I once thought I’d solve this by taking notes, organizing a journal, and writing ... Well, it was a manual. That had the same problem as other manuals - too long, not gonna read.

Full circle.

First thing you should do is figure out what's wrong. Refer to what other people here are saying. Additionally, see if your family history includes a history mental illness or degenerative medical conditions (including dementia and Alzheimers). Everyone knows someone with this, you're looking for a pattern. For example, multiple people in my maternal grandfather's family had been institutionalized and most of the family had bipolar and schizophrenia diagnoses.

And now, how to still get your job done... :)

At one point in my career, my mental facilities became so compromised, I couldn't follow abstraction. Instead of seeking help, I figured out a system to overcome this.

What I did was externalize my memory. Quite literally, I would write everything I needed to paper: variable names, notes on their contents, call stacks.

Once the entire set of function calls where on paper, I could see the structure and continually shuffle things in and out of very limited working memory as I worked to understand and fix issues.

It's slow, but not as slow as you would think.

I can only do one task deeply at a time but while doing that, I will think and worry about other tasks that need to be done. This stops me from what I am working on, leaving it half way and starting something else. When I reach a point when two or more tasks compete for my attention (or someone drops something on my plate) I feel locked up.

The best thing I've found is to capture tasks as soon as I get them and try to ignore things until my current task is done. Otherwise, i drift of into mindless scrolling

Your list is sometimes in internal conflict with itself. I have excellent conscious concentration ability and food memory leading to sometimes getting stuck in local maxima for a given situation. Clear the working memory, remove the "stuck" and suddenly free to snap onto the global maxima for a given situation. Or sometimes not. Complex tools are not like screwdriver; sometimes you can't even tell what the right tool for the job is, much less expect it to work. Often enough, using a different tool works better than trying harder with one thats already not working.

I have a hard time switching my brains off. Even when i try to sleep. The problem is that having this ability is what gives me my technical abilities so its both a blessing and a curse.

When you are stuck, it probably means you are too focused. You should turn your attention-thermostat more toward the exploratory side of things. You also probably want to talk the problem through with a coworker whom you like who is good at being a sounding board.

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# Explanation: Working Memory and Scope of Attention

# Working Memory

You know how a computer processor has registers and it performs operations on the values stored in those registers? Your brain has Working Memory and it can hold 4-9 "chunks" of information. More if you are relaxed and confident in your social position, Fewer chunks if you are stressed or worried about being kicked out of your social group.

A "chunk" is any piece of information that you are able to think about as a single thing.

- Your own home address is 1 chunk

- A stranger's home address is 4 chunks (house number, street name, city+state, postcode)

- A stranger's address whom you've said out loud a couple times is 2 chunks I guess.

- A design pattern you know well is 1 or 2 chunks.

- A design pattern you've not yet learned is 5-15 chunks.

Your brain decides what to hold in your Working Memory based on a whole lot of things. The mental act of focusing is ignoring ideas and stimuli in order to preserve specific information in your working memory. If you google "mindfulness meditation" or "sniper breath control technique" and try doing either, you can observe this process in action.

> I am a new grad

Great. Picture a massive undirected graph of all the wikipedia articles and their links to each other. Now picture a graph of all conceivable ideas and the conceptual links that might lead the thought of one to lead to another. When you focus, you tell your brain "If the concept doesn't seem like X, don't traverse this edge."

In your case, it seems like you are telling your brain "If adding the new idea doesn't mean that I can put together full solution from what is in Working Memory, stop." Well it turns out that code and design patterns can be complicated and trying to do the whole thing at once might take more Working Memory than you have. However, doing the imperfect solution would:

1) Take some of the complexity out of your head and put it into a text editor. Thus, it would also "chunk" it and free up space in your working memory for manipulating the rest of the complexity.

2) Cause you to traverse the graph of ideas more. With your working memory freed up, you might spot a solution which is based on the crappy version but closer to what you want.

So my advice is to ego for a walk for a bit and let your brain expand the set of possibly-relevant ideas.

Also delete your RSS reader, loopback HN and other "educational" sites to localhost (subscribe to http://www.hndigest.com instead) and try to get back into reading books again.

Good luck!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analysis_paralysis

www.getmindsync.com

DM me if you would like to try some for free.