Just a quick dump of what I've been thinking recently:

• A train of thought is a sequence of thoughts about a particular topic that lasts for some time, which may produce results in the form of decisions and updated beliefs.

• My work, as a technical co-founder of a software company, essentially consists of riding the right trains of thought and documenting decisions that arise during the ride.

• Akrasia, in my case, means that I'm riding the wrong train of thougt.

• Distraction means some outside stimulus that compels my mind to hop to a different train of thought that my mind is currently riding or should be riding. The stimuli can be anything: people talking to me, a news story, a sexually attractive person across the street, an advertisement, etc.

• Some train rides are long: they last for hours, days or even weeks, while some are short and last for seconds or minutes. Historically, I've done my best work on very long rides.

• Different trains of thoughts have different 'ticket costs'. Hopping to a sex-related or a politics-related train of thought is extremely cheap. Caching a big chunk of a problem into my mind requires consciois effort, and thus the ticket is more expensive. In my case, the right trains of thought are usually expensive.

• Interruptions set back the distance traveled, or, in some cases, completely reset the distance to the original departure station. Or they may switch me to a different train of thought completely, while, at the same time, depleting the resource (willpower?) that I need for boarding the correct train of thought.

• My not-so-recent decision to stop reading peoplenews has greatly reduced the number and severity of unwanted / involuntary train hops.

• My "superfocus periods", during which I'm able to ride a single right train of thought for multiple days or weeks, are mostly due to the absence of stimuli that compel my mind to jump to different, cheaper trains of thought. These periods happen when I'm away from work and sometimes from my family, which means I can safely drop my everyday duties such as showing up in the office, doing errands, replying emails, meeting people etc.

• Keeping a detailed work diary is tremendously helpful for re-boarding the right train of thought after severe interruptions / "cache wipes". I use Workflowy.

• I noticed that I'm reluctant about boarding long rides when I expect interruptions during the ride. Recent examples include reluctance about reading Bostrom's Superintelligence at home, or reluctance about 'loading' a large piece of project into my head at work, because my office iss full of programmers that ask (completely legitimate) questions about their current tasks.