What does ‘difficulty concentrating’ feel like for you? I often find that value words, like ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘difficult’, ‘happy’, ‘sad’, mean different things for me than for most people.
I spend much of my free time working on a game that I intend to sell at some point. The indie game community talks a lot about focusing, overcoming difficulties concentrating, etc. But I’ve never seen someone describe in detail what ‘difficulty concentrating’ or ‘difficulty getting to work’ feels like. I find myself wondering if they are talking about what I think they are talking about. It’s possible that their tips don’t often work because we are thinking about different things.
Akrasia gets talked about a lot here, as well as ways of improving productivity, and I’m really curious what akrasia or difficulty concentrating actually feels like for other people. Taboo the words ‘akrasia’, ‘procrastination’, ‘distraction’ and other similar words, and tell me what it feels like.
Here’s what ‘difficulty getting to work’ typically feels like for me: I look at my list of tasks and I get a strong feeling of despair. Starting work on the list feels like I’m chaining myself to an assembly line in a grey factory in a grey world making grey featureless joyless objects, and I’m going to be there for the rest of eternity. It’s strange because I actually feel like what I’m producing is colorful, beautiful and interesting. I’m not sure if it is related to the length of the list. I thought it was perhaps due to nebulous definition of the task leaving uncertainty as to what the finished task was supposed to look like, but I’ve had the same problems even with well defined tasks.
Here’s what ‘difficulty concentrating’ feels like: Imagine that you’ve got a good sized dog, and you’re trying to make it look at something. You grab its head and hold it down to look at whatever it is, and the dog fights you the whole time. Sometimes this will pass if I start with a simple task and get going. Other times it feels like every line of code I write is a continual struggle to hold the dog’s head in place. Or imagine that you’ve really got to go to the bathroom, and you’re trying to ignore it and just work. There’s a pressure that demands release. It’s almost like there’s a voice in my head (not an actual voice, it’s not schizophrenia) screaming for me to turn off my brain and play a video game or do something else that requires no brain power.
I would estimate that I have difficulty with these feelings at least 30% of the time I try to sit down and work. Sometimes these bother me at my day job, but they show up most frequently when I’m working in the evenings and weekends.
So what does it feel like for you?
I imagine someone will ask about this at some point: I have been diagnosed with Bipolar Type II, I currently take lamotrigine, quetiapine, and bupropion to manage it. I’ve had problems like this at least since my early teens.
That is interesting. Your experience sounds very similar to mine. I find myself wondering what affects the way that concentration difficulties and akrasia feels.