Comment by pdimitar

Oh yes, they are very closely linked!

To be even more precise, regaining focus unlocks many other skills, prioritizing the physical health included. I am still working my way towards that.

Yes, that would be the ideal setup indeed, agreed.

But ruined health made me laser-focus on my wife and my work and I ignored many other things. Much to my shame, I don't even have a home media center and I have all the skills to make it happen and have it be much better than f.ex. Netflix or Disney+ UI.

It's all about carefully picking my battles, at least in this stage of life. Lack of focus and trying to be everywhere led to me making dozens, if not hundreds, of easily avoidable mistakes. I am hellbent on never allowing that again.

For me personally, it's certainly been an iterative process. I like to think of focus as any other habit that I want to form, so from that:

- Schedule time for it

- Understand that I will have slip ups and that's okay

- Make it hard to do the bad things (in this case, I have domain blockers to stop me redditing, I move my phone to another room etc.)

- Make it enjoyable. For me it's finding a particular energetic DJ set and just bopping along while I do the focused work.

And so on.

I would not even know how to call my so-called "technique" if somebody else did not do it for me: awareness.

What I do I would today call "reconciliation" or "making peace". Let me explain.

On the one hand, I start recognizing in a colder, more methodical and mathematical manner, what things I did screw up in my life and why. I drill down and understand what emotions, unmet needs and un-addressed trauma led to these faulty decisions. Then I say: I understand why I did it but this only worked against me, it's time to change it and put myself on a better path. And by "better path for me" I don't mean only financial and career success; I mean those _and_ being happier and calmer.

On the other hand, I allow my more beastly / primitive / emotional / immature side to show up. I don't shun it, I try to sympathize with it and somewhat validate it. That's basically treating a part of yourself like an angry and lost kid: you do feel for them but want them to stop doing damage. But you also want to not force anything on them; you want them to understand and internalize they are only hurting themselves and others (in this case: other parts of you) with zero benefit for anyone involved.

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It's not easy. I had a very rocky start in life. Sure I did not sleep under bridges but growing up in a shitty Eastern European town with a gay brother and you yourself being the nerd who effortlessly gets all A grades and is also good at karate, physically attractive and liked by girls sadly had a ton of downsides that many people are blind of. Almost everyone hates you for being different and they feel threatened by you while all you want is to fit in and be a part of a friendly group. It was and still is a big tragedy, one I don't claim I have managed to come to terms with even as of today.

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But what I do lately is talk to my more primal side: "Look, I really understand how much you hate doing X and Y. I hate them too! But what else would you do? We did it your way for so long, you had an almost complete full reign and look what happened -- now we all suffer from severely diminished physical and mental health, we hate our life and often our work, we know that we wasted our best years on pointlessly rebelling against things we could never change. Where did all that bring us? Please, work with me. I understand that you never feel heard because we never achieved the life you wanted. But I can't see any shortcuts. Do you? If not, then let us please take the long but much safer road to our goals. That way we'll still get there one day. If we are not making progress then we'll talk again and readjust strategy and maybe do things more your way. But in the meantime, can we do things my way for a while? Please?"

Or something very similar.

But all that is 99% specific to me. You really have to find your own way to your deeper and more primal / emotional side. It exists and very often sabotages you because you never give it the wheel. Being civilized does this to us and no, I am not saying you should go outside and beat someone to death with a ratchet wrench of course. I mean that you should find a way to do the things you truly want, regardless of the cost.

I am NOT doing this well at the moment. For example I am too chicken to give up programming. But as mentioned above, I am trying to reconcile a few factors the best way I can for the moment. Maybe if that unlocks more energy and more motivation then the time would be ripe for more drastic measures.

One step at a time.

Seconded. I am also curious to what your ADHD plan is.

I'm in the same boat as the parent with helix. I like to think that its not about being able to type x chars more per second but rather doing some clever tricks sometimes with your IDE just because they safe you from boring work and is lots of fun. For example repeating the same action with macros across multiple files is so helpful and maybe only needed once a month or so, but oh boy, when you pull it off it is so fun and rewarding!

I’m used to both vim and emacs. While I appreciate some IDE power features (debugging, code generation, tools integration,…), ultimately editing is very much a chore with them. You could add emacs or vim keybindings, but then you start to miss some of their features.

But whatever the editor/IDE, There’s always some neat tricks that will help you, especially around editing and tools integration.

I get your point but I am fairly sure I'll never move away from Neovim or nano (when I really have no choice).

There are Zed and Helix of course and they are on my radar but... not enough focus and energy for such big quests.

As for speed, I know Neovim can do much more than I use it for and I want the speed. When I can code even quicker my thought just flows through my fingers and the result is always good. But I have not been like that for years (ever since I gave up Emacs) and I want it back (and no I wasn't that much faster with Emacs either).