Yeah I sound like an idiot when I start talking because my brain will process thoughts much faster than I can speak them and it ends up with odd extended pauses while I catch up and such.

I don’t write particularly well either, often because I’m on a phone and my phone loves to make radical new words via autocorrect but at least I can read over a few times before posting.

I think you can, but the big risk is that what you produce becomes incomprehensible to anyone without all that context filling their brain, including you next week.

(Not saying I'm in favour of deliberate interruptions, just that this might be an argument for them.)

This is incorrect. Everybody is different.

As an ADHD sorta guy, I write much, much better if I can walk around and get my blood moving while dictating compared to sitting with my butt going numb and my brain screaming out in oxidative stress agony as I try to think clearly.

There have been many posts on HN in the past little while about interruptions killing concentration. Well, in that environment, there's always a siren going off outside, or a car alarm, or a car horn, or... You can't just think there unless you get a place that insulates you from all that. Even then, it takes time for all the mental jarring that happened to you on your way to that place to die away, so that you can think.

> Yes, yes, I know the idea of eliminating distractions so that I can focus. Honestly, that's crap that leads to disasters every time I try it. If I have positive motivations to do X, distractions are easy to set aside.

I don't have ADHD but this is something I struggle with/keep at the back of my head constantly. It took me a very long time to accept that (to put it bluntly) it's almost impossible for me to force myself to work on something I find useless. I wrote about this here: https://sonnet.io/posts/hummingbirds/ and here: https://sonnet.io/posts/sit/

Do you have any resources on the subject you could recommend?

Yep. "Removing" distractions is a fools errand, because I am the Da Vinci of creating them. This is why I need structure.

Nope.

Most probably you’re either don’t really want what you say and think you want. Or something else is sucking up your mental or physical energy.

I think that's even worse for me. I can in fact sit in a chair and get stuck in my own head for hours. I've even stayed awake in my bed for hours, no TV, no computer, ignoring phone notificataions, being stuck in my own thoughts. Buzzing thoughts about my job, my life, my past, family, choices I should have taken, choices I should not have taken, or just random triva I gathered over the year. My mind can never truly be quiet, something will pop up and fade just as quickly to the next tangential thought.

It's just not productive and I usually end up more remorseful than when I sat down. I try to get outside or do literally anything else to avoid getting stuck there. I can never truly be "bored" so I may as well try to distract with something productive. Or not productive but not depressing.

Good lord no, I want my cognitive best to be when I'm getting shit done. When I'm doing non-cognitive tasks I want my cognitive best to get back in its box and shut up for a bit so I can enjoy life without constantly over-analysing everything. I'm certainly in that category, though I suspect something like a meditation practice would probably be more useful as a long-term strategy than having a drink after work.

I stop feeling charitable when I start missing deadlines and can't get any work done because of constant interruptions.

Is there a more clear way that I can signal I need fewer interruptions than a closed door and headphones? Just a couple hours each day without being interrupted would be great.

Why, is there something wrong with them?

> I think the author might have chosen the traditional way of note-taking, because he just doesn't have the patience or the particular obsession to tailor the note-taking system.

Because nothing says "This is naturally the best way for humans to do something" as clearly as it requiring patience or a "particular obsession", right?

I'm always confused by people who struggle so much with being able to quickly answer a question and get back to what they were doing.

Also, here you're prioritising your work over someone else's.

> I simply can't stand incessantly being asked questions, I view it as a type of interruption

Well, you are being interrupted. But you're being paid to be interrupted.

Then that’s not a cognitive task, or at least one that requires the full brain. I would venture a guess that you might have been able to complete that task faster if you weren’t also listening to the books, or your error rate might have gone down. Or maybe you didn’t fully comprehend the books. Or maybe the material wasn’t too involved and missing some passages here and there didn’t make a difference.

> who gives a damn whether or not it's multitasking or real multitasking or optimal behavior?

Because attempting to multitask causes long term damage. One could say the same thing about drinking or drugs, and it’s clear that short term enjoyment can have negative long term effects.

I find this kinda pointless for myself. Most of the time I just revisit the same subjects over and over and come to the same conclusions no matter how I try to solve it. Once I’m done with the menial tasks - the “deeper” topics just make me upset to think about because they make me realize how hopelessly fucked I am. I’d rather not focus on that and instead do a bit of hedonism while I can.

"The world is asleep" is basically my definition of serene and peaceful.

---

A while back, there was a national holiday, so I had the day off. I didn't actually have anything I wanted to do with that day, so I used it to plan out my next work project. It was a very productive day where I went from being very unsure of how to do the project to having a blueprint that directed what I did for months to come. The project would be in a much worse place if it weren't for the thinking I was able to do on that one day.

It wasn't a productive day in the sense that I got a lot of things done (my usual definition of productivity), but it was productive in the sense that I got some important, deep thinking done. It's rare to get a chance to do such deep thinking.

This kind of productivity is hard to achieve in the face of distractions. But I think it is actually worse than that: It is hard to achieve when there is even a _risk_ of distractions. When my brain knows that someone could demand my attention at any time, it seems to limit the amount of working memory, focus, and time I can spent thinking about something.

But if I know that I don't have to pay attention to interruptions, the problem I'm thinking about can take over and I can spend time swimming in the problem instead of just splashing my toes in.

All this is a long-winded way of saying that knowing you _might_ be interrupted can be almost as bad as actually being interrupted.

This is the norm for ADHD as far as I can tell seeing how my kid behaves.

As I see it, ADHD is not an inability to focus, but an inability to control what you focus on.

I cannot stress this enough. Being cooped up for long periods of time is very detrimental to tasks that must be carried out “in the head.”

And yet, I was confined to a small room for most of my childhood and I feel I managed to be more creative then than I am now, when I have the freedom to travel the world. I wouldn’t want to go back to staying inside a room most of the time though.

While I have noticed that ADHD people gravitate towards interrupters, and are more likely to be disorganized and unreliable, generalizing this to all interrupters is absurd.

Everybody in my mom's family is an interpreter, including my mom. You will meet few people more organized and reliable than her.