Team environments contain lots of activities (meetings, answering questions, reports, etc) which are quite tricky because they’re *sometimes* very valuable. And that makes it easy not to notice when you’re only doing them to hide when feeling aversion to tough creative problems.
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I’ve noticed that displacement activities are much more obvious when working alone. There’s no mailing list of questions to answer, so hiding often look more like surfing the internet, cleaning the house, etc. It’s much harder to accidentally convince yourself that that’s work!
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It’s funny: if I get into a good awareness state while in the middle of some tough creative work, I can feel a noticeable “baud rate” of aversive impulses, graspings for easy escapes, etc. Many times a minute! Usually can’t de-identify enough to see that.
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Like the past few minutes, while I’ve been intending to read some very dense 19th century psychology papers, I suddenly felt it was very important to write on Twitter about a totally unrelated topic. w̸̩͊h̴̻̔a̴̲̎t̴̼̔ ̵̝͘ả̴̧ ̸͕̿s̶̭͊u̴͔̽r̸͎͝p̵̖͂r̵̥̂i̶̻͆s̵̉ͅe̵̺͝
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It's astounding how fast my fingers can type "cmd-tab, cmd-T, tw, enter" when I'm working through some particularly difficult part of a problem.
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I used 200mg modafinil daily for ~15mo (prescribed for treatment-resistant sleep issues, now better), and it did seem to substantially improve the quality of my focus. Sometimes this was bad: I’d go down crazy rabbit holes and not notice. Some notes:
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