>In high school, you could just sit down and crank out some homework while watching Youtube videos and chatting with friends.
I see this kind of distraction as introducing complication. When I was in high school about all I could do was listen to the radio on my boom box and even that was using too distracting.
I wouldn't really be able to actually watch something and chat and do math problems. It would be more like 20 minutes of each at a time.
Maybe another way to say it is that in high school math problems fit into a small enough chunk of memory that you could store it to disk and load it back into working memory in a few minutes.
On the other hand, I literally can't fit my current work project into working memory. It's just too big. I have to page it to stored notes. At the end of the day, I write to myself where I need to pick up the next day, and then the next day I spend 20 minutes following my notes to load that context back into working memory.
I don't think I'm bad at this stuff either, because my solo side projects don't have this problem. I can pick those up for an hour at a time and it's fine. But my work projects...
You know, I’ve found myself doing the same thing: I usually have a git versioned ‘notes.org’ file in whatever repo I’m working in, and I’ll rebase it away before opening the branch for peer review. I also don’t feel the need to do this with my personal projects, not even the larger ones.
I suppose that’s because I insist on understanding more of the tech stack for my personal projects than I do for my work projects.
I see this kind of distraction as introducing complication. When I was in high school about all I could do was listen to the radio on my boom box and even that was using too distracting.