Before I worked for Ars, I had a pretty traditional office job. As part of my daily routine, I got up at 6:30 am, took a shower, made breakfast, and sat down in front of the computer to eat and respond to e-mail before hopping in the car to sit in traffic. It's the "sat down in front of the computer" part that used to take some of my friends by surprise (who responded to personal e-mail before 7 am five years ago?), but that behavior seems to be increasing, with more and more people checking e-mails, text messages, and news online before their first cup of coffee.

The New York Times recently highlighted the dramatic change in many families' mornings, noting that kids are hopping on Facebook while Mom and Dad are checking up on e-mail and Twitter the minute they wake up.

"Things that I thought were unacceptable a few years ago are now commonplace in my house,” one mother, Dorsey Gude, told the Times, "like all four of us starting the day on four computers in four separate rooms." One father said that he sends his son text messages to wake him up in the morning.

These days, being hyperconnected means that everyone in the family is checking their own gadgets for updates the moment they wake up, and they even use those devices to communicate with one another before seeing each other in person. Most firms that analyze Web traffic note that things slow down overnight but spike pretty high first thing in the morning—especially for websites that are consumer or socially oriented. Text messages in the morning are even up—according to Verizon, texts sent between 7 am and 10 am rose 50 percent year-over-year.

For those of us at Ars, things are even worse now than they were in our pre-Ars lives. If we're not already up at 3:00am checking our work e-mail, it's the first thing most of us do the minute we roll out of bed. The days of attempting to shower before getting online are almost long gone—after work is now the preferred shower time—and it's a pretty common occurrence for most of the staff to be online and working for some time before remembering to wander over to the kitchen to grab breakfast.

When I asked Ars creative guru Aurich Lawson whether he usually checked in online before breakfast, he said, "Haven't eaten yet. Just a glass of water." Senior editor Nate Anderson wouldn't even acknowledge that what he ate on a daily basis could be called "breakfast" at all. "As I'm working, I eat... things," he said.

Ars contributor Chris Foresman tried to pass off his morning habits as not-insane by noting that he doesn't get online before his morning run. When pressed, however, he acknowledged that he occasionally glances through e-mail "while stretching" before a run. "But I try to avoid that since I tend to get sucked in," he said.

Not everyone likes the pace and connectedness of this sort of life, including some of those who practice it. Novelist Mark Helprin did a wonderful job summing up the feel of modern life in his otherwise execrable new tome on copyright, writing:

"The world flows at increasingly faster and faster speeds. You must match them. When you were a child, it was not quite that way... You love the pace, the giddy, continual acceleration. Though what is new may not be beautiful, it is marvelously compelling. Your life is lived with the kind of excitement that your forebears knew only in battle, and with an ease of which they could only dream...

"But you can't go back, you can't fall behind, you can't pass up an opportunity, and if you don't respond quickly at all times, someone else will beat you to it, even if you have no idea what it is."