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Comment by sph | Hacker News Reader

I agree with you both. This is why I decided to switch and master Emacs, and I've been diving deep into Lisp and other languages with a REPL like Erlang and Elixir. The quick iteration cycle requires little upfront investment in focus, and it's immediately rewarding to keep you in focus and enter a state of flow.

Our concentration is fickle, so streamlining is key.

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REPL is extremely helpful for me aswell, I normally just develop whole blocks in a REPL interpreter like nodejs or IPython. And just copy the working code to an IDE.

This, I write auto updating todo list cli tools for specialized tasks because I always lose focus when trying to reprioritize todo items, etc...

Don't spend too much time on your tools. A carpenter doesn't spend hours obsessing over screwdrivers. Reprioritizing todo items is not for people with ADHD, like most of other productivity hacks.

You need to write stuff down, use it as a guidelines to stay on track (hardest part), and tick it off. Everything else is waste of time that masquerades as "productivity hacks."

The goal is to outsource your list of things to do because you have a fallible memory, but the biggest goal is doing something that drives your life forward. Don't get stuck looking for the new productivity fad or rewriting your todo cli.

I spend a good amount of time on my tooling (too much? not sure), because fairly small amounts of friction can distract me for quite a while (long compilation, having to copy over files - it's especially bad when the step requires attention). Have it happen often enough and productivity approaches 0.

That's also my experience

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