The importance of Sandboxes
My not degree has multiple “seed moments” beyond asking a ChatGPT how many hours study an Australian Degree would take.
One of the key insights that developed over time is that my ADHD mind works best in Sandboxes which limit distraction.
My first Sandbox: A gym
I used a gym to rehabilitate my back after carrying a work-acquired injury that lasted around 6 months. This gym is highly unusual, has physiotherapists working directly on-premises and distinguishes itself from other gyms by having only weight equipment, but no free weights. It is also unusual in having no mirrors, no music and no screens. To get around my ADHD while attending I still had to split my program over two days so that I only had a 15 minute program to complete each day. I knew in my heart that if I didn’t go every day I was going to drop out.
Wonderfully, I was successful at fixing my back using this gym, continuing to be able to work, which was amazing considering how sore I was during that injury.
My second Sandbox: Dreaming Spanish
Dreaming Spanish is a website/App that basically sits on top of youtube and provides Spanish Language videos at various different learner levels and tracks users watched hours. It works on the idea of comprehensible input - where you listen to content that includes a lot of words you know and some you don’t and by doing this over a lot of hours you build the ability to understand the language. I used it a lot before my trip to Peru which happened in the middle of last year.
I’m currently at 229 hours, most of which happened before this trip. I credit Dreaming Spanish as key in realising that hours engaged can be a meaningful metric which I can actually tolerate and engage with.
My third Sandbox: Wiggly Spanish
This developed out of my frustration with the limits of Dreaming Spanish. Even though I think using it did me a lot of good Dreaming Spanish gets you to hold off on speaking, and I needed to be able to speak phrases during my trip. I described it as there being a tension between wanting transcendent spanish and phrasebook Spanish. Dreaming Spanish is aimed more at transcendent Spanish. So just through intuition – with semi-conscious awareness that what I was building was a Sandbox, or that sandboxes can really work for me – I vibe coded a markup based website phrasebook which uses Google TTS (Text to Speech) which is tolerable to listen to. Its main feature is to allow phrases to be played on loop. It took me ages to build. (Even as I was on ADHD focus medications over this time period - without which I think I would have been unable to complete the project. Alas, I can no longer take them because they are too liable to trigger Bipolar mania. I pulled the pin on the medication on the basis that felt like where I was heading if I didn’t cool it.)
I’ve ported a version of this to this website – without all my old learning materials.
My fourth Sandbox: The loggers of my Not Degree
These were very quickly vibe coded and simply allow log files with a start time and a stop time and a duration. They exist as Python Scripts mainly, though I did vibe code versions in Go, eyeing the cross-platform nature of Go. I even had some GUI versions up and running using Go and a GUI library called Fyne. Experiments also occured with Python scripts versions which deals with timezones. The timezone version worked but in the end I decided that for me all of this was just a distraction and I can upgrade in these kinds of ways some time in the future. Even looking at the csv output of the timezone-aware version made me feel uneasy. And yes, I’m well aware I’ve lapsed heavily into technical descriptions on this page.
The bottom line
The bottom line is that on my laptop and phone I can type s for start, e for end and d for description in order to run my loggers and that’s the core of my Not Degree the system.