It's really interesting how minor changes in your workflow can completely wreck productivity. When I'm at work I spend at least 90% of my time in emacs, but there are some programs I'm forced to use that are only available via Win32 GUI apps, or cursed webapps. Being forced to abandon my keybinds and move the mouse around hunting for buttons to click and then moving my hand from the mouse to the keyboard then back to the mouse really fucks me up. My coworkers all use MSVC and they don't seem to mind it all because they're used to moving the mouse around all the time; conversely a few of them actually seem to hate command-driven programs the same way I hate GUI-driven programs.
As I get older, it feels like every time I have to use a GUI I get stuck in a sort of daze because my mind has become optimized for the specific work I usually do at the expense of the work I usually don't do. I feel like I'm smarter and faster than I've ever been at any prior point in my life, but only for a limited class of work and anything outside of that turns me into a senile old man. This often manifests in me getting distracted by youtube, windows solitaire, etc because it's almost painful to try to remember how to move the mouse around though all these stupid menus with a million poorly-documented buttons that all have misleading labels.
I feel your pain. I have my own struggles with switching tasks and what helps to some degree is understanding that that kind of switching and adapting is a skill which could be trained by doing exactly this. At least I feel less like a victim and more like a person who improves himself :)
But it appears I'm in a better position because I don't have to work with clearly stupid GUIs and have no strong emotions to them.
As I get older, it feels like every time I have to use a GUI I get stuck in a sort of daze because my mind has become optimized for the specific work I usually do at the expense of the work I usually don't do. I feel like I'm smarter and faster than I've ever been at any prior point in my life, but only for a limited class of work and anything outside of that turns me into a senile old man. This often manifests in me getting distracted by youtube, windows solitaire, etc because it's almost painful to try to remember how to move the mouse around though all these stupid menus with a million poorly-documented buttons that all have misleading labels.