[xyzzy123]

I found for me that when I unpacked it, a surprising amount of it was actually fear / anxiety. I know this isn't a post seeking answers but it's a thing I've battled a lot of my life.

It's trite but I've gotten a lot of value out of LLMs for getting past the "blank page effect". It doesn't matter if it generates complete garbage, something in my brain goes "this is garbage!" and before I know it I'm working on the thing. The general technique is "just do the smallest possible thing".

Another one is narrowing focus to just 1 thing to reduce overwhelm. Ideally on the most important thing! Otherwise your background fear will actually go up while you are working on the "filler task".

Finally, trying my best to communicate well and greatly reduce expectations. For me an important piece of the puzzle was that I expected more from myself than anyone else actually did (or even needed). So I have been consistently trying to scope down every commitment and promise WAY less. I actually feel like my execution has improved a lot as a result.

Am I great? Not really. Am I able to keep functioning day to day and slog through a soul crushing corpo job? Yeah, for now at least.

Also certain teams / situations will trigger this more than others. Teams with great task tracking, clear expectations and a culture of discussion tend to reduce anxiety for me. While it's risky to recommend changing jobs or teams to "fix things", sometimes that's really all that's needed.

[kingstnap]

LLMs have introduced a lot of reading slop into the mix. But they definitely help when you don't feel like typing and can just describe the problem at hand.

I'm hoping better sleep helps with the activation energy / anxiety.