Could someone more familiar with the subject and vernacular provide some sort of summary of what this is trying to say? I've read it two or three times and I still can't work out the point being made.
If any.
If any.
So in summary I guess he's saying in the search for solutions to burnt out knowledge workers we're focused too much on symptoms like distractions.
Firefox just opens with all the same tabs by default (at least it does for me. I don't recall if it's a setting I selected).
It's a setting. In your preferences, under start-up, check restore previous session. IIRC, you can also restore the previous session from the history menu even if you don't have that option checked.
Likewise, Chrome in particular will also allow you to recover closed tabs if you accidentally close the window. I'm not sure if Firefox has the setting but I would assume it does.
menu -> history -> recently closed -> XX tabs
It will open all the tabs you had going when you closed.
I learned to treat browsers like this because of Chrome, actually, and its resident processes that still eat my RAM even after I close all browser windows.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabs-outliner/eggk...
Also, on the subject, it helps me by being able to store a window, or a group of windows for later. And when I've opened a bunch of tabs for a specific task, I can easily pop them out into a separate window to focus on them, or to have less distraction when showing stuff to a colleague.
I've used this plugin for years and it's been great.
I use a spiralbound notebook and a fountain pen for mine, because I find the change of tools helps me to think about the project I'm logging on a meta level. I tried doing it in a textfile and it didn't work so well for me, but people are different.
As well, I'm more likely to treat looking up docs as a research project where I copy relevant snippets of the text into one place for easier reference.
I'm still unhappy with a lot of aspects of how I code, but most of it isn't on the end of the day-to-day editing, but rather things like, "oh, I switched languages again - time to relearn the string library".
I think that's why software companies are often approached with quite a bit of caution by other businesses. It's not like hiring an engineering firm, where you can be pretty certain you'll get an industry standardized result.
Which IDE is this?
Also my host OS is my private leasure time system and of course that causes some distractions during the work day - pay bills, read about some new music band or movie.
Now I am contemplating about stripping host OS from all easy reach distractions (browser, email, side-projects) and creating dedicated private time VM.
https://medium.com/@justinseymour/my-head-a-clusterfuck-a8a2...
In reality, (1) we are all distracted, (2) our work usually consists of a large number of small chunks that are spread over time (3) we all have a large pile of undone work (both “job” and “personal”) that we're always feeling guilty about.
What do we do about this difference between the ideal and reality? We could just give up on the ideal and resign to the reality — or even make it worse. Or we could try to fight it superficially, and fail (there's a reason things are the way they are). Or we could start from accepting the reality (instead of ignoring it), but try to move towards the ideal, e.g: (1) reduce whatever it is that makes us seek distractions (very different from blocking distractions), (2) make it easier to get back on track (e.g. keep track of the task being done).
In coming up with this problem statement, the author believes he's diverged from the usual problems being imagined: things like trying to block distractions, trying to maximize efficiency, “collaboration”.
[That just restated the post, so I don't know if it helps :)]
This could use all the addictiveness techniques of current "engagement+advertising" platforms and turn it to good use.
And one who knows exactly what steps are going to be involved and how long each one is going to take, weeks or even months in advance. The fact that I approach every new programming problem with: "ok, how the hell do I figure this one out?" made me feel really nervous early on in my career, since there seemed to be this default expectation that not just good, not even just adequate, but even mediocre programmers could blurt out a list of the tasks involved in solving a problem, "estimate" (meaning predict with +/- 5% accuracy) the hours associated with each and then robotically plow through each of them. This was back in the 90's, before somebody named this "agile" and built a set of Orwellian tools and "coaching strategies" around it, but after a few years I couldn't help but notice that, in spite of being an abject failure at accurately predicting how long each bug fix was going to take before I even really knew what it entailed, I was also one of the most sought after developers in every organization I worked at.
As a concrete example: I frequently find myself needing to figure out how to implement some software task I've never done before myself, involving concepts that I barely know anything about. This usually results in dozens of opened tabs in multiple subtrees - Google searches, Github repos, and so on. This might overflow my main "browsing" Firefox window, so I end up opening a second FF window just to hold those tabs. Per the article, maybe there's a better way to capture the notion of "I'm trying to research this topic over the course of a week - how do I better organize what I'm working on, and perhaps share that info with others?".