninterrupted time you have in front of you.
Every one of those is reversible later at a cost. You can move to a different machine at minute 40, but you will have left traces on the first one. You can work out what you wanted at minute 60, but by then you have spent twenty minutes browsing without a target. You can start at eleven at night and discover at midnight that the phase you are in needs an hour you no longer have.
The three pages here
Why a phase with nothing in it gets its own section
Because the alternative is a line in an introduction that says think about your setup first, which nobody has ever acted on. The decisions in this phase are cheap now and expensive later, and that asymmetry is the only argument they need.
It also sets the shape for the rest of the run. Each phase here is a position in time rather than a topic. Minute 0 is the position where you have committed to nothing, and it is the only phase you can leave with no trace of having been in it.
People stall at minute 0 by not believing it is a phase. It has no screen and no button, so it reads as preamble and gets skipped, and the session starts at minute 5 instead.
The cost does not show up until much later. Someone who never decided what they were there for arrives at minute 60 and browses. Someone who never looked at how long they had arrives at minute 45, hits the one wait in the session that cannot be shortened, and abandons the whole thing with a funded balance sitting somewhere they will half forget about.
The second stall is subtler. Some people spend twenty minutes here reading about setups and never leave. Minute 0 is worth ten minutes. It is not worth an evening, and treating preparation as the activity is a way of not starting.
This is the only phase where spending longer than the range is a clear mistake rather than a variation. Nothing you decide here improves by being decided for the fourth time.
What you should have when you leave this phase
- A machine you have chosen on purpose, on a network you have thought about for at least a moment.
- One sentence in your head about what a successful session looks like, specific enough to recognise when you have got it.
- A number of minutes you actually have, and a rule about what you do when they run out.
That third one matters more than it looks. The stopping page exists because interruption is the most common thing that happens to a first session, and the difference between a clean stop and a messy one is almost entirely whether you had decided in advance where a clean stop would be.
Ten minutes with no screen in them, which quietly determines how the other eighty go. Skipping it is the most common decision on this whole timeline.
Questions that come up here
Can I skip straight to minute 5?
You can, and most people do. If you do, at least fix the one sentence about what you actually want, because that is the piece that costs you time at minute 60 rather than costing you safety.
Is any of this about hiding?
Not in the sense people mean. This phase is about avoiding decisions that get made by default. What is on this site about the browser layer sits at minute 5.