I was in need of some distraction - too much straight and narrow thinking can be bad for your health - so I allowed myself to click from link to link. And one of those clicks led me to a Linda Stone article from a few months back that I hadn't seen before. Stone wrote:

When I get "stuck" or when I reach a natural break point on a piece of work, the menu of potential distracters includes everything from email and telephone calls to getting food, socializing and more.

By this stage in my hypertextualized existence I should perhaps expect, maybe even plan out, a distraction of this sort. But for some reason, there still seems to be a disconnect between the way I understand the need for noise and the way I actually use it. So although the larger truth may be that I sought out Stone's article, what I felt at the time was that I'd actually chanced upon it.