
Ask HN: How do you get back the ability to concentrate? - madamelf
I can&#x27;t focus on anything except for completing my duties as a programmer at my job. 
All my side project ideas remain just ideas and I never get started with them. I have probably started and completed 20% of numerous books, articles etc.
I procrastinate like a crazy person on all my side project&#x2F;learning tasks. 
Even(if ever) I get started, I can focus for like 15 mins before my mind wanders off.
Has anyone come from this situation and gone on to be generally a productive person? 
If so, please share your insights and experience.
======
meric
It's fine. If your mind wanders off after 15 minutes then the idea wasn't that
interesting anyway. There's no requirement in life to be more productive than
necessary. Spend your time to enjoy it and go wherever your mind wanders off
to. Forcing yourself to concentrate is just sending yourself a message you
needed to be forced to work on the idea, which is counterproductive if you
want to work on your ideas. If the idea has potential, it'll come back, your
mind will keep expanding on the idea, until it's interesting enough for you
spend a whole day on it.

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MilnerRoute
I know a lot of people who are very smart and who also have ADHD. (There's
this theory that this combination may be more common in the computer science
industry.) Honestly, for those people it was a relief just to recognize that
their brain was just wired a certain way - so they could stop beating
themselves up over the way it behaved.

Another thing that's helpful for concentration is just getting enough sleep,
enough exercise, and enough healthy foods. (Alan Turing used to run marathons,
and a healthy heart does pump more oxygen to your brain...) :) This also can
help burn off any leftover stress from a hard day of programming... (It's
always good to get outside and relax for a bit.)

~~~
madamelf
I have never got myself diagnosed to see if I have ADHD.Is ADHD a real
disorder(genuinely curious here)?

~~~
davelnewton
Of course it is.

It's also wildly over-diagnosed. There are physiological reasons it can exist;
there are also environmental reasons the _symptoms_ can exist.

~~~
madamelf
Can you elaborate on environmental reasons which leads to symptoms existing?

~~~
davelnewton
If you're in a distractive environment you'll tend to pick that up. E.g.,
skimming internet articles and comments. If you don't work in a place where
you must focus on multiple tasks. If people around you are scattered and
unfocused. If you use external stimuli for arousal (food, TV, internet,
whatever). Etc.

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yannis
Just hang in there. Your mind and gut feeling is trying to tell you where you
should be going. Try writing down "where" your mind wanders off and see if you
can identify the "why".

Don't worry and there is not a single programmer that cannot "concentrate".
You probably got stuck in a job that demotivates you with possibly the wrong
people around you.

You can also try and get active with something that has nothing to do with
your main work, i.e, a hobby such as photography and see if it helps.

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Jugurtha
Hello,

I've suffered a lot from this and I'm making progress. Here are some things
that have helped:

a - Having a notebook with ideas and what I want to learn and my thoughts on
stuff with _dates_. The date is a slap on the face to remind me how much time
I lost to indecision. "Indecision is a decision".

An example: I wanted to brush up on my Maths and Physics (to have a stonger
core). I started wondering which book would be best to read first and all the
"ooh, look at this one.. Oooh, that one looks great" that goes with it. I
started reading them chicken style (a bit of that one, a bit of that other
one).

Before I knew it, months have gone by and I have accomplished nothing at all.
I spent too much time doing everything but the very thing that I set out to
do, forgetting three things:

1 - If I am as serious as I think I am, I would eventually read them all so
why does it matter so much which one I read first?.

2 - In that period, I could have read them all if I had just picked one,
finished it, and picked another to finish it too.

3- Parallelism is easier in love and reading many books on different topics
than in reading books on the same topic.

This has taught me a lot about myself: I'm a smartass who wants to find a
shorter path than a line segment(ooh, let's go ninja and bend the fabric of
time).

Then again, Blaise Pascal once said: "I have only made this letter longer
because I didn't have the leisure to make it shorter".

b - For the specific problem of reading books, completion, and retention:
taking notes is helping tremendously. I used to either read without taking
notes (still do when it's a book that I can somehow digest on the fly) or take
notes with pen and paper and lose them later. I still scribble with a pen but
also using LaTeX to write notes in the "Cornell format".

Here are my notes on a course called "Introduction to Marketing":
[https://j.mp/mrktgnts](https://j.mp/mrktgnts). When it's organized and neat
like this and easily found, I find myself taking the thing more seriously and
wanting to complete the book, etc.

Plus, from now on, I can share my notes on books I read, etc.

Another advantage of this format is that long after you have finished the
book, you can test yourself by covering the right side (blue boxes) and trying
to answer the questions in the red ones, instead of re-reading the whole book.

~~~
madamelf
"ooh, let's go ninja and bend the fabric of time" pretty much sums it up
perfectly, for me its not enough to spend time learning something. I have this
useless obsession with doing it the best possible way and not getting started
in a reasonable fashion.

Btw,your notes look fantastic. I also did 20% of the intro to marketing
course(surprise!). But the reason I dropped out of that was I thought there
would be some internet marketing involved but there was none. While on the
topic, I do have a surprisingly good track record of completing moocs.

I would like to get in further touch with you and talk about this in detail.
If you are interested let me know your email.

I can't post mine here since this is a throwaway/anonymous account.:)

~~~
Jugurtha
Yeah, they do look slick. Fran and Joe Corneli from TeX StackExchange did a
good job.

Mine is jugurtha dot hadjar at gmail dot com.

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davelnewton
Practice.

Just like everything else, really.

