I own a lot of stockings as part of my regular daily attire (they’re so awesome! They’re like tights, except you don’t have to do the weird tights-dance every time you go for a pee, and if one of them gets a hole, you can just throw away the one stocking instead of the entire pair of tights!). However, if I’m doing programming, I’m probably at home, and in lounge wear.

I always found the “programming socks” quite funny, so one day, I decided I wanted to be even more in on the joke, so I deliberately wore some of my fancy thigh highs when sitting down to write some code. I ended up having a tremendously productive session, and it made the socks feel like magic. It was likely just that I was just having a serendipitous day where my brain decided it wanted to get shit done, but still, the prospect that they had actually helped was pretty humorous to entertain.

Because of this, I wore them again the next time I wanted to have an extended, focussed session of coding. And then the time after that. And again and again until eventually, I had created a self-fulfilling prophecy of programming socks increasing my productivity — I came to associate them with the headspace of productive focus, and so now whenever I wear them while sitting at my desk, my brain goes “oh damn, we programming now — best lock in”.

I am extremely happy to have stumbled into this outcome, because it is both useful and hilarious