HN user
This is a weird take, but as a junior developer, I find I'm more productive on the days with meetings because I'm 'forced' to squeeze in the 'real work' rather than just being scared.
It might help if you introduce more things to focus in and out on. I find that when I'm playing a game I'm not as interested in/has down time, by having something like music playing softly in the background, I'm able to focus in better during slow periods.
Some amount of LoFi beats, classical, or music in another language might help a bit even if you feel you need to 'focus in' by just providing a bit more stimulation? I find that without music it's much harder for me to enter my flow state when programming even if I 'stop hearing' the music once I get into what I'm working on.
But everyone's different, that's just something that works for me, but I hope that you keep up the hard work. Focus is hard, and you're taking some important steps to try and restore yours.
At my old job, even if you plugged a generic keyboard that you'd already been using with the computer into the wrong USB port it wouldn't work. I believe you can set this stuff all up to be looking for very specific pieces of hardware on specific USB ports.
My ctrl key seems to mimic my Command key for most of these command and not do anything in other cases (Firefox & Word). Is there some setting I need to change?
I'm sorry if this is a dumb question, but how do I actually use these? Control + A?
It sounds dumb and it's not how addiction works, but it might be worth just will powering yourself into it the first time then going with the calendar chain approach to try and not break your streak.
Even if you fail every once in a while, it'll be an improvement to what you're describing now.
Something that I've heard of people doing is getting a timer box. Basically what it is, is something that locks for a designated period of time.
When you're done work you can pop your stuff in it, set a timer for 16 hours or whatever is necessary then you can't access these things at all.
Here's a rough link to what I mean (https://www.amazon.com/Kitchen-Safe-Locking-Container-Height...)