Lyceum — dev log 46
Lyceum

It's been two weeks since the last log and work has been going rather smoothly. Monitoring services have been setup, logging's next. It feels great to be able to ship my work to production and make a contribution to the overall product.

In the previous log, I planned to get back to my habits of reading and learning to sketch. Well I haven't, some days because I did not have the time for it and some days because I just took the easier way out and you guessed it, watched some random videos. I did make an interesting observation though, I spend long hours on the PC but scarcely get work done. Whatever work I have to show by the end of the day is usually the result of a short burst of productivity that happens in a state of flow. This insight came about when I was talking to the founder in a meeting and they mentioned blocking out a time-frame for deep work. It starkly contrasted my approach, (which isn't the smartest now that I think about it while writing this), I'll just start working in the morning and hopefully finish it by the night. Yeah, dumb, I fully agree. It seemed bizzare to me that someone who I assumed spent a lot of time writing code, didn't. This can simply be chalked up to skill and experience, but it's not that simple. Clearly time spent is not directly proportional to the outcome. It has more to do with the quality of time spent than to the quantity.

So out of curiosity, I started keeping watch over me working. After a couple of days I clearly saw the problem. The problem is context switching. I'll be looking at the configuration instructions for a program and will randomly open up a new tab with monkeytype or typeracer and start typing away. This will happen over and over again, maybe it's looking at my phone, taking a look at slack or discord anything that'll let my brain get a dopamine hit quickly. YouTube and the internet in general has trained me that way. I can't quite keep my concentration on a problem for too long, before my brain sub-consciously gets annoyed and looks for the easiest hit of dopamine around and since I'm on a platfrom that has an abundance of it, I usually find it.

That's the current hypothesis, I'll now have to figure out ways in which I can prove or disprove it.