The ADHD Programmer in Middle Age...
Oct. 21st, 2008 09:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsSigh. This is gonna be whiny.
What the Hell is wrong with me? I seem to be completely unable to concentrate on anything for very long. This really came to a head recently when I read Warren Ellis' article on where ideas came from. After talking about doing the real world thing, about reading and living and that One Moment when the story comes to you, he wrote:
I was playing the other day with a to-do manager. I know I shouldn't do that; I have a perfectly good system on paper that works just fine. But I can't help the temptations of the electronica and its shininess, so I was playing with it. Wrestling is more like it, though, because the thing sucked: it didn't have contextualizations, and it was really hard to isolate down what to do "at home" or "at the office" or "at the computer", like David says you should.
I had thoughts like "It would be nice if this thing had a search function!" and "In the real world we don't categorize things at a certain scale; we tag them!" And then, in that brilliant bolt of heat and light that Ellis describes, the entire thing fell out of my head. I grabbed the nearest notebook and began scribbling. I threw out one sheet, then another, then another. By the fifth sheet I had a working UML Client-Server Logical View and a pretty good idea of the UML Class Diagram for the first-pass SQL database on the sixth. I realized I was actually designing a generic system, and branched it out into three different ideas: a single-user to-do system with a variable dating structure for pending and immanent tasks; a multi-user to-do system with a variable dating structure and a rich interface; a multi-user to-do system with a tagging and search system. I realized what I'd been doing wrong with my design of Consilience and fixed it.
As I was suffused with this holy fire, a first-pass implementation rumbled through my head. I had been reading up on Django and Dojo recently, and finally had found the perfect excuse.
And then I realized I would actually have to write the damn things. I'd have to find a graphic art theme for them. (My brain says "Ben Franklin! Zombies! iUI!") I'd have to put them up somewhere, let other people bash on them, and maybe someday I'd even market them.
And that just seemed like work.
See, and I do this shit with writing, too. I get a great idea and I write it down, and then I realize I have to write a whole freakin' story around the idea to make it work, to bring it to life. I have to write out the the characters getting to the story so I can learn to live with them as more than mere stereotypes (and believe me, Linia & Misuko have been on my ass all month to get to their next novel) boinking away on page after page.
Maybe it's just age. I don't see the reward anymore, especially not of converting my efforts into commercial ventures. The writing isn't going to bring in income, and it's not getting me laid nearly as often as it did a decade ago-- and I wouldn't have the personal time to enjoy it even if offers were flowing in. And the programming, while fun, is also work: it's what I do at the office.
And the GTD people always tell you that the real secret is to "just start." Yeah, I try that. My hard-drive is littered with projects I "just started," but never got around to finishing.
How do you do it?
What the Hell is wrong with me? I seem to be completely unable to concentrate on anything for very long. This really came to a head recently when I read Warren Ellis' article on where ideas came from. After talking about doing the real world thing, about reading and living and that One Moment when the story comes to you, he wrote:
For that brief moment where it's all flaring and welding together, you are Holy. You can't be touched. Something impossible and brilliant has happened and suddenly you understand what it would be like if Einstein's brain was placed into the body of a young tyrannosaur, stuffed full of amphetamines and suffused with Sex Radiation.No shit, Warren.
That is what has happened to me tonight. I am beaming Sex Rays across the world and my brain is all lit up with Holy Fire. If I felt like it, I could shag a million nuns and destroy their faith in Christ.
I was playing the other day with a to-do manager. I know I shouldn't do that; I have a perfectly good system on paper that works just fine. But I can't help the temptations of the electronica and its shininess, so I was playing with it. Wrestling is more like it, though, because the thing sucked: it didn't have contextualizations, and it was really hard to isolate down what to do "at home" or "at the office" or "at the computer", like David says you should.
I had thoughts like "It would be nice if this thing had a search function!" and "In the real world we don't categorize things at a certain scale; we tag them!" And then, in that brilliant bolt of heat and light that Ellis describes, the entire thing fell out of my head. I grabbed the nearest notebook and began scribbling. I threw out one sheet, then another, then another. By the fifth sheet I had a working UML Client-Server Logical View and a pretty good idea of the UML Class Diagram for the first-pass SQL database on the sixth. I realized I was actually designing a generic system, and branched it out into three different ideas: a single-user to-do system with a variable dating structure for pending and immanent tasks; a multi-user to-do system with a variable dating structure and a rich interface; a multi-user to-do system with a tagging and search system. I realized what I'd been doing wrong with my design of Consilience and fixed it.
As I was suffused with this holy fire, a first-pass implementation rumbled through my head. I had been reading up on Django and Dojo recently, and finally had found the perfect excuse.
And then I realized I would actually have to write the damn things. I'd have to find a graphic art theme for them. (My brain says "Ben Franklin! Zombies! iUI!") I'd have to put them up somewhere, let other people bash on them, and maybe someday I'd even market them.
And that just seemed like work.
See, and I do this shit with writing, too. I get a great idea and I write it down, and then I realize I have to write a whole freakin' story around the idea to make it work, to bring it to life. I have to write out the the characters getting to the story so I can learn to live with them as more than mere stereotypes (and believe me, Linia & Misuko have been on my ass all month to get to their next novel) boinking away on page after page.
Maybe it's just age. I don't see the reward anymore, especially not of converting my efforts into commercial ventures. The writing isn't going to bring in income, and it's not getting me laid nearly as often as it did a decade ago-- and I wouldn't have the personal time to enjoy it even if offers were flowing in. And the programming, while fun, is also work: it's what I do at the office.
And the GTD people always tell you that the real secret is to "just start." Yeah, I try that. My hard-drive is littered with projects I "just started," but never got around to finishing.
How do you do it?
