Working on scattered days

Don't give up. You might be distracted but keep at it. That way you give yourself a much higher chance of a "good hallucination" happening

This is a delayed post, coming almost a week late. But better late than never, i guess!

Thursday was a rather scattered day. Maybe it was a combination of lifting fairly heavy on Wednesday morning, and not sleeping well enough that night, but I found myself unable to focus that day. It was what I like to call as a “high ADHD day” (I know I shut my ADHD blog recently saying it wasn’t helping me, but I need to write this one).

When I broke for lunch around noon, I rated my work in the first half at a 2 out of 5 (have I told you I have an Excel where I track these things every day?). There wasn’t anything that I’d been able to really “get started” with. I did routine admin tasks, like replying to people on slack and email. There was nothing of initiative I could do. If there was any task that needed my sustained attention for a period of time, I would be unable to get started. It didn’t help that I was logged in to Twitter, and kept checking it as I tried to “work”.

Now, the conventional wisdom on a day like this is to simply cut losses and move on. That I hadn’t been able to focus meant suggested that I wasn’t going to achieve anything that day, and so it would be a good day to do some other stuff (such as reading a book, for example), or get some karma by doing some household chores (it was my wife’s turn to pick up the kids from school that day, but I could have volunteered).

But for whatever reason, I ignored temptations to do these and soldiered on. I just sat at my desk, staring at some codes and documents. Over a period of time, I remembered that there was an email I had not responded to. In my highly distracted state, i started reading that email. And then it started making sense in a way that it hadn’t before.

I have frequently written about how the thing with ADHD is that it helps you connect seemingly unconnected things. Basically you hallucinate a bit more, because seemingly unrelated thoughts cross in your head. And while people might associate a negative sentiment to the word “hallucination” (thanks to LLMs), I strongly believe that hallucinations are a massive source of creativity.

I possibly took longer to read that email than I usually would. But in that distracted state that day, wires crossed with other thoughts I had had that day .And that led to some very interesting thoughts. Soon those thoughts turned into a breakthrough in terms of a problem I’d been looking to solve at work for several days. There was amazing clarity!

And I continued to plod on, on various aspects of work (cycling through all of them, since I was still unable to focus). Another short WhatsApp conversation (this time with a customer) led to another massive insight, and an item in my todo list (I’d figured out how to solve a problem, though I hadn’t solved it yet).

In the course of an hour, where I continued to be distracted, my day had gone from a 2 (pre-lunch) to a 5 (post-lunch). I may not have written much (or any) code that day. I may not have done any customer calls that day. But I made sufficient breakthroughs in different parts of work to mark that out as a massively successful day, at least the second half!

It was all a result of defying intuition - when things don’t seem to be going well, your instinct is to cut your losses and move on. Here, because the reason they were not going well was my distraction, by sticking on to work, I managed to solve problems that I may have never solved had I not worked in a distracted state!

Putting it another way, and correlating it with one of my most seminal blogposts, which I will be talking about in a soon-forthcoming blogpost, stud work is possibly actually better done in a distracted state, than when trying to focus very hard. Fighter work, of course, requires focus.

The key, however, is that even if you can do better stud work when in a distracted state, you need to spend a long time at work. That gives you a much better chance of getting that “good hallucination” right. This is the essence of my 2004 talk on how “quality takes time” (this was in business school, as an assignment for a course on Managerial Communicatino).