Some great tips and tactics here. I think it's worth describing the end-state you might be shooting for which those tactics can help with.
From what I'm reading, I think you're looking for the ability to deeply immerse in problems when the time is right.
When you're deeply immersed or in a flow state, your conscious and unconscious are completely aligned on a common goal. In fact, your conscious mind participates less and less in the tasks - only providing high-level strategy notions to your work, letting your subconscious tactical problem solving, recall and muscle memory do the work of getting the solution out into the world.
When it's working:
- your working memory (i.e. the classic 7+/-2 figure from psychology) is filled with the task at hand, and nothing else. Not only are you not thinking about other things, but you also have no doubts or second thoughts about what you're doing or how you are doing it.
- you have short feedback loops in place, letting your brain's pattern recognition work effectively.
- you have all of the tools you need at hand to solve the problem, and don't need to switch tasks to build/acquire them.
When you're in this state, you don't need a dopamine rush from anything else - you're caught up in in the problem, and don't need something to synthesize the excitement of discovery. You're getting that from the task!
Conversely, some examples of how it can break down:
- The steps required to reproduce your test conditions overflow your working memory, especially when decisions or analysis is required. Any conscious thought put towards the steps to recreate a test case is a task switch away from the problem you're solving. You might want to invest in scripts to automate some or all of the work.
- you're not sure if your approach is the right one. Now you're spending some of your problem solving energy on the "meta-problem" of how best to solve the problem. Take a moment to prove to yourself that the approach is at least worth investing in and then move forward.
Finally, know that deep immersion has its own drawbacks! Most importantly, while deep into solving one problem, it's easy to "over-invest" by going down the wrong path. For now, you might consider that a good problem to have and a sign of success at acquiring this skill. Honing the skill of choosing between the two approaches is level 2 ;)
From what I'm reading, I think you're looking for the ability to deeply immerse in problems when the time is right.
When you're deeply immersed or in a flow state, your conscious and unconscious are completely aligned on a common goal. In fact, your conscious mind participates less and less in the tasks - only providing high-level strategy notions to your work, letting your subconscious tactical problem solving, recall and muscle memory do the work of getting the solution out into the world.
When it's working:
- your working memory (i.e. the classic 7+/-2 figure from psychology) is filled with the task at hand, and nothing else. Not only are you not thinking about other things, but you also have no doubts or second thoughts about what you're doing or how you are doing it.
- you have short feedback loops in place, letting your brain's pattern recognition work effectively.
- you have all of the tools you need at hand to solve the problem, and don't need to switch tasks to build/acquire them.
When you're in this state, you don't need a dopamine rush from anything else - you're caught up in in the problem, and don't need something to synthesize the excitement of discovery. You're getting that from the task!
Conversely, some examples of how it can break down:
- The steps required to reproduce your test conditions overflow your working memory, especially when decisions or analysis is required. Any conscious thought put towards the steps to recreate a test case is a task switch away from the problem you're solving. You might want to invest in scripts to automate some or all of the work.
- you're not sure if your approach is the right one. Now you're spending some of your problem solving energy on the "meta-problem" of how best to solve the problem. Take a moment to prove to yourself that the approach is at least worth investing in and then move forward.
Finally, know that deep immersion has its own drawbacks! Most importantly, while deep into solving one problem, it's easy to "over-invest" by going down the wrong path. For now, you might consider that a good problem to have and a sign of success at acquiring this skill. Honing the skill of choosing between the two approaches is level 2 ;)