A quick scan, because I need to know where I stand right now.
Physical: I'm tired, but only lightly so. There's tension in my forearms, elbows, shoulders, and neck, but no pain; most of it is the kind of tightness that will go away when I sleep, some of it is the deep knotty kind that builds up over time and needs to be worked out by a good therapist. I'm paying attention to my ergonomics right now to keep that in check. I'm full - perhaps overly so - from a fantastic Ethiopian dinner-for-two-plus-appetizer (that was eaten by one... what? I was hungry!) but this has rapidly faded over the past few hours and I suspect I'll be hungry again tomorrow as usual. I'm at that perfect, rare point where I'm able to sleep but not on the verge of crashing; it has been quite some time since I've managed the edge of my tiredness so well. It's a good kind of tired. Aside from being overly full, not having really exercised today (I'll do some stretching before bed to get a little range of motion in), and having some RSI warning signs, this is close to the end-state I should ideally be in each night.
Mental: Scattered. I overestimated my ability for sustained concentration today. It seems like my hypothesis about learning method was accurate, but not complete - it's also got a timeout. I need the ability to take spontaneous, irregular breaks involving physical motion to keep myself in controlled hyperfocus pointed at a target of my choosing. Based on today, 4-5 hours is the upper bound my current strategies can muster. (Of course, if I click into unconscious hyperfocus, I can go way longer than 4-5 hours - but the skill of being able to turn it on and off and direct it at something is still a work in progress, and it's hard for me to do.) These results aren't yet conclusive; I need more data. I will try again tomorrow.
I am proud that I'm starting to recognize - and compensate for, however clumsily - when my brain is overloaded and scattered ("hypofocused" is the word I've seen in books). I am stepping back and (re)prioritizing and then executing priority #1 (...most of the time) and checking in to do that as many times as needed, dropping lower-priority tasks with... well, less guilt and more grace than I've had in the past. Incremental improvement. It isn't even close to decent by any stretch of the imagination. But the analysis and redistribution of priorities is now something I can consistently do. It used to be a coin flip on whether I could prioritize or not; a year ago, when I started actively working on this, I'd sometimes (often) hit this unexplained wall and not be able to complete the prioritization - I would be totally unable to decide What Mattered. The frequency of failure decreased as I worked on it over the years. Now I can nail it every time. The question is just how much time and effort it will take to get there.
Consistently executing on the priorities that I've decided on... well, ah... the first step to fixing a bug is becoming aware of it, and I can say that I've become acutely aware of this bug over the past 4 years if not longer, but that's about it. At some point, it will start tipping more into the "fix this bug!" realm rather than "let's escalate the severity so you will FIX THIS BUG," which is mostly where it stays now.
My ability to absorb and grok complex, shifting, and potentially fragile and/or explosive situations, then gently tug and nudge at the right places in the tangled webs so that the knots start slipping out - that's the ideal version of that skill (I think it's one of the things that makes me good at, and high-potential-for-growth in, "Community Stuff," but I lack a way to articulate it), and it's also very much not there yet. But oh, it's improving - and more rapidly than I'd thought! When I was navigating the multiple Sugar Labs discussions on SoaS during a break this afternoon, I found to my surprise that I could think further ahead and make more complex adjustments than I'd expected. Diplomacy? That word doesn't seem to capture it. It's like spidey sense. I'm clumsy with it, and slow, and it is not well-developed, but it's getting there. I think this feeling would be more familiar if I'd learned how to play Go (or chess, or any strategic game or sport) more. I think it's called "strategy." Perhaps I should do other things that exercise my intuition on this more. I did enjoy learning what little Go I studied; I never properly learned chess, but suspect I would like that too... I'll keep an eye open for opportunities to learn either. (This paragraph is the most incoherent of all the sections in this post, because I don't understand what I am trying to describe.)
Physical: Yes, I'm more tired now; it's time for me to wrap up POSSE APAC stuff, get off the computer, stretch, wind down, read a little, quickly sketch out a starter set of priorities for tomorrow, and then sleep. (All this should take something like 15-20 minutes.)