However when I'm working on something truly interesting and challenging, all the distractions vanish. Tweets go unread, emails unanswered, RSS ignored. Unfortunately that state has become a lot more rare lately as I slug away on uninteresting parts of the project and my mind wanders to new ideas I don't have time or opportunity to play with.
I do think that when I was younger it was easier to be utterly immersed in a project because the whole thing was still new and challenging. Now some of the stuff I used to spend hours or days or weeks toiling away with intense concentration feel like.. busy work. It feels like I shouldn't have to program in assembly anymore and that it's tedious. It feels like I shouldn't have to implement yet another <insert data structure or process>. The act of implementing a lot of the small pieces are no longer interesting and instead I just want to get on to the large scale interesting bits, but it can seem that there's so much boilerplate and cruft in the way...
And so I check Hacker News...