There’s a very simple trick (originally posted by danarm) for dealing with the most harmful consequence of attention hijacks, namely, the difficulty to return to where your mind was before the hijack occurred:
Writing each step you do on paper, while doing it: +8. This helps me when I can’t concentrate, when I’m distracted. I simply write what I’m doing (the current step, or the next step), on paper. If for a step (which I have already written on paper), I find that I must first do a sub-step, then I write the sub-step. The result is a log of what I’ve done and what I’m doing. The great advantage of this is that if I get distracted, I can return to just where I left off, by just reading the last line or the last few lines I written on paper.
There’s a very simple trick (originally posted by danarm) for dealing with the most harmful consequence of attention hijacks, namely, the difficulty to return to where your mind was before the hijack occurred:
‘Most harmful consequence’ is highly situational here and evidently varies a lot from person to person. When I am returning to the task I have no particular need for a piece of paper to redirect me. The task is right there on the call stack, I’m just not doing it. Perhaps my hijackers are of a different kind.
My stack depth varies depending what I am doing. This is to be expected given that with expertise comes the ability to operate on long term memory more or less as working. My ‘programming’ stack on a project that I have been working on is more or less unlimited.
There’s a very simple trick (originally posted by danarm) for dealing with the most harmful consequence of attention hijacks, namely, the difficulty to return to where your mind was before the hijack occurred:
‘Most harmful consequence’ is highly situational here and evidently varies a lot from person to person. When I am returning to the task I have no particular need for a piece of paper to redirect me. The task is right there on the call stack, I’m just not doing it. Perhaps my hijackers are of a different kind.
I have a limited stack depth.
My stack depth varies depending what I am doing. This is to be expected given that with expertise comes the ability to operate on long term memory more or less as working. My ‘programming’ stack on a project that I have been working on is more or less unlimited.