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> However, if I discover I need to look something up, a hard block on internet access would be a problem.

When I'm in "writing mode", I forbid myself from doing quick lookups, because I can almost never stick to the "quick" part of the process, and end up chasing rabbits. Instead, I just put something like (verify) or (research to confirm yay/nay) while writing, and move on to what I can do in the moment. Then much later do I go through with a "editor" mindset and address all those things in one go, rather than in the moment.

I guess kind of like picking work into a queue rather than doing it immediately, and leaving it hanging until I can work through the entire queue in one go.





The old timey trick is to write “TK”, for “look this up later”. It’s not a common letter combination so it’s easy to visually or automatically scan for. Example:

> The moon is TK miles from earth.

Write away, don’t get distracted by the details, and catch up afterward when you’ve shifted to editor mode.


I apply this to writing as well as coding. To keep the flow, I leave TODO: notes, and later I search for the TODO: and see what needs attention.

Feels like a lot IDEs now call out `TODO:` text; I think VS Code does this for most languages.

They do, I use a custom one that has <NAME>TODO: so I can find stuff before I rebase, nothing should be pushed with that one, IntelliJ let’s you customise the colour by matching on a regex.

That’s a great use for git hooks, too.

4000 TODOs? I’m sure we’ll get to these one day right team?

Ruff (I'm sure it's not unique) can yell at you for having a TODO without an associated link to a ticket, which I greatly appreciate.



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