Comment by JCattheATM
1 day ago
Plans, goals, routine, separation of concerns.
Instead of having a million different tabs open, use a tab session manager, save the stuff you want to read later, and keep open only stuff pertinent to things you are working on.
Prioritize your projects to have actionable goals.
When you procrastinate, try to do so by being productive on smaller projects.
Be aware of your own nature, and try to exert control over it. Recognize that not every idea or desire is useful, and learn to discard the ones that are not and investigate or give more attention to the ones that are.
Organization, take notes and organize them. I often have a scratchpad textfile open, that I then organize into sections (e.g. app ideas, ideas for specific code projects, movie ideas, whatever), break these up further into project or topic files. The ones that grow and get fleshed out are the ones worth pursuing.
Have a healthy sleep and recreation routine to not get burned out.
This is the opposite of what works for me.
Leaning a little into the the distractions, and building processes to quickly search and hop between things had made it better for me.
At the very least opening tabs with Ctrl+T, tab search with Ctrl+Shift+A, quickly closing them with Ctrl+W is my main workflow in Chrome-based browsers.
Once I get my speed up, I find distractions don't occur as often.
Emacs, org-mode, magit, and AI, combined with good sleep, weight lifting, stimulants, have almost completey nullified my ADHD problems.
It's been a hard slog to get here though.
I'd be curious to compare our efficiency and output.
But like, that's the thing isn't it?
You're dying.
Why cling to false narratives of "efficiency" and "output".
Be human. Be not bot.
1 reply →
Literally just a text file? This is interesting to me. So many task app choices. But a bit of mark down nd notepad I think is a thing?
I have a few text files open at any one time. One is for a diary I keep, which changes for each month, so for example at the moment I have '2026 01.txt' open. I have a general to-do file and a tech todo file, and then notes.txt. When my notex.txt grows too long, which I define as having to scroll at all, I start to break it up.
When I break it up, I personally use latex files. I know everyone loves markdown, but I'm not a fan of Obsidian (closed source and electron, ugh), so I fell in love with TexStudio.
I have keybindings for simple macros to insert sections and subsections that I can quickly name, and these display in the navigation tree very well. TexStudio also allows multiple tex files open at once with a tabbedinterface, and allows saving sessions, so I can open one file to open all my, say, 'ai app ideas' notes. I've found this to work better for myself than any other available app or solution.
Eventually, I'd like to release a fork which would mainly be trimming stuff out rather than really adding anything in, but it's far from a priority for me at the moment.
I have so many text files (technically wikis and GDocs text docs, but I'm not doing more than lines of text). I was talking to a coworker today about our graveyard of pen and paper notebooks, todo apps, reminder thingies, post-its..
I need two things: ubiquity, so that I can add ideas, todos, etc. wherever I am; and exaggerated simplicity so that I don't end up turning the note solution into its own project that's abandoned or exchanged in a year.
Force yourself to use the same paper journal you carry around. Keep writing whatever comes in your mind, literally everything. Re-read the last day at day's end. Mitigation tecnique to empty your brain, leaving trails.
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I use TaskPaper. It's essentially markdown lists with a few bells and whistles for managing items.