You’re working on the most complex problem in computer science: fixing permissions on a deployment pipeline. It’s been 4 days you started on that simple task already. Your manager explained to you in no uncertain terms that your performance on the subject is well below the expectations she has from a midterm intern. Your colleagues stay as far away as possible from you to avoid getting tainted by your shameful failure. 4 days of sleepless afternoons, seeing that freaking status turning to “build failed” everytime, bringing you to tears. The weather is shit, rain taping on the window of your overpriced basement suite, reflecting the state of your soul. You never felt so alone. Even your partner left you, you loser!

But this time you got it. This time you have a strategy beyond clicking on “retry failed steps” again and again. You finally read the logs, and you have an idea. You think you finely grasped what might be wrong. It’s a long shot: you’re gonna clear the credential cache, get an elevation you’re missing, force a permission sync, reset the service connection to the cluster, then downgrade the stupid auth library you’re using to a version that was hacked 6y ago but still works, setup everything again, then rollback. Your brain is making the connections, you got it, you’re better than that. You’re sorting through 23 different documentation tabs, waiting for the elevation to succeed, summoning all precious focus you got.

A red bubble shows up on IM. Conditioned by years of desperately reading your texts as soon as they arrived to create yourself what passes for a social life, your hand doesn’t even consults the sentient part of your cortex, and just moves to the little icon. click. It’s Mitch, your PM. He’s asking the url for a doc he wrote, and complains that it’s so complex to find doc in this organization.

This is a trap meant to get your focus out. Not this time. You’re better than that. You ignore his message, look at the elevation command, trigger it. Copy the id of the request that you need to preciously keep to finish the elevation to your clipboard.

4 minutes later you get a call request from your manager. You answer.

Hey, Mitch is saying he needs a doc urgently and you’re not answering his IM. Can you get to it?

poof

Where the freak was I?

Credit: monkeyuser.com. notice how much better it conveys my story.

Like everyone, I sometimes struggle to maintain focus. This was particularly true when I was a manager switching context all day long, this is also true as a dev working on three antagonistic projects, including one that’s very consultory in nature, and working with processes that sometimes take hours to complete.

The typical situation is that I start something, switch to something else, get into a meeting, forget the very essence of what I was doing. Turn on autopilot, read all my emails, all my IMs. Then it’s 5PM, I’m exhausted, and I realize I’m at the same stage I was at 8AM, tell myself I should really achieve something that day, and open HN.

It was so bad at the beginning of this year that I seriously started wondering if I had ADHD¹. I started working on something badly documented. As in: there’s no documentation, the people who built that thing are halfway across the world and they don’t even really work for the company anymore. It wasn’t even just interruption, but also procrastination. I felt so frustrated by the situation that I started writing that in my daily notes on Obsidian.

I asked Berna how to turn on super-compression 5000, and she’s not answering again! I tried it with the --yo-compress-shit really-well-like-5000-or-something and it didn’t work. It still spits me that yo is not proper English, be civilized error. What the hell can I do about that.

Mitch called me to ask for that doc again, which I gave him, not without mentioning that little “star” icon in the url bar. And then got back at it.

And boy oh boy did that help! I just re-read what I was doing, and boom! I was back in.

I started listing all the commands I was running, and their results. Writing down my train of thoughts, the things I was doing and what I wanted to do next. And I have been doing that for the past 3-4 months. I feel like I invented something new. It helps me think more clearly, and restore the context so, so much faster when I switch between things. I’m almost looking forward to an interruption to get a chance to marvel again at my genius!

Except that it’s nothing new, right? “Writing helps you organize your thoughts more clearly”: everyone and their grandmother know that! Writing a plan, writing a diary? People keep listing how transformative that’s been for them. I’m not proposing a new framework. I’m just saying - every movie has a scientist recording themselves on one of these shitty little cassette recorders. They might be onto something. Write notes of what you’re doing and what you’re thinking. When you drop the pen and get back at it, read the last bit. That’s it.

I’ve just been too lazy to ever do it. Or not necessarily lazy, but more: I didn’t trust the tool enough to think it was a good use of my time, and instead just mash on the keyboard till it works. After all, I’m writing pages of text, of which I will never read more than a fraction. But that’s not the point. The point is structure, and the point is caching.

I guess that’s kind of it: if you’re having trouble switching between things or getting focused, try writing what you’re doing, and read the last couple sentences when you resume. Maybe it will help you. Maybe it won’t. Or maybe I’m an idiot who needs crutches. But hey, who knows!

notes