"The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day when you are writing a novel you will never be stuck. That is the most valuable thing I can tell you so try to remember it." - Ernest Hemingway, advice to a young writer in 1935 article in Esquire

I wanna live in that world vs kids and coworkers yell fire and their urgent request isn't actually urgent but now I'm outta the zone. Seems like you're describing an idealism.

Ideally, sure I'd fend off these attention suitors and get to them once I hit a stopping point. Love my job and my kids but this triggered me a lil bit. Somewhere along the line I feel like I just became battle hardened into actually accomplishing things regardless. Just a lot of picking up the pieces of context and ideally I left myself notes (e.g park facing downhill, a good mantra)

This is the way. I stop working with tests passing but write a context comment on whats to be done next. It’s like flushing my working memory.

On the other hand it can be helpful, in my experience, to stop right in the middle of a very hard problem, where you are still searching for a good solution. Come the next morning I often know at least a possible solution, without having worked on it consciously.

It’s crazy the degree to which the subconscious mind chews on problems it’s been given. I never even dream about the problem in question but pretty consistently sleeping on friction points like that will clear them in short order the next morning. It’s almost kind of spooky, like there’s a second person in my head burning the midnight oil.

I wonder how much of it is also about getting out of a local maxima... you are pursuing a specific solution, and are exploring the end of a long chain of choices you made on how to approach it... and starting over again the next day clears out all those choices, letting you maybe discover a better solution that was on a different branch of the decision tree.

The risk with this is that you keep procrastinating away before getting going again. It's the anticipated pain of frustration that prevents you from starting. Not so much if your idle time generated a solution to the problem. But if it didn't, then you are in trouble.

This is an underrated comment. Not only this, but there are some micromanaged environments that make this impossible and you're immediately hit in the face with a meeting first thing in the morning that destroys any energy you might have had to continue after being asked several ways if it's "done yet".

I've been 60 minutes of focused work away from wrapping up this current ticket for the past two days. Too exhausted to get going in the morning before meetings and interruptions kill my productivity for the day. Usually I start work two hours before the workday actually starts because context switching and meetings drain me, and deep work won't get done otherwise. The curse of ADHD.

I already know I don't have ADHD, so I can tell you it might not be your ADHD. It's not that you're ruminating about what they asked, but that they all keep asking you because they use you as their syncing mechanism and must repeat yourself to several people. Effectively just as bad for productivity.

Morning meetings are a deliberate tactic. Middle management needs answers for their next meeting which is also right after yours in the morning.

The people who get to have meetings at the very end of the day are at the top of the hierarchy, and guess what? They got their work done!

If there was ever a real example of inequality that should be fixed (fuck all that DEI shit) this would be it. Work from home actually massively reduced this meeting train crap at my workplace, but they just found other ways to annoy people. It's still an improvement though.

Yeah, you have to give it a solid effort for this to work. On day two if it's not solved yet, you have to give another solid effort before resting.

I'm not sure if in this scenario it's an option to solve the problem on the first go. Usually when I hit this scenario, I am simply unable to do it in the first place, but the next day is easy.

Right. Or you try to break it down into subproblems which may be easier to solve. And those are then candidates for the downhill parking on-ramp for next day.

Well, if it did work, and you have a good solution the next morning there will be no reason to procrastinate.

In uni there were a few times where I'd spend 12 hours solving assignment problems. At EOD I still had maybe half unsolved, although I'd tried to solve them all. Next morning in the 30 minutes I had before class, I quickly solve all the problems before handing it in.

Oh, another time for algorithms assignment, I am up until 5am or so. Still had 2/5 problems left unsolved (but again I had tried to solve them). I go for coffee at the student center, oops it's not 24/7. I take a light nap in the student center waiting for the coffee place to open up. Full on REM dream problem solving occurs. A couple hours later I awake knowing full well how to solve the 2 remaining problems. I grab my coffee and leave to write up the solutions.

Sleep really helps.

can't tell you how many great solutions appeared in my head in those moments when you're awake before getting out of bed.

Came here to say this, can also be called "leaving a little in the tank"