Sam

You are paying a startup cost every night and it is eating a third of your time. Kill that first, before you try to find more hours.

The habit that fixed it for me: stop mid task, deliberately, every session. Not at a clean stopping point, in the middle of something small and obvious, and leave a one line note in a file called next.md saying exactly what the next physical action is. Something like: add the email field to the signup form, file is routes/signup.js line 40.

The next night you sit down and there is no decision to make. You just do the thing. Ten minutes of the session goes back to you, and more importantly you skip the reading phase where you talk yourself out of starting.

The part that makes it click for adults is countersteering. To turn left at speed you first push the left bar slightly forward, which steers you right for an instant, which drops the bike into a left lean, and then you turn. Every cyclist does this without knowing. It only makes sense once you accept that steering controls lean rather than the other way round.

Name the equal transit story as a myth explicitly, otherwise she meets it in a textbook at fourteen and decides you were wrong. I tell kids the air over the top gets there first and is in a hurry, which is memorable and also true.

Given your actual goal is to follow arguments about studies rather than to run analyses, you might be reading the wrong genre entirely. What you want is a book about study design and how claims break, not a book about computing test statistics.

The questions that let you evaluate most studies are things like: how were people assigned to groups, what was measured and was it decided in advance, how big was the sample, and what did the effect size look like rather than just whether it was significant. Almost none of that requires the formulas you keep bouncing off.

This is worth checking before anyone concludes their phone is magic and their friend's is broken. Two phones can be doing very different amounts of invention on the same subject.

This is why dew point is the number to watch rather than temperature. Small gap between air temperature and dew point, expect visible breath. A few degrees of gap and it disappears.

Five friends is a kind audience and that is both good and a limitation. They will not tell you the hard things and you should not expect them to. Their job is to prove the thing works on a device that is not yours.

When you are ready, five strangers is where the real information is. It is more uncomfortable and it is far more useful, because a stranger who does not care simply leaves, and watching where they leave tells you the truth.

The uncertainty budget framing is the best explanation of this I have seen. It also explains why I read new things happily on holiday and never in a busy month.