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Lately I've been using timers daily

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Re: Lately I've been using timers daily

#101

Post by akhosravian »

Swizec wrote: post #61
akhosravian wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry to be that guy, but IME the fidgety & anxious feeling is almost always some need in one’s life that is being unmet. If you sit with that feeling it often becomes clear exactly what the source is. YMMV especially if you’ve experienced some serious trauma.

Oh from what I've read it's probably just undiagnosed ADD (for me).

FWIW I am diagnosed ADHD (from childhood) and the whole thing that got me to start sitting with the fidgety feeling is the calmness that came out of the first time I sat for 10 minutes felt identical to the effect of stimulant medications for treating my symptoms.

Re: Lately I've been using timers daily

#102

Post by akhosravian »

rubicon33 wrote: post #82
akhosravian wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry to be that guy, but IME the fidgety & anxious feeling is almost always some need in one’s life that is being unmet. If you sit with that feeling it often becomes clear exactly what the source is. YMMV especially if you’ve experienced some serious trauma.

I’m, yea… it is completely clear what the “source” is. I need to MOVE. I was not made to sit in silence and do nothing. I was born to move, physically. After a long run, some weights, etc… I can sit and focus or be in silence. To me the ability to sit in silence is just a test to see if you’re in a settled state.

Nice glad that works for you. My language was vague because the unease can come from a lot of different things. Needing exercise or food, being mad about something that happened, processing loss (of family or a job), wanting to connect or reconnect with someone, having ideas for a project I’d like to get going on are a few examples of things that have cone up for me.

Re: Lately I've been using timers daily

#103

Post by mlok »

TechBro8615 wrote: post #96
voytec wrote: post #53

I call my "timer" a "nagger" and use it via a shell nagme() function. Takes care of certain ADHD traits which were previously causing "refocusing" during unpleasant tasks, like emptying the washing machine (half or less clothes would go to the dryer and half would stay in the washing machine while I'd switch to other task). I learned to only turn off the nagger after completing a task and it works. It's used not just…

This reminds me of a feature I had enabled on my previous computer but hadn't enabled on my current one yet: having MacOS announce the time on the hour. Sometimes it would scare the crap out of me, but it was effective at breaking me out of the periodic trance state that's so easy to fall into. I think I'll enable that again...

Here (in France) I hear the nearby church bells announce the time every hour and quarters of an hour.

Re: Lately I've been using timers daily

#104

Post by stevekemp »

mlok wrote: post #103
TechBro8615 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of a feature I had enabled on my previous computer but hadn't enabled on my current one yet: having MacOS announce the time on the hour. Sometimes it would scare the crap out of me, but it was effective at breaking me out of the periodic trance state that's so easy to fall into. I think I'll enable that again...

Here (in France) I hear the nearby church bells announce the time every hour and quarters of an hour.

I grew up living next to a convent, and the nuns who lived there had a bell that would be rung every hour.

After moving away from that house I would sleep incredibly badly, and I always wondered if I was waking throughout the night "surprised" at the absence of the bell, which I'd otherwise heard every day of my life.

Re: Lately I've been using timers daily

#105

Post by gima »

a_petrov wrote: post #100
saeranv wrote: post #80

Off topic, but just wanted to say I love the way this guy has repurposed a github repo to be a blog. One of the most effective integration of aesthetics and functionality of minimalism I've seen.

That's what I was thinking too. I'm pretty confident you can actually write and publish an open-source book on github. I love how simple markdown is and how covers most of my writing use cases.

Btw github supports more than just markdown: https://github.com/github/markup#markups

Re: Lately I've been using timers daily

#106

Post by kgwxd »

mlok wrote: post #103
TechBro8615 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of a feature I had enabled on my previous computer but hadn't enabled on my current one yet: having MacOS announce the time on the hour. Sometimes it would scare the crap out of me, but it was effective at breaking me out of the periodic trance state that's so easy to fall into. I think I'll enable that again...

Here (in France) I hear the nearby church bells announce the time every hour and quarters of an hour.

I despise church bells. Hourly is bad enough but every 15 minutes? Imagine if any other entity decided they could just blast their theme song loud enough for the entire town to hear every 15 minutes. There’d be immediate uprising.

Re: Lately I've been using timers daily

#107

Post by surprisetalk »

voytec wrote: post #53

I call my "timer" a "nagger" and use it via a shell nagme() function. Takes care of certain ADHD traits which were previously causing "refocusing" during unpleasant tasks, like emptying the washing machine (half or less clothes would go to the dryer and half would stay in the washing machine while I'd switch to other task). I learned to only turn off the nagger after completing a task and it works. It's used not just…

I integrated nagging timers into a scheduling system!

It prints out pretty charts :)

I was hoping to open-source it this month, but I'm swamped with work. Maybe next month haha

[1] https://taylor.town/nowify

Re: Lately I've been using timers daily

#108

Post by unfamiliar »

surprisetalk wrote: post #107
voytec wrote: post #53

I call my "timer" a "nagger" and use it via a shell nagme() function. Takes care of certain ADHD traits which were previously causing "refocusing" during unpleasant tasks, like emptying the washing machine (half or less clothes would go to the dryer and half would stay in the washing machine while I'd switch to other task). I learned to only turn off the nagger after completing a task and it works. It's used not just…

I integrated nagging timers into a scheduling system! It prints out pretty charts :) I was hoping to open-source it this month, but I'm swamped with work. Maybe next month haha [1] https://taylor.town/nowify

Please do open-source this, it would be very useful for me.

Re: Lately I've been using timers daily

#109

Post by bitL »

Carrok wrote: post #69
bitL wrote: post #64

Taking a break from work and just going for a walk/bike ride in a forest or visiting some interesting place while traveling and working remotely often gave me really great ideas that helped me to solve problems at hand much faster than sitting in an office, fighting with a problem. Like what would take me a week to solve was often done in a day when changing scenery.

Very much so. I have solved far more tricky problems on a chair lift at a ski area than I have in an office chair.

Former colleagues told me about a guy who went fishing on a lake and got an idea how to solve some distributed system problem there, then came back, wrote a system using water level, bubbles and fish names and called it an aquarium or something. It worked well for the next decade.

Re: Lately I've been using timers daily

#110

Post by toastercat »

saeranv wrote: post #80

Off topic, but just wanted to say I love the way this guy has repurposed a github repo to be a blog. One of the most effective integration of aesthetics and functionality of minimalism I've seen.

In a similar vein, the developer of BYTEPATH used to use Github issues as their blog. I also thought it was clever. You even get a commenting and reaction system for free!

https://github.com/a327ex/blog/issues

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