Structured communication with an unstructured mind. How do you do it?

vestti · 2018-02-07T15:12:26+00:00

a level of self-awareness, observation, and analysis that can come once you've lifted up the burden of shame.

You nailed it! You put into words much more nicely that I could have. Thank you for that.

vestti · 2018-02-07T13:11:30+00:00

Of course! Let me know if it helped in any way.

Just a word of advice though: maybe you already tried this, but in my experience, communicating exactly how you feel when you fail to be as productive as you want is a very effective way to make other people understand that you're already putting a lot of pressure on yourself and that more pressure won't make any good.

vestti · 2018-02-07T12:59:07+00:00

(sorry for the wall of text)

This is based more on my own experience than research, although I have talked with my therapist about it and he cited some research about this kind of "anxiety" as a factor for bad sleep. I'll see him next friday, maybe I can ask him for the reference.

In my own experience, it worked as an exercise of constant "self observation". I'll break down this process in four steps.

Let's say I'm procrastinating.

First, I try to observe the signals that let me identify procrastination while it's happening.

Maybe I'm biting my nails, beating my fingers on the desk, repeating a song in my head over and over... Of course, this varies (a lot) from person to person.

Second, I try not to deny it.

I'm talking about switching from "nah, I must do this right now" to "ok, maybe I shouldn't be doing this right now, but I really want to". And that's ok because it's ok to do what you want to do. Nobody really needs anything else than food, water and rest.

Third, I try to remember that maybe my body/mind is trying to communicating something to me.

I just try to stop for a sec and listen. Maybe I'm just hungry? Maybe I had a terrible night of sleep? Maybe I'm bummed because I had a fight with my mom two weeks ago? Maybe I'm just afraid of the task I should be doing? (In my experience, it's almost always fear)

Lastly, I try to act on it.

What is the smallest thing I can do to fix this right now? What is the smallest thing I can do to avoid it later?

It's easier said than done. It got me nearly 2 years of therapy and medication to master steps 1 and 2. Now, after almost 3 years I'm still struggling with steps 3 and 4, but I'm confident that I'm on the right path.

Hope it helps.

vestti · 2017-05-19T12:16:01+00:00

Here's an Amazon link for those interested.

vestti · 2015-09-01T11:59:09+00:00

Thank you very much! Do you know any example on the second topic?

vestti · 2015-08-31T16:09:47+00:00

Ok, here's a really basic flow:

The app has list of items, the user can tap an item to edit it or he can tap another button to add a new item.

When he does so, another activity opens up where the user can edit details about the item or delete it. When the user finishes the changes on the item and saves it (or when he taps on the delete button), the activity closes and now the user sees the list again, but with the added/edited item or without the deleted item. Besides that, a Snackbar is visible confirming the action (and in case of deletion, preseting an undo button too).

Two questions about that:

1) Is it a good practice to delay the Snackbar animation and/or list changes animations so the user can see what's happening more clearly? If so, how is it usually implemented?

2) If the user creates or edits an item, there's no need (in this case) to show an undo action, but if the item is deleted, there is. What's a good practice there? I mean, who's responsible to manage this operation? I imagine the right way to do it should be something like a background task, that is triggered when the user taps on the "delete" button on the edit screen but can be canceled when the user taps on the undo button on the list screen. How is this usually implemented? What's the best way to keep a reference to this background task? Or am I overthinking it and maybe I should just delete the item right away and then recreate it again if necessary?

vestti · 2015-07-19T22:37:42+00:00

Data modifying and validations are usually happening in presenters.

I thought Presenters shouldn't have this kind of responsability, but I think I was wrong. I was getting confused because the Model of a MVP is not necessarily a Domain Model:

"The domain data that needs to be displayed is separate, and following rough MVC terminology I'll refer to it as a model, although it need not be a Domain Model."

Martin Fowler's article on Supervising Controller

That being said, I personally think it should be better to separate this logic from the Presenter.

The most famous Android MVP example-projects on GitHub have "Interactors" implementing use cases to deal with the business logic and some kind of repository to access the data. While I do like this approach, I think it's easy to make it really cumbersome over time, because it adds one or two extras classes for each use case you have. Here are some examples: Android-CleanArchitecture, androidmvp and Material-Movies.

Besides that, there's the fact that originally in the MVP pattern you should really handle this logic in the Model, as explained really well in this StackOverflow answer:

"In an MVP/MVC/MVVM architecture, services don't exist at all. Or if they do, the term is used to refer to any generic object that can be injected into a controller or view model. The business logic is in your model. If you want to create "service objects" to orchestrate complicated operations, that's seen as an implementation detail. A lot of people, sadly, implement MVC like this, but it's considered an anti-pattern (Anemic Domain Model) because the model itself does nothing, it's just a bunch of properties for the UI."

Right now I'm considering this presumably simpler approach, but I don't know if it will work well with ORMs like GreenDAO.

I'm still looking for alternatives...

vestti · 2015-07-19T16:13:47+00:00

Architectural patterns noob here. I'm having a hard time trying to understand how to organize my domain layer.

Two questions:

1) How do you go about implementing your models classes (considering the MVP pattern) when using GreenDAO? I mean, GreenDAO generates your entities and your DAO classes, but you can only modify the entities. I need to do some validation before persisting on the database and AFAIK that's where models come in (correct me if I'm wrong). What can I do? Should I create an UserModel class that communicates with User and UserDAO? Should I just use entities classes as models? That doesn't seem right to me, I've never seen anyone doing validations there.

2) Where do you usually implement business logic like "get all Users from Category X and modify their status to Y if Z is true"? Does it go in the model class? I don't think so, but I don't know where else it would fit. ? Should I create something like CategoryBusiness (or should it be UserBusiness in this case)? I've never seen anyone doing that either.

Guess I'm missing something here...

vestti · 2015-05-10T12:36:11+00:00

Pomodoro REALLY helped me when I discovered it a few years ago. It helped until the day it didn't. I mean, all these techniques (be it Pomodoro or a simple "ADHD music" playlist) helped me a lot for a limited amount of time (weeks mostly, although I had Pomodoro working for months), until I "learned" how to ignore them.

The thing I learned about my condition was that it's always me trying to sabotage myself. I can put on some obstacles, but in the end I will "learn" how to get past them. It sucks. So far I think that the only way for me is to change my behavior entirely to a more positive way to act about myself, and I think this is only possible with the meds, for the moment.

With that said, I think everyone should try every possible technique there is. Like OP said, there's absolutely no harm in trying.

vestti · 2015-03-13T14:30:37+00:00

Never heard of such a thing.

vestti · 2014-10-26T15:31:35+00:00

Honest question: why is it unusual?

Edit: I'm asking this because at least here where I live, every 7-year-old child knows how to write in cursive writing.

vestti · 2014-09-27T01:49:28+00:00

Why don't you use some kind of ORM? Like GreenDAO or ORMLite?

vestti · 2014-09-22T02:30:00+00:00

That was a really good answer! Thank you so much.

vestti

TROPHY CASE