Stop trying to make hard work easy

Ahh how nice it must be to be neurotypical and have a modicum of control over your focus.

The article has some good insights on self discipline but...

“Well, I have news for you: some things are just hard. There’s no way of getting around it.”

That quote, even in the context of managing distractions as per the article, is the antithesis of technology as a whole. Yes, some people will put off hard things but somebody, somewhere, will find a way to do it easily and then that hard thing becomes easy for everyone - on to the next! To suggest that we all should just roll over and accept that some things must be hard and remain that way is absurd.

This is a useful article of general interest to everybody. It even has advice for parents who need to focus on their job during lockdown.

A recent meme is, "Focus is the new IQ", meaning the ability to focus is a superpower akin to having a 200 IQ.

Programmers are self-selected for focus, so we take it for granted.

But people I know outside of the industry are often amazed when they experience people who can deep focus for an hour or more at a time on one task.