[Hamatti]

OP here.

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.

[noosphr]

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.