Honestly, my buddy had a similar thing happen with his excavator. He was always feathering the controls super gentle, thinking it was smoother, and his old foreman told him to just commit to the move, be firm. Tbh it sounded like a good way to jerk everything around, but he tried it. The machine actually settled down and dug way better because it wasn't hunting for pressure all the time. Some of that old hand advice just sticks with you.

Stellas56 is right about tunnel vision. It's like your brain gets stuck on a loop and you can't see past your own idea. I've done that with house stuff too, trying to fix a leaky faucet for hours before realizing the shutoff valve was just old and loose. Sometimes you need that outside person to snap you out of it.

Had a physics teacher who made us solve the same problem with and without friction. It seemed like busywork until I saw how the "ideal" version hid all the real complexity. Breaking things down to a simpler, clunkier version forces you to actually build the model in your head instead of just copying a pattern. That coding workshop trick is totally the same idea.

Wait, you're totally right! It's not just dinner parties. Look at how we don't even know our neighbors anymore. We order everything to our door and work from home. @andrew850 talks about valuing downtime, but this feels bigger, like we're all just hiding. We used to borrow a cup of sugar, now we'd just run to the store. It's sad.

Honestly, the book never works for me either. What helped was setting a timer on my phone for regular walk-arounds, like every 45 minutes. It gives your brain a break from just listening and lets you actually check things properly. I'd also write down the spindle load numbers at the start so I had a solid baseline to compare against. That way you're not just guessing if a sound is new. It turns the waiting into a sort of routine instead of just staring into space.