“Nothing” is the secret to structuring your work
vangemert.dev
vangemert.dev
What am I working on, what's in progress? The work space is the map. The terrain is changing as the task progresses, and so must the map, but the map is useful, even if it takes a bit of redrawing here and there.
The desktops (multiple, 3-7) are the map of the work. Part of the work is keeping the map accurate, not wadding it up and throwing it in the trash.
I suppose different things work for different people, but I started with the suggestion here and came around to skillful use of space as the work map itself.
Cleaning and updating are continuous, not a 'big bang' clear-the-desks event, mostly. But if it's not continuous, the big bang is probably better.
Some spots are problem spots, like digital notebooks, desktop icons. When I notice a problem spot, I create a recurring task to remove one X per week, or in some of the worst cases, one X per day. I have a rule of clearing out the oldest two days of email each day. I miss some days if I'm busy, but on average rate out = rate in, because I will always catch up within a day or two applying the rule that the oldest two days of email need eviction (make a task out of it, archive it, whatever) every day. Rate out = rate in
{And if I'm getting what you said correctly} What you described, is similar to how I organize my drawers in my room. Everything is visible at once, but navigating them usually takes 2 or 3 steps. Without this visual map I'm completely lost.
Thank you for mentioning this - best tip of the day ;-)
Seems to be inspired from emacs/doom-emacs and friends … great!!!
Thanks for sharing, I'm gonna grab this right away.
So basically I have
- A session for dev
- each tab is a service
- each service has a pane, vim, claude code, runner (npm run dev, go run etc)
- vim
- staing
- prod
- Misc
I, too, operate using the "nothing" approach as my DEFAULT and most common mode.
In my mind, the big things I never forget to attend to (they are big). The small things that I might forget, who cares, they're less important and the forgetting is a natural prioritization mechanism.
Some times I do feel overwhelmed by how many "big things" I have to juggle but won't "remember" or "it takes too much cognitive load to track". In that case, I make an ephemeral list on paper. That helps me adjust my perspective (sometimes things that I worried about are now clearly in the not urgent or not importang bucket).
Over time I have come to the ritual of closing everything in the evening (end of afternoon really), what is still running is on servers in Tmux labeled with the task number, sometimes I leave Readme's open with instructions to myself (vscode or obsidian), but starting clean works better for me (like OP). I sort of slowly load the context in the morning and start to ramp up. That is what it feels like. It works for me. When I boot up, I have 5 empty desktops and zero tabs open in the browser. But it is all filled up relatively quickly again. I do have rituals/rules, like secondary, longer running tasks (ie long running data analysis workflows) are usually on desktop 4. Element/Slack/Signal on desktop 5, outlook/teams (for current client) + other side stuff in browser on desktop 1. Desktop 2 is very dynamic, usually where I spend most time, it overflows onto desktop 3 when I need more space, both are filled with terminals, vscode, browser windows. I have my laptop screen on the side, but for some reason never use it... I just use my Iiyama ultra-wide with quarter tiling (probably would tile more if Gnome would support it, KDE did, loved that, but love the simplicity of Gnome more).
I'm considering making 6 desktops haha. Oh, I really can't work with dynamic desktops, as I "need" some stuff to be on the final desktop, far away yet easy to reach.
Current client has an Excel file for tasks. Really hate that. Tried pushing her to MS Tasks, didn't really work well. But I also need a large space for context and subtasks. For some data analysis tasks I made a small Django system, with a page (model/view) per dataset. That works very well for us, it was very much worth the effort to set that up. The view grabs in data from several locations so it also helps me quickly look things up.
I've found that for me, spreading things out and having visual cues allows my brain to relax and focus on the task at hand, because I know I don't have to use a memory slot to remember to do something that I don't have a visual cue for, because every so often I see that cue and know it isn't going anywhere until I have time to deal with it. Almost the exact opposite of the anxiety the author describes. (And before it's suggested, yes, I also take notes and put important tasks there, but it isn't as helpful for my brain to let something go compared to having a visual cue.)
It's really short and would fit in a comment here, but quoting just some fun bits:
> A vertical organizer would have scooped this stuff up, and put it in a file to retrieve later. Had I done this, there would be a bare spot on my desk. These bare spots are the mark of vertical organizers. They are a dead give away.
> […] The fact is, I am a horizontal organizer. I like all the thing I am working on spread out on a surface in front of me, where they can beckon me to continue working on them. When I put something in a file, I never see it again. The problem isn't that I can't find it (although that has happened), but that I don't look. I am constitutionally incapable of opening a filing cabinet and fishing out a half-finished project to resume working on it.
I work better with a conceptual (but not actual) blank slate, by asking myself each day what the top three things are that I need to get done that day, and not allowing an ever-growing TODO list to get in the way of seeing what's important.
I have ADHD and use the start-from-zero or as I would call it Inbox-Zero method personally
Avoid scrolling apps. Avoid touchscreens for a couple of hours after waking up. Try to work a few pages of long form reading into your daily routine. It will become easier to remain focused for longer over time.
Don't fall for grand schemes and definitive solutions. We are prone to manic-depressive cycling as we think we've solved everything now and than fail to follow up.
Try to make everything you want to be doing very easy to get started on and everything you don't want to be doing harder. Cultivate this pattern.
It's not one big thing, it's a bunch of little things. And if you have a (few) bad days or weeks or months, don't spiral. Forgive yourself and try again tomorrow.
I would add - going for a walk and having a shower are both excellent circuit breakers.
Apart from the parent comment's point about visual cues, the biggest thing for me is rituals. Specific enjoyable or unavoidable or easy to maintain rituals really helped break that focus. Dogs are a part of that for me, since you only ignore their needs at your peril. Taking them for a walk and putting on an audiobook or podcast so that I don't think about work makes it a lot easier to slip into something else when I get back.
I haven't done the Pomodoro thing but I could definitely see the appeal in a rigid timer that screams "hey you! it's time to get off your ass and do something else for a bit".
- To combat time blindness and hyperfocus, create daily-ish alarms on your phone's builtin clock for things you otherwise forget until it's too late. (If your mind is better at being reactive than proactive and time-aware, create a systematic practice of creating interrupts/redirects for your future self in advance. Create them moment you learn about them.)
- To combat compulsive phone numbing/scrolling/distraction, the (android) Intenty app can prompt you right after unlocking with a custom Q&A about why you are unlocking. I find that it has promoted awareness of my mental state in the moment, has over time generated reflection and an awareness of what my persistent triggers are, and enabled me to catch myself and stop the habitual numbing a helpful percentage of the time.
- When I unlock my phone it brings me back to where I left off. That tends to send me down old rabbit trails. I found apps like AutomateIT that let me return to my home screen each unlock.
For instance, I have a morning routine which ensures I'm "presentable"/etc. When I start work I immediately create the day's note, go to the previous day and review, copy over any ongoing tasks, etc. My day note is the same thing every day: Things I did, Things I need to do, Meeting notes (important meeting notes get extracted to their own file), Random notes. Then setting in to work. Evenings are bit more flexible and the weekends tend to be the wild west, bit of a reset so I don't feel "trapped" in a cycle, etc.
I do struggle with weekly/monthly or longer intermittent routines. Even stuff like doing bills (automated as much as possible), re-ordering prescriptions, etc. So it's always a process.
Last thing so as not to go too long - not everyone runs into this, but in case you've gotten down on yourself at times and now realize it might be ADHD, give your self a break / forgive yourself. Same thing going forward. Not an excuse, not continuing to seek improvement, but realizing that when you stumble, there is a reason and it may not be something you can actually control. Reflect on what you could do to prevent it in the future, but do it without self-blame or criticism. Be kind to yourself, in other words.
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=adhd%20comments%3E100&sort=byD...
20231115 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38274782 Hacking ADHD: Strategies for the modern developer
(apologies for the unfortunate delayed response)
Celebrate your differences, acknowledge your limitations.
For inattentive type, try forcing transitions when someone interrupts you. Walk to a new room together.
For hyperactive type, try planning out multiple synergistic things to do in parallel towards the one goal.
Then I work.
Writing the major goal every day is important to not let sub-goals overshadow it. Writing the immediate goal every day is important because together the two goals create a very clear direction of action with a clear next step.
I have my screen mounted on the wall, and have side end-tables for pens, papers and notes I need, etc. so my desk is absolutely clear.
My desk is a half circle, but not that deep, because that optimizes the usefulness of the surface for work (not storage).
I recommend being less ambitious! Or be smarter than me!
Now my major goal is to complete the first tools in that area. it’s still challenging but I think the first version will have only taken 12 months. There is just a lot of newly settled stuff that I am getting fluent in.
12 months seems like a good length of time for a major goal.
Immediate goals are the closest challenging milestone. I.e. a necessary task that requires non-trivial design and/or implementation.
I think both major and immediate goals should be stretch goals with actual impact at different scales. 6-18 months and 2 to 8 weeks are typical ranges. But as my first paragraph notes, the major goal is the big thing that needs to be done, so however long that takes. It is inspiring to aim for significance, and it pushes me to not waste time on all scales of life.
And then I replot my path to the immediate goal. Usually takes under a minute. Mundane steps and questions to settle.
I recreate a the whole plan every morning like that. The repetition embeds the plan and goals into my conscious and subconscious minds.
And also keeps everything fluid.
Every morning, any new perspective can alter anything in the plan, including the goals if need be. Altering the immediate goal, or a better definition of the major goal.
I did write the goal down a lot, on working notes, and put it on my fridge, my whiteboard, my pin board, along with next steps and lists of tasks for each.
It was too hard to work on one next step, because there was so much I didn’t know, and it was impossible to know which step was going to cave in first.
That’s when I learned to clear my desk, whenever work hit a wall, and rewrite the goals and steps. To completely reset my mind so I could move forward in a clear alternate direction without pause.
Later I noticed doing that reset every morning helped even more.
I thought a lot about Don Quixote as time went by. I dreamt an impossible dream. Under a star. And then, one day, I got in!
You are right that 100 days can mean a lot.
But if you are always thinking "What is the most important thing I could ever do, if I just did one thing?", sooner or later you may find something where time isn't an organizational issue, because your North Star has become so clear.
I don't try to guess how long anything will take in any serious way. I set targets, but those are to push myself, visualize success, not schedule anything.
Not to say that routine and form can't get results. It is hilarious how much of the current fascination with LLM writing can be summarized by "actually filling out a routine template will satisfy a ton of requirements." People that are surprised with how well some output works, but would have scoffed at filling out a lot of boilerplate in previous technologies.
So, yes, try it. But do not become attached to it. If it works, rejoice in that. But do not count on it always working. If it stops for a time, feel free to leave it for a time.
The 5S acronym is:
Sort (remove what you don’t need)
Set in Order (organize what remains so it’s easy to find/use)
Shine (clean the area regularly)
Standardize (create consistent rules/checklists)
Sustain (maintain the discipline long-term)
It's really easy to end up on autopilot with the structure of your workdays, only to notice that it doesn't work for the current project all that well. Getting stuck on the 'nothing' approach can be just as bad as getting stuck on a 'hundred tabs' approach if you're just doing one or the other because you've always been doing it.
I worked with an older gentleman for the last decade until recent layoffs who had worked on Oregon Trail for MECC. Single most productive person I've known in my life. I aspire for half the career he's had. His desk was absolute chaos. He had multiple computers on his desk across an unmatched mix of monitors, all as described above, controlled with Synergy.
The least productive people I've known have clean aesthetic desks, no icons on their desktop, and inbox zero.
Don't get me wrong, there are absolutely people that are a mess that aren't productive at all. I have worked with them too. Frankly, in their case, cleanup like this suggests probably would actually help. I've just never seen the opposite.
I just know that the most productive people I've known have been insanely good at managing chaos, and lean into it.
I maintain it’s because productive people know how to focus on what matters, to cut through the noise, and it’s not just by carefully thinking things through (though that’s an important skill too). It’s partly because they “just don’t see” the noise - if you like, they’re not distracted by it, they can tune it out - or rather, they don’t need to spend any energy tuning it out because they don’t ‘see’ or hear it in the first place!
I’ve frequently been: 1. Complimented on my productivity 2. Told I need a less messy workspace/environment.
One of these is true, the other is a road to depression - wasting time and energy tidying up and then feeling like I got no actual work done because, well, I didn’t!
There’s obviously a limit - continual small bits of sorting and organising ensure I can still sit at my desk and find stuff on my computer, but it doesn’t need to be the extreme clear-desk policy that proponents of Clean Work seem to be pushing. There’s a huge zone in between the two extremes.
The human body is not made of regular lines.You can see it in ergonomics accessories. They are not what we would call beautiful. While I love to tidy every once in a while (mostly for cleaning), everything will eventually fallback into some organic arrangement where I don't need to think about what I need and what I don't will eventually get removed. I think about task planning, then I offload the result in the environment. Starting fresh every day will just gobble up my time in order to reconstruct the environment again.
Lol
Man, I wish this would also work in reverse, like being messy would automatically make me a good programmer.
Their desk and computer setup is chaotic, but their "task system" is probably very minimalist. Either it's nonexistent - everything's in their head. Or it's a scribble pad with the next few things they need to do which they cross off and then write new things. Or it's a .txt. At most it's a .md but even that's already stretching it.
What it's not is an immaculately structured maximalist Notion workspace - which is what the "clean desk" people you're talking about often prefer.
It is unlikely this will work for those less experienced.
I one had a roommate who, when they get stuck on a technical problem, start cleaning. The change of pace would often give them sparks of inspirations -- sort of like shower-thoughts without the shower.
But eventually I get to a point where all the failed attempts crystallize and it flows out of me start to finish in one sitting. Every piece of knowledge from those failed attempts crystallizes into one gestalt of how it’s supposed to be.
Those final “easy” 20 pages always come after 100 pages of discarded, frustrating, exploratory work that feels like it’s going nowhere.
Also a deadline helps.
It's very tempting to want to write an outline & then revise the outline until it's perfect, so that your first draft can be as solid as possible. That never works out well for me, though. It's only after I've written a substantial chunk of the thing that I realize half my ideas were bad and the other half are being poorly realized, and I start to understand the story I really want to write.
I'm very taken with this one HYTRADBOI talk [1] that applies a similar approach to software design. It's not something I've ever gotten a chance to apply, but it really appeals to me.
[1]: https://www.hytradboi.com/2025/03580e19-4646-4fba-91c3-17eab...
I think I would be half as productive as I'd like without this.
This way I have everything about a ticket in a place and if someone is like "uhh, you did something to something some 3 months ago or so?" - ~/Stuff/2025-1{0,1,2} probably knows, I certainly don't. I can find things again like this :)
I'll eventually have to setup some automated archiving for it, but so far it's not using too much space.
My room should be messy when I come back to it - how else would I find anything if it wasn’t where I left it?
And it really helps to not think about accumulated junk.
The trick is to make the workflow really dynamic so that the process of managing it doesn’t stand in the way.
Some folks prefer to accumulate. I think this is fine as long as they make a system comfortable to navigate. Their approach wouldn’t work if they had to use a dynamic system that forced them to manage their dozens of sessions all the time. Conversely, their tools seem to be slow for a dynamic user.
It works pretty well, especially when I want to take a project to a meetup.
Unfortunately, I also have a bin labeled "Projects".
Also, if you have projects with lots of parts, and you've got a 3D printer: have you discovered Gridfinity? (or others like Multibuild?) For the uninitiated, these are wall/drawer 42mm grids, in which you place bins that are multiples of 42. So you get perfectly-sized Tetris-like drawers and walls.
Eventually, some external pressure (boss, client, IM, whatever) causes us to open a second context simultaneously. Then it happens with a third, a fourth, etc
This is happening because the world is expecting shorter and shorter time to results due to better tooling in the last 10 years, but most have not figured out that all the LLMs and agents in the world won’t shorten the loop, only the person using them can do that.
I find that for any given problem, if I don’t see results in 30 minutes, it’s time to stop that problem and likely reshape it. If I don’t actually get the result in 90-120 minutes, I’m doing something wrong.
I try to keep a space for organization (slack, jira, whatever) and another for the ide, for example. Start working, and pretty soon I need to check an old pr on GitHub, and see it side to side with the ide, next someone sends a link in slack that opens a chrome window which is a doc with links that go into tabs. Hold, I have to hop in zoom for the daily… aaand we’re back at 20 windows and 15 tabs.
I wonder if it’s just the mess imposed by modern workflows. Picturing an engineer decades ago working alone and disconnected in its own office sounds like a dream, but I might just be idealizing it from today’s mindset.
mkdir NewProject
cd NewProject
But in contrast, my physical workspace is completely empty, I might be a bit schizophrenic.
I do this. But every now and then, I have what I call "The Purge", in which the browser window gets closed. There are a few tabs that survive The Purge. One window has [GMail, Calendar] as pinned tabs. Another window has [Gmeet] as a pinned tab. Everyone else is expendable. If they are needed, they will be reopened.
(I do give a little thought to it. "Is there some actually ongoing thing I realistically need to save, and can't reopen?" Those tabs might be pulled off.)
I did this this week. "This will close 437 tabs. Are you sure?" Purged.
I recently realised I can do 70% of my work with only the terminal open and nothing else. Can get it up to 95% with terminal + single IDE at a time. The last 5% is browser-based, which can get distracting really fast - like HN and youtube rabbit holes.
If you really want to shine a light on the cockroach that is digital hoarding, try nuking your entire browsing history and tabs, delete all your movies/series/games collection. I 'cured' myself of being this kind of hoarder just before covid started and I haven't had the urge to store anything besides some private/precious data. On my one machine I've explicitly set firefox to not remember tabs and to also wipe history/cookies/tmp data on every close. Feel weird the first week but then if you see someone else's browser with 100+ tabs, its like looking at one of those picture of a hoarders car that is filled with trash. I think on some level the brain likes this kind of trash hoarding, some kind of rat behaviour. I jest but I hope you get the picture.
What I should do is also keep them mentally separate - don't go to HN while at work, disable personal notifications while at work, etc. But at the same time, I often have 'downtime' at work (waiting for an agent, test run, CI, feedback, etc), and especially since the panny-D, private and work have more and more started to mix. I'm aiming to be at the office more often but it's very easy to not go there since there's rarely any compelling reasons to do so. For me, anyway.
It happens because I will have ctrl+c'd something several minutes ago. My mind subconsciously "holds" onto the info that I have text copied in my clipboard. It's only when I ctrl+v it and consciously discard it does the nagging go away.
I have no idea why it happens or if others experience this too. But I fully agree with the author about starting from nothing and getting rid of the clutter you think isn't bother you but which you're probably subconsciously holding onto.
That said, copying and pasting (and the attendant switching between windows/tabs) does often feel like one of the biggest cognitive frictions I have to deal with in any given day. That's a nut I'd like to crack one day.
One thing that has helped me the most in that regard is Alfred's multi-clipboard feature, where I can append to clipboard, which means I can copy-paste N links in N+1 actions instead of N*2 actions.
Anyway I did this because our version of jira isn’t great, so all the features I found complicated, I put that in my system. For the rest, I use jira because with other things it’s really intuitive.
As one step, I've taken to just nuking my browser sessions at the start of the week. If it was really important to keep, I would've bookmarked it. If it's important, it'll come up again.
Sure, sometimes I lose of forget something useful or important. But the key part is that I'm making a choice between a 20%-100% constant loss of focus, and the occasional missed item I should've kept.
By regularly nuking context, I've also trained myself to better note down those things I do want to track (I've been bouncing between Reminders.app and Emacs Org-Mode) (I am not asking for task tracker advice)
I try to start most days on my machine by closing almost everything I had opened the previous day.
I prefer to clean my workspace at the end of the workday and to leave a clearly defined task for myself the next morning. I can deal with a lot of friction after noon. Not so much at 6am.
I read a quote one time that the best way to keep up daily effort is to always stop when you're the most excited about what comes next. When it's obvious.
Tarantino by way of Hemingway, I think.
Another thing that I've enjoyed a lot is a browser plugin called OneTab, when I start a new task or context switch I just hit the button and all the browser tabs are saved and closed. I then go through the list and only open up the tabs relevant to the task or I just start from scratch.
Then I tackle that list.
Sometimes the list changes.
"Focus work" happens as pressure vs desire mingle.
The real question is "what is expected of me in the next four hours?" And suddenly my work is structured.
I intensely dislike the authors smug self satisfied sense of superiority.
Has this person not heard of Chrome Profiles?
Github Repos?
Just start a new one. Don't clear your desk every time. For the techniques out there, this is like Javascript Promises that use one stack instead of Fibers, that uses many stacks.
I find myself doing this a couple dozen times a day.
I shut down work computer every day and every day in the morning I start it up.
Sometimes if I really have something I didn’t finish and want to start on early in the morning then I leave it running with all apps open.
I do this reset for my business side work, my programming project repo and my clinical work (I'm a kid physician).
I feel It both liberates me and at the exact time forces to understand my workflow and think of logical folders and separation of responsabilities. If something doesnt belong anywhere, maybe It is ephimeral and deserves to be erased... Though, but practical and I LOVE It.
Once they reboot all goes away.
If they would reboot once a week they would save couple hours of cursing and being annoyed every week.
I want to believe that by getting back on track from nothing to where I left off already helps a lot to understand the problem at hand, and maybe realizing issues that before prevented me of finishing the task.
Cool you found a system that works for you.
I don't get flustered by chaos, and cleaning/organizing is a waste of time.
It does bizarrely use two Google Fonts. Stop using Google fonts people. These aren't even good fonts.
Well… I sometimes ask my wife to help me clean everything up. Somehow with her there, it eases the pain of erasing my haptic pan-spatial memory system.
To try my hand at reductive advice, I would say this: know your strengths and what work you do has the most value. The structure exists to serve the work and not the other way around. Habits and processes can serve the work, but can quickly become a form of procrastination for certain types of personalities. Reading about productivity on the internet will not generally make you more productive. Only through honest self-reflection can you actually improve your personal productivity and impact.
I'm quite pumped.
I'm sure the author wasn't trying to tell the whole world to "Do it my way.", and was just offering some advice on one thing that worked for them. But it would read so much better if they wrote it that way, instead of writing it all about telling "you" how to organize your work.
and then start every morning with an empty page
It's pretty simple.
As a data hoarder something like onetab is amazing, there is still a lot of room for improvement though in browser ergonomics, session resets that force you to log back in and refind your place, it's nice to see some tools like data bricks that will at least let you reauth in a new tab.
But! I've learned to harness the power of ending the day without complete closure. I stop work when I know the next step I'm about to do fully. Then the next day it's completely obvious what to start with, and I'm back in the flow without procrastinating as much.
It took some attempts to get comfortable with this; NOT finishing can be kind of excruciating if you're not build for work/life separation. But once I learned to delay my gratification in this regard, I found it set me up for many other things that require daily habits. I also balk much less at "this will take daaaaays" scenarios in general. I'm more comfortable now with things that stretch over longer periods.
I somehow started doing this from the very start of my computer interaction, so I never understood why people find it weird. But now if I keep my system on, I feel uneasy, as if I have work pending, so I am make sure to shut it down at the end of day everyday :)
It explains what it means.
Some people are just naturally a bit chaotic and actually thrive on that for creativity. Others can't think straight until they first clean and organize everything around them. This can relate to the physical world but it also extends to planning and the state of things in software projects. I spend a lot of time staring at screens. The distinction is not that relevant to me.
I have a thing that I call problem inception where it's normal for me to start fixing one thing discover another thing in the process that also needs fixing and so on. I sometimes find myself four or five levels deep before being able to climb out and fix the thing that I was supposed to fix. It's fine. But it's hard to estimate and plan this. Solving hard problems is almost impossible without getting good at keeping track of such problem dependency graphs and getting structured about dealing with chaos and uncertainty.
Part of my process is another thing which I think of as "immersing myself in the problem" which boils down to embracing the chaos rather than trying to contain it. Patterns only emerge from chaos once you fully grasp it.
And another thing at play here is spatial memory. Your desk might look chaotic to others but once you have internalized the chaos, you kind of know where everything is. Chaos is just complexity you don't understand yet.
And sometimes there's just too much chaos and cleaning it up is actually exactly the right thing to do. I deal with technical debt and other gardening type issues when I get stuck. Often that unblocks me.
But the real advice here is "think about what you're doing". Any system, whether it's "clear your workspace" or "arrange absolutely everything so its visible" probably works, because you're acting deliberately.
I’ve been using a personal variation of this system for over 4 years now and it’s outstanding for me. I firmly believe that for the vast majority of people (myself included), working without a plan is one of the dumbest things they can do.
You ok?
Work surfaces are empty, unless work is in progress. Storage areas are for storage, don't mix. Consider access frequency and where you would look for it first, when choosing where to store items. When seeing something out of place while everything else is put away, it's a nice trigger and motivation for cleaning / fixing / organising. Otherwise I turn passive.
This applies to both starting projects, physical items / surfaces, digital spaces, inboxes and de-facto task lists of various types.
However, it sometimes feels almost like a compulsion, a way to procrastinate. "I cannot start unless all of is clean". Just looking for a sense control to manage the stress I may feel about a task or a situation.
For me it is hard to not think of an object (physical or virtual) when it is in front of you, so I need to keep my line of sight empty and only "see" the items I need to work on, or are otherwise immediately relevant. Depending on stress level this "need" may go deeper and I "want" to empty the other spaces as well, even the previous steps of the current project that I'm working on.
Is this making me less effective in messy environments or does the general stress reduction and focus help compensate for this?
Also, this approach doesn't seem to be as universally good as the article seems to express. Knowing a few people with diagnosed ADHD, I've understood that they also may have a different sense of object permanence.
For them, it may be hard to think of an object / item unless it is in front of them, so keeping all the "relevant" items at hand and in the line of sight is useful. Otherwise they may have trouble getting into the space mentally. Like people who tend to buy too much of a same item because they've forgotten they have a bunch in the cupboard.
In the same vein, at work I've also have had trouble getting other people to agree with having focused lists in our task system. For example, showing only the new items when we need to triage new things, or having a way to isolate (a specific status step) for items that got pushed back from the development to analysis and will need to be clarified.
Instead, they seem to prefer having longer lists to maintain a "full view" of what's going on. At the same time I see that some then do predictably get distracted and / or need to scan through the same items each time because they are in the same list. Not sure how to best deal with that so I've opted for isolation for now. I have my own filtered views and during the relevant meetings I bring them up so they can find them in their bigger lists manually. Perhaps they have a lot better mental filters than I do.
The balance could be to somehow start empty, but allow for the "mess" of relevant items during the project and periodically prune the old stuff without thinking too much how to deal with the in-progress things as they are volatile anyway.
Because I know that my downloads folder and my documents folder and my images folder and my source code folder are all enormous piles of crap.
And it does actually bother me, I just haven't thought of a solution to that.
One solution would be.. automated backups... and then every once in a while, just rm -rf ~
What kind of sick mind does it take to ensure a straight blog post requires Javascript?