However, in my experience this approach has one big problem: certain events (changing continents, moving, sickness, finished milestones) completely unravel my productivity for weeks or months. Once I lose the streak it's very hard to get back on track.
I either have to rebuild a new routine step by step or just procrastinate long enough until I've found a new project I can build my work day around. These periods can last several months.
Has anyone come up with strategies to cope with such breaks?
For example, in my system, "travel to X continent" is itself a project, existing alongside multiple other projects. I find this pretty helpful not just for staying in motion, but also for avoiding that sense of guilt that I haven't been productive on days when I'm dealing with these kinds of environmental change. It's a reframing: "It's not that I've been unproductive while moving. It's that I have been productive on my moving project."
I wrote about it a long time ago on my old blog when I first started using it, and dug up the link. Sorry for broken images, etc:
https://hackthesystem.com/blog/the-bet-switch-mechanism-the-...
I’ve noticed this my entire life and tried to fight it and have been mostly unsuccessful. Now I see it as an opportunity to build a new, more resilient structure in my life.
Some habits and routines seem to stick around even after big events. Some don’t. Thinking about why this is the case has been a bit illuminating for me . Also, I find those big events also help get rid of bad habits as well.
Lots and lots of material out there about this type of process in industrial process design circles, a lot of which is suitable for soft production processes like software development.
Plan: Recognize an opportunity and plan a change.
Do: Test the change. Carry out a small-scale study.
Check: Review the test, analyze the results, and identify what you’ve learned.
Act: Take action based on what you learned in the study step. If the change did not work, go through the cycle again with a different plan. If you were successful, incorporate what you learned from the test into wider changes. Use what you learned to plan new improvements, beginning the cycle again.
Presumably the original PDCA has some good if applied correctly - I haven’t studied it, but have heard good things.
But the "innovation" (if that's not too strong of a word) in the nested plan-do-learn loop is that it's explicitly engineered for someone's personal life routine, rather than, say, the development of an external product or service.
Can't really choose what app to use, though. My go to choice for now is a vim and plain text file. But I'd love to have iCloud sync + smart features (like grepping over todos) out of the box. I use Obsidian for the second brain, and it looks like a great choice for interstitial journalling, but their app is an Electron :( Apple Notes seems like a great choice for iOS/Mac, but close source and I can't even find an easy way to automatically insert time. Notion is a great thing too for this, but, again, too web based.
Another thing I've found is that externalizing my plans takes a little stress off my working memory, which is also somewhat diminished in people with ADHD.
