To be even more precise, regaining focus unlocks many other skills, prioritizing the physical health included. I am still working my way towards that.
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.
The first point is the hardest. It affects every aspect of my life and I have no idea how to really tackle it. This is the first year where I feel the need to take drastic action to achieve some kind of improvement.
What’s your plan? How is it working?
- 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.
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.
And be a touch assertive when you need to. I found I can't just put down the phone so I changed what I do on my phone (books instead of doom-scrolling). So far it works okay-ish. I am fine with a gradual progress.
I'm actually not that convinced of these productivity gains in the context of IDE tricks. The cost of learning + tool-lock seems steep compared to the actual productivity gains. I'm switching fairly regularly between IDE's, and even if VS Code is the default, the only reason I'm considering learning it in depths is because some people incessantly comment on these things during pair programming.
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).
But whatever the editor/IDE, There’s always some neat tricks that will help you, especially around editing and tools integration.
- MANDATORY: Get more intimate with my Neovim. I've always kind of half-arsed my editors / IDEs, I always found it annoying to become a deep expert. This must change; surface-level skills rob you of productivity. I already am hugely annoyed by my typing speed, which is quite excellent but still not enough to work almost at the speed of thought. I want to achieve something near to these levels.
- OPTIONAL: Integrate closer with one ore more LLM agents for coding. I have not paid for any yet but copying-pasting from a web UI gets tiring. Sometimes you really just want to say "OK, now remove that duplicate test and include that edge case" and see it materialize in 20 seconds. I am not against paying, it's just that so far the paid tiers have not been a blocker. Well, seems like they are now.
- MANDATORY: Prioritize body. I have health conditions and I have a relatively good visibility how to fix them. I regularly end up desperately trying to solve more and more problems on the computer just so I don't get up and start a workout. I started turning this around but it's way too slow and time and age don't wait for anyone.
In general: connect better with myself, forgive myself all the previous mistakes, understand why and how they came to be and remove the root causes, put myself on a better path. And above all: be more true to myself.