Focus

Back in my twenties,I probably made the assertion that programming must be one of the most intense efforts of concentration and focus of just about any professional line of work. With age may come just a little bit of modesty and I wouldn't have claimed that later in life.

However, now that MS has made it so that maintaining focus and concentration have become some of my greatest challenges, I'm re-evaluating that. Drilling down into code, solving the problem, building the abstraction house of cards, is by far the hardest thing I'm trying to do right now. I have comparable difficulties in other areas but they differ in at least one critical aspect. Physical effort is hard because it's, well, hard. On the other hand it's the area where it's easiest to see the improvements, and it's incremental. If you pass an obstacle you've come closer to your goal.

Social interaction is incredibly tiring but at least it's self-driving. I do tend to nod off in conversations and I'm less active in discussions than I used to be, but at least it's situations that keep dragging one back in.

On the other hand, if a coder nods off, the code just sits there. You have to maintain focus through an effort of will. And that's frickin hard. I'm sure there are situations that are just as hard for others, like writing for instance. For me writing is pretty effortless but coding requires a level of concentration that is very hard to maintain. Keeping focus on writing for a long period of time would be similarly hard but at least in the short term, maintaining visual focus and staying awake are the bigger obstacles.