So as y'all know, I am bad bad bad BAD at staying consistent at doing stuff. I already wrote how I'm building up the habit of working on stuff (so far I am two for two days!), but I also need to hack my brain for hobbies, notably game dev.

So I am trying this thing where I play Torchlight 2 and for every level up I actually do (which according to game stats is about every ten minutes or so), I do 10 minutes of game dev, either working on Godot itself or thinking and making notes.

And the smart thing, I think, is that I don't do that every 10 minutes or whatever, or whenever I level up in the game. Because that'd be disruptive and it'd actually make me resent the switch and my brain would actually keep sliding off of the game dev tasks.

Instead I switch only after actually spending the character and skill points. Which means if I want to keep playing I just don't do that every level, and also it happens whenever there's no actual action in the game, AND I switch to Godot every time I get that dopamine boost from Number Go Up. In practice, I leveled up usually every two levels or so, then worked for 20+ minutes.

I tried this approach today. It worked well, at least this first time!

I got a good 50+ minutes of honest work out of this. Not just staring at the screen and doing nothing, either. Properly moving forward.

I didn't *make* much, but I definitely moved forward.

I didn't exactly chomp at the bit to work rather than play, but my brain was sufficiently poked and prodded that I never got bored. And by the time the 10 or 20 minutes of working were up, I often felt this "I am almost there, maybe a few minutes" impulse which primed my brain to return to the work several minutes later.

It worked surprisingly well, is what I'm saying.

I don't think it'll work indefinitely because the ADHD brain adapts to things and once it stops seeing novelty in this switching up, it will probably start avoiding it too.

But for now I think it's a brilliant approach for me specifically.

Plus, it helps me avoid that behaviour loop where I level up and I immediately want to play just a little bit with the higher stats or the newly available weapon or whatever, and of course then I want to play until a level up or two, and I end up sinking hours into the game.

(and as a person who once scrolled TikTok for 14 hours straight... yeah.)

No, whenever I feel this Skinner Box pull to continue is when I stop and do something else, and that short-circuits the bad behaviour to an extent.