> wake up, smoke, make coffee, smoke, have a quick bite, smoke, get a shower, smoke
This rings absurdly true with me. I realized at some point that a cigarette was a little celebration ritual that I went through after completing anything.
It's also why I'm negative on vaping as a tool for quitting; it doesn't get rid of that ritual part. Snus (someone else also mentioned dipping elsewhere in the thread) does. Entirely quitting the impulse to the ritual took me a good two years, and having the nicotine hit from the snus helped me through it. Quitting the snus was a fairly miserable two weeks.
I'm not denouncing vapes, though, because although I don't think they're good for quitting nicotine addiction, they're good for quitting cigarettes, and that's good enough to lengthen your lifespan by 2-3 years, and the lifespan of your lungs by 10-20 probably. I don't know that we know what the long term effects of inhaling propylene glycol are, but there's no doubt there's a better outlook than cig smoke. I just can't help but recall how gross and unpleasant inhaling what smoke machines produced was when I was in a touring band.
edit: entirely incidentally, I feel that ritual made me more productive. Between cigarettes, I felt like I was supposed to do something before the next cigarette. It was like: finish writing that function, smoke, get to the point where I can run tests, smoke while the tests were running, get to the point where I can run benchmarks, smoke while benchmarks are running, get to the point where I can hand things off - make the call to the person I have to hand it to, smoke.
After quitting, life seems more dreamy, spacey, and unstructured. I think that's a point for vaping, although I think the fact that cigs are discrete units that lower in quality slightly after having been put out is both a factor affecting the ritual, and a quality that vaping does not have.
Quit smoking at least 7 years ago, so this isn't just addict wistfulness.