What gets me mad sometimes is that when I work on something and hit a road block, then I remember I found an article about it a year or so ago and I definitely saved it. I just have no idea how to find it.
I have not looked, but I wonder if there is an indexing tool that would also do an OCR on screenshots, PDFs etc. in the local filesystem and then had some advanced querying.
I have recently started using Zotero, which can create offline copies of saved webpages and papers. You can then search their contents.
Last week I bookmarked Yacy, which is a search engine and which seems to allow you to define your own web index. However, I haven't gotten around to seeing how it really works...
Daily, all links are fetched (as part of a larger web search product I'm working on). I can search this, but mostly i don't bother.
I will soon add semantic search and see if there's any magic to be found in my data exhaust.
Truth is I'm forced to spend my days googling dull problems and reading vaguely interesting articles.
No deep work for me at the moment
# summarize yesterday
python summarize_day.py
# summarize a day (3 month chrome history limit)
python summarize_day.py --date 2023-01-12
# summarize the last 90 days
python summarize_day.py --days 90
File and forget is incredibly effective when you have ADHD. There are just too many things that are "interesting" that you'll never have time to do anything about.
Just write it down (or an equivalent) so your brain can stop worrying about it. You'll find in a few weeks time the things that didn't actually matter are gone.
When I was having anxiety problems it was also an extremely effective way of getting out of the circular thinking loop. Write down all your worries on a new tab in Notepad++. All the worries stopped circulating. When I might occasionally look at that tab in a month or two's time. usually I didn't even care about any of those things anymore. Even though they'd all been thought obsessing distractions a couple of months earlier.
And lists, lists, lists. I'm at my most happiest when every day I create a short-ish to-do list for work and a list for home and throw it away at the start of the next day. I try and keep it below 7-8 things, in reality I often get 3-5 done. I fall out of the habit fairly frequently, and that's often when I start feeling overwhelmed.
Plus exercise, exercise, exercise. If I haven't exercised for more than about 5 days, I start becoming a right asshole who gets anxious about the most ridiculous things.