flâneur

The best way to get unstuck | Hacker News

news.ycombinator.com · 3,902 words · saved by 1 readers

If you can improve something you've been working on all day very very mildly where it costs very little energy, it's fine. Switching to the next big thing costs a lot of energy due to context switching and having to learn a new mini-domain. It takes time, especially for someone like myself with ADHD, to adapt to a new context. What I mostly want to get accross is that it's unnecessary to view this behavior as procrastination (negative) and not just natural, energy-efficient and expected. reply reply reply reply reply reply reply 0: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yak_shaving 1: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bikeshedding reply reply reply reply This scene[1] from Malcolm in the Middle almost illustrates it perfectly except it's more Hal getting distracted on side quests that were spawned because he tried to change a light bulb... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbSehcT19u0 reply reply reply reply reply Other times, when he needed a 'lower effort' comic for whatever reason, he'd have

I would add that gold plating, in the software engineering sense, is also a form of being stuck. You may be telling yourself you're doing useful work, like making the code prettier, or lifting test coverage up from 98%, all the way to 98.5%. But in reality, you're just buying time until taking on the next real new task. Because new tasks are scary, and require extra determination, and thus energy (and remember, you're tired!), before you have conquered them to a point of comfort, where the gold plating soon looms again. Rinse. Repeat. Eh, as I've learned, energy is limited. You can only do…

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