Exactly! So happy to read you managed to pick up the core gist of the story.
It's important to find the tools that work best for YOU.
I partially wanted to write this because I've often felt as an outsider in tech teams where everyone sits at a computer 7.5 hours every day and I'm the one thinking better when I'm away from the screen and keyboard. So I wanted to offer an example to those who are like me and also feel like they might not belong.
I used computers for a lot longer than 7.5 hours a day. Doubly so since I got a home desktop with a tablet display and 3 other screens. I find that the reason why productivity in offices is so low is that:
1). The available screen real estate for doing work is tiny.
2). The tools people use have happy paths that force you to work a specific way.
3). Deep thinking is impossible with interruptions.
As an example of a tool which works best on computers, I've finally recreated the literate environment I used at a previous job on my own time and from scratch: https://olive-alayne-28.tiiny.site/
I can now work happily with Emacs in an environment that supports deep thinking about code instead of fighting with it every step of the way.
If you're interested [1] and [3] from that paper are great introductions to literate programming and noweb + emacs + synctex is by far the most pleasant IDE I've ever used.
I also can't rave enough about how well pen tablets work with xournalpp these days. I can take notes on top of multi-thousand page printouts of code bases and rearrange, doodle, remix, and add new pages wherever I feel like. Even five years ago there was no tool that would let you do that without the threat of a major crash is you wrote too fast.
Exactly! So happy to read you managed to pick up the core gist of the story.
It's important to find the tools that work best for YOU.
I partially wanted to write this because I've often felt as an outsider in tech teams where everyone sits at a computer 7.5 hours every day and I'm the one thinking better when I'm away from the screen and keyboard. So I wanted to offer an example to those who are like me and also feel like they might not belong.