Being able to think about nothing is a skill/habit/muscle that needs to be learned and practiced. My mind still can churn but at least now I have the tools and some ability to tell it “not now” and quiet it some. It’s been pretty dramatic, especially in being able to fall asleep quicker.
And the stories of feeling like a zombie when off meds are very real and pretty freaky.
Almost everyone I know ends up on a significantly
higher dose than they started with.
Two: Many/most people seem to avoid dosage creep by reducing or limiting their dose on weekends or on other days when it is feasible. If you take e.g. 20mg every day, 365 days a year, it's pretty much guaranteed to lose effectiveness. But if you can take that down to ~5-10mg on weekends that helps. Also weaning yourself off of it entirely from time to time seems to provide a reset. Doctors seem to never tell anybody this.
And the stories of feeling like a zombie when off
meds are very real and pretty freaky.
If you do significant amounts of stimulants every day and then go cold turkey you're gonna have a real bad time for a day or three.
On the other hand if you steadily taper your dosage down to 0mg over ~3-7 days it's not bad at all.
Again, doctors seem to never tell anybody this.
BTW, while I am kind of "rebutting" your points I am not pushing Adderall. There are downsides to it. It made me more high-strung and prone to arguments and stress. The frequent shortages are a nightmare. And so on. I eventually moved on.
Of course, the same tolerance issues will creep up, perhaps even more so, but there is no red-tape, no doctor visits, no shortages, easy access, etc..
Is nicotine as effective as amphetamines or methylphenidate? I have no idea, but probably not, and that is mainly why I haven't experimented much with it. I will say that it's effective enough to plenty of people with ADHD self-medicate with nicotine, and seem to do fine enough.
If nicotine were half as effective, it still might be better, at least for my circumstances.
Having coping mechanisms and and understanding surrounding is way more important.
Without that and only meds I am only the person with the highest tension in the room.
And my adhd was measured. Low dopamine.
Btw I tried a adhd friendly diet and sports once . I don’t know if it was placebo or real but it felt like it helped much.
Mini meditative naps of 5 minutes also help if my brain is on the run.
Honestly in my opinion meds are the easy way out but the side effects make alternatives necessary. On the long run there need to be better solutions that imply that society has to go a step toward the mentally divergent or Ill and respect their behavior as good willing and maybe find a better way to incorporate those in the workplace and social life.
Sorry for edit:
For example. If I have one of those adhd moments, where I am bit to specific about something and talk too much because of it, my friends recognize this and tell me to „ wake up“. And everything is fine. But if someone like this is needed.. there I am ;)
One thing you didn't mention was night time sleep, which is actually maybe the biggest single thing for me. The rest matches my experiences exactly.
I love the part about respecting and embracing neurodiversity.
What does this even mean?
The higher dose was better for my emotional regulation and my focus, but it made my body feel wired all the time.
The dose I am on now does provide significant benefits compared to not taking it, especially when combined with daily vigorous exercise (likely at least partially due to improved sleep).
But I've never been on Adderall and I've never been on an IR med and I'm a woman diagnosed in childhood and again in adulthood, so I'm an ADHD unicorn really.
What does a neurologist do anyway. I have CP and ADHD, yet haven't been referred and think all. It's not clear what they'd even do.
I wonder though if I never discovered these two things, and simply absorbed everything I read online and convinced myself I had ADHD and got on meds. It's modern life, getting people down. There's simply no way to break through without recognizing that life is inherently distracting, and finding strategies around that.
(This is not dismissing the reality of ADHD, however, only to note that medication is overprescribed and that many confuse biology with extremely targeted algorithms designed to capture attention.)
uh, perhaps by not using all of those things? sounds like you're uber distracted
Seriously, though, there might be external factors at play; different social circles might use these things and abandoning the apps could be the same as abandoning the groups.
The piece was a good read but its so personal to me that it doesn't really help sadly.
Don't worry about it. I think this is good advice for any software engineer. Eventually you'll be senior enough or on a different team and it won't be a problem.
For nearly all working relationships, I think it's reasonable to keep an emergency communication channel open.
Hopefully it doesn't sound too combative, but I wanted to express that it's a two way street and compromises have to be found. I dislike various things in my company on a personal level, but often make sense from company/team point of view.
Thanks.
Beyond that I refuse to do daily standups. I'll quit a company if they won't let me do async or communicate through slack. I'm not logging in and the start of my day being a meeting every single day. Absolutely not. I've been there before.
At two companies the actual CEO and CTO were in every single one of our standups (startups of course).
But I know good engineers (who are also good communicators) that loathe them with a great passion.
I didn't say a single thing about paired programming. Christ. Did I say that the dev wanted to pair program? No, I didn't. I would have happily hopped in a huddle with him as OPPOSED to scheduling a meeting 3 days later.
I am sick of meetings and people who are incapable of working async, especially when we're in different timezones, which is exactly what this thread I'm responding to is about.
this sounds like pair programming imo.
> Great, now instead of being able to respond while working on other things I have to cut out an entire hour of my day just for you.
this reads as a bad attitude towards mentorship. sorry for that assumption.
My frustration is not knocking this out over 10 slack messages right now and having to round back to it days later. I want it done and off my plate.
I'm ADHD. I don't want lingering tasks floating around giving me anxiety when they can be done quickly. I'm going to forget it exists until 10 minutes before when it pops up on my notifications, then I'll have to context switch over to that situation.
One of my biggest coping mechanisms is as soon as something pops into my mind I do it RIGHT NOW. If I walk by the laundry basket and think of doing laundry I grab it and do it RIGHT now. Or I'll just walk by it for a week completely oblivious to it.
I'd much rather just get an interruption out of the
blue than have someone schedule a meeting to talk to me
For me, out-of-the-blue interruptions are a worst case scenario for my ADHD. It's very hard for me to get into the "flow" if I know that I might be interrupted at any moment. I prefer scheduled meetings as a less-evil alternative.
But many many feel similarly to you.
Also, somewhat contraintuitively, I often avoid starting some new work e. g. 30 minutes before a scheduled meeting, meanwhile without it I just start, and if interruption happens,... it just happens.
Also, somewhat contraintuitively, I often avoid
starting some new work e. g. 30 minutes before a
scheduled meeting
It's hard for me to get into the zone if I know I've got a hard stop in 30 minutes.
Two workarounds for me. One is that I tell myself I'll spend the final 5 minutes jotting down todo's so I can pick back up relatively close to where I left off. I normally work in 20-30 min bursts anyway. This is actually not super successful for me but better than nothing.
Slightly more effective for me is using those 30 minutes to bang out some smaller tasks. Review a small pull request. Pay a bill or two. Apply some software updates. Gotta be done eventually so I get them out of the way now, in service of more focus time later.
The most successful advice I’ve found is to find a way to reset after meetings without using your computer. For whatever reason, they’re emotionally drained after meetings. They get back to their computer and reach for Reddit or Twitter or something for a low effort snack, which then spirals into an hour or more of doomscrolling or distractions. This then translates into self disappointment at their low productivity, which further drives them to seek more cheap online entertainment and the cycle repeats.
So try something else. After your standup, go for a walk. Don’t use your phone. Do some stretches if you WFH or have a quiet place. Whatever you do, don’t fall into the rut that destroys your productivity.
- taking breaks
- thinking through a problem
Regardless I would never allow myself to browse anything not work related when I'm actually working (i.e. twitter, reddit) even when I'm "destroyed". I think cutting the unproductive crap out completely when working and trying to find more healthy coping mechanisms is far better.
I've had this problem too. But now that I have more meetings, it's become much easier to transition back to focused work. It's only the occasional more-stressful-than-usual meeting that eats up my attention for hours afterwards.
I don't know what the solution is for most people. I guess this is why some people who transition manager --> IC can be so effective.
It’s still better to state your problem. I like to use the “non-violent communication” as a template. Something like, “When we have the standup, I have a hard time refocusing on work afterwards. I’m concerned about the impact this has on my productivity. Can I send status updates via Slack?”
I’m not gonna pretend that this is a solution to your problem; I just want to sympathize and have a conversation about some of the strategies that we can use to fix problems with management that interfere with technical work.
- Everything destroys my flow anyway. So $#&#$% fragile.
- Standups are 100x less destructive to my flow than random unscheduled synchronous communication.
- For management and collaboration purposes, I recognize the need for some kind of synchronous communication for most projects/jobs.
- When working remotely I've found video standups help keep me feeling connected to humanity.
- Most teams I've been on are quite understanding if you choose to miss standup and offer an update via Slack instead because you're "in the zone."
So.... they suck, but they have upsides for me, and I accept them as kind of a "least-bad compromise solution."
This sounds oddly specific. How consistent is this time? If you start working an hour earlier does it impact the timing of your productivity boost?
In reality, I generally have too much external distraction around me in the morning to capitalize on this.
So my actual productive hours are basically like, "whenever I am reasonably sure that everybody else will leave me the fuck alone for the next few hours." Which often means, "the end of the work day when everybody is signing off for the day."
You ask us to perform unreasonably tops, then hate us for inventing doordash and shit because: we were smart labor, not cheap.
Huh? ADHD is a debilitating and disabling disorder... I don't think you're talking about ADHD.
ADHD is a deficit in dopamine processing/production within the brain, it has physiological signs that we can look for:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s11689-022-09440-2
ADHD is diagnosed based on symptoms, not based on physiological signs. Like most diagnoses, it's a co-occurring set of traits we'de decided is outside of what's normal.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2023.1026...
>In conclusion, a series of biomarkers in the literature are promising as objective parameters to more accurately diagnose ADHD, especially in those with comorbidities that prevent the use of DSM-5. However, more research is needed to confirm the reliability of the biomarkers in larger cohort studies.
But yeah, generally there are a lot of conditions where you go report symptoms to your doctor or perhaps a specialist and they prescribe a treatment based on that alone. Testing is mostly used to rule out the really nasty possibilities or figure out what's actually going on when first-line treatments don't work.
Are both of those really clinical markers for ADHD? as in, adhd would be expected to have low working memory and low processing speed? My understanding is its more about executive function I.E. deciding to start tasks.
admittedly my experience is coloured by my own clinical diagnosis of adhd plus anecdotally good working memory and processing speed
I even got in an argument with the psychologist/proctor at one point during the symbol matching section. I was supposed to write the corresponding number under a series of randomly ordered symbols on a page. The numbers were mapped to each symbol using a key at the top of the page. I thought it'd be easier to solve all of the same symbols one at a time e.g., if A = 1, B = 2, etc. then I would write "1" under every A symbol, then "2" under every B, etc..
The proctor told me, "Wait, you can't solve them like that. You have to do them in order."
I replied, "Why does it matter? It's my test and it's what is intuitive to me to solve them."
He replied with something like, "Time's ticking" (implying that that I'm only hurting my score by talking with him).
There were probably more words exchanged, but that's the gist of it.
Anyway, after all the BS, I received my scores, and I swear there were flaws in the calculations (despite using the proprietary software) though my score wasn't too bad -- my GAI was much higher than FSIQ. I also had to calculate my own GAI since the ass never put it on my report (I found a pirated copy of the manual with the proper tables in the back based on the section scores).
The psychologist (who was the proctor) basically told me that due to my large variance in some scores that my test could be considered a "testing error" and "you do not technically have an IQ score" but he "managed to manipulate the numbers a bit to give me a score." He couldn't provide me anything with a confidence interval greater than 90% (not the worst, I know), and there were odd statements in my report about having difficulty scoring my test due to my age (I was 22 at the time). So, who knows? I refuse to ever do one again though.
Anyway, I know my behavior didn't help lol, but I also just got a weirdly pseudoscientific feeling from the whole process. I've done plenty of my own research on the topic, and I am still not convinced it's the be-all and end-all of psychological testing. I think intelligence is too abstract for humans to quantify currently.
As someone who is the spawn of two MENSAns, has friends in Neurosci and Psych, and who has brushed up a fair bit on the topic, I don't think any psychologists outside those in a tiny subset of the community believe in IQ Tests. The support for them is at best "well they measure something, but we're not sure what it is, and we have trouble labeling it as 'intelligence' due to the broad nature of that term". There are so, so many flaws with IQ testing that have been pointed out not only by yourself, but also by others in the field. The only actual practical, measurable use an IQ test to improve lives to date was an application in the 1980s on intake for fighter pilots, and it resulted in many less fighter pilots dying from crashes during training.
I do believe the test are not useless, and I agree with Taleb that IQ might be more accurate at the lower extremes i.e. less than 70. In other words, the test cannot measure intelligence, but is pretty good at finding a lack thereof.
However, the further along the bell curve one traverses, the more the test falls apart.
The only reason I was administered a test was for ADHD diagnostic purposes. Sure, the conclusion was that I had ADHD, but the psychologist was confident in my diagnosis prior to the test, so the test was more of a formality.
> The only actual practical, measurable use an IQ test to improve lives to date was an application in the 1980s on intake for fighter pilots, and it resulted in many less fighter pilots dying from crashes during training.
This is so fascinating.
Tangent:
I was listening to a podcast about what it means to be a genius, how it's measured, what it means, etc.. There was a section about Lewis Terman's research on gifted children/adults. He followed and studied the lives over 1500 gifted children over the course of his entire life. Out of all the gifted children, none of them became anything noteworthy -- doctors, lawyers, etc..
However, two boys that were apart of the same school system that were not studied because they were not gifted eventually went on to each win a Nobel Peace prize -- separately and in different fields.
I will not claim that Terman's research proves anything, one way or another, but I did find it rather interesting.
I would regularly down 3-4 red bulls (diet) in the evening if I knew I needed to fall asleep and sleep well. I'm not sure if it's been studied but anecdotal evidence from others seem to suggest I'm not alone and that some others have the same experience.
In my youth, I would pound a mountain dew before bed.
One example, is opiates make me MOVE. Most people they zonk out, not me. I'm ready to move your house, one brick at a time, with my bare hands and feel like I could knock it out in about an hour.
Proton Pump inhibitors are common meds for acid reflux. About 10 years ago, I did a genetics study (I worked at the lab, and my data stayed mine) and learned that of the 7 classes of PPIs available, at that time, my body only works with 1. The others either have little/no effect or similar.
It may not be everyone's issue, but cases like mine do exist. It's not better or worse, it's just how it is.
How often a partner probably told you that they felt neglected or forgotten, or how often you'd wind up in a rabbit hole and forget that you also have to nourish that relationship.
And my most recent ex was anxious attached. That was rough. I'm far more on the avoidant side, not sure how much of that is upbringing vs adhd.
I have trouble focusing, I don't think quite to the level of ADHD, but it would be so much worse if I had 4 or 5 apps on each screen.
Or you found coping mechanisms. We all figure out what works for us. Like drinking a ton of coffee or things with caffeine... you're self medicating with your stimulant of choice.
I need all my apps visible in a tiled arrangement. Shuffling windows shatters my flow. I literally cannot have enough screen real estate. My dream is something like a curved 48" 8K monitor filling my entire field of view at 300dpi. (Vision Pro?)
I know a lot of people, ADHD and otherwise, like me in this regard.
I also know a guy like you, diagnosed with ADHD FWIW, who takes it a little further than you. He needs his apps fullscreened, and can't even do multiple monitors. One screen, one app.
I don't know how the f-- he works that way but I'm jealous. He's effective and has no trouble working on a 13" laptop in a coffee shop or whatever.
I will never understand it because I absolutely hate having full screen windows and I am almost worthless working off my laptop when traveling. Just lots of frustration juggling windows back and forth. I always have 2 or 3 apps side by side on my 48" and I have a 28" 16:18 DualUp monitor next to it for long text/dev.
I didn't work with him so I don't know how productive he actually was but I've always been curious if he kept up with the people who had 2-3 monitors and input devices. I have a hard time believing that he did but no actual idea.
The "laptop only, one app only" guy I knew actually was really verifiably productive. Which again is insane. We were working on a big Rails monolith. A task that inherently involves working with dozens of files simultaneously and looking at things up and down the stack while also looking at documentation and running code in the browser.
I actually enjoy working on laptops directly but the keyboards always do me in. Just a little too cramped for my wrist/arms, and if I'm adding an external keyboard the monitor is just a bit too far away so I'm back to the normal docked setup.
During my part-time studies (I had a 70-80% employment at that time) the time I really started studying productively was after 9-10pm when everyone around me went to finish their day and the world around me started to go silent and night is coming in. Thinking of it today, I don't know how I would have survived that time without the huge support from my wife back then. So all the credits of me being able to complete my studies go to her!
Nowadays, I would not know how I would get through the day-to-day work without medication most days. That often worries me a little.
As someone who also has a bit more than 2 decades experience with ADHD medication and started with meds quite early in my teenage years when I went to school, I have very similar experience to yours.
One of my assumptions is that it also has a lot to do with the humans metabolism that changes over the years.
One of my assumptions is that it also has a lot
to do with the humans metabolism that changes
over the years.
The first few weeks on Adderall were f'ing magical. I remember tearing up, I was so happy. Finally I was laser-focused. A bit emotional thinking of it now.
The magic faded fast. Adderall was still a large net positive for me for ~6-7 years. But never like those first few weeks. I guess I got somewhat close to that original experience a few times, after extended breaks from Adderall and restarting it.
Anyway, this is of course a sample size of 1. But since all the experiences described above took place in my 30s I don't think that metabolism change was a major factor. Certainly not within the first year. Again I know... n=1 =)
I continued to benefit from it for ~6-7 years. But, never felt anything like those first few weeks.
This is super true for me as well, to the point where I structure my day around this. I'm lucky to have a workplace with flexible hours and enough seniority that nobody complains when I roll in at 10, which gives me a few "quiet hours" from 4-6 as others trickle out.
Just reading that made me feel the presence of 'bliss' :)
I think the pop-culture definition of ADHD has shifted a lot. In the past, being able to focus well (as you described in a different environment) would have been a sign that the issue was more environmental in nature, not a sign of clinical ADHD. Patients with ADHD struggled everywhere, even in distraction-free environments like a quiet library or quiet test taking environment.
Now, the pop-culture understanding of ADHD has shifted so far that we don’t bat an eye at declaring ADHD even when someone is operating under a constant barrage of environmental distractions. To be clear, someone with ADHD will have an even harder time resisting impulses to seek out distractions, but the fact that someone can focus just fine when their environment is minimally structured to keep distractions at a reasonable level would suggest that person doesn’t have classic ADHD.
> I think ADHD is the new norm.
I think this is my problem with the current pop-culture definition of ADHD: When the definition shifts so much that it becomes the “norm”, we’ve lost the plot. Something isn’t really a disorder if it’s “the norm”.
There’s a secondary problem I’ve been noticing in a subset of the young people I’ve worked with: Some of them self-diagnose with ADHD or get a doctor’s diagnosis, then mistakenly think that their ADHD diagnosis is an excuse for everything. I’ve had far too many conversations where I had to gently explain to juniors (via a volunteer mentor program, not as their boss) that having an ADHD diagnosis doesn’t mean that deadlines don’t apply them, or that they get a free pass for being late to meetings, or that they’re still obligated to perform at the level of their peers at work. Some of them have grown up in an environment where ADHD students get extra time to take tests, which some of them assume should translate to more forgiving expectations at work. It’s difficult to get some of them to accept that having ADHD means they need more accountability and oversight, not less.
I think we’re making a huge mistake by normalizing ADHD to the point that people think it’s the norm or that everyone has it because they surround themselves with distractions. Anecdotally, I’ve seen too many young people self-diagnose with ADHD and then actually spend less effort to curtail distractions, train their focus, and work on self-improvement. There’s something about becoming convinced that your behaviors are a medical condition that is out of your control (many erroneously declare they have a “dopamine deficiency” or similar misunderstandings of the science) that can give people a false sense that they either can’t improve their situation or that they shouldn’t be held responsible because it’s a labeled medical condition.
I don’t know where we go from here, but I can say it’s been an uphill battle to get recent mentoring cohorts to accept that attention is something they can improve with practice or even that they need to do things like silence phone notifications while they work.
I’m often stunned when I screen share with someone who has a non-stop stream of unimportant notifications in the top right corner, who later laments that they just can’t focus on anything for someone.
but the fact that someone can focus just fine
when their environment is minimally structured
to keep distractions at a reasonable level would
suggest that person doesn’t have classic ADHD
[...]
Patients with ADHD struggled everywhere, even in
distraction-free environments like a quiet library
or quiet test taking environment.
Like many or perhaps most things we classify as disorders, ADHD isn't a binary "you have it or you don't" condition.
Also, what constitutes "distractions at a reasonable level?" Very few jobs would meet my personal definition of that.
declaring ADHD even when someone is operating
under a constant barrage of environmental distractions
A person who lightly dabbles in illicit substances once in a blue moon would not generally be considered to have a drug problem. However, this is also going to be relative to that person's circumstances. Are you a 23 year old with no responsibilities? Are you a breastfeeding mother? Are you in a profession with frequent random drug tests? Are you a shaman in a culture where psychedelics have been a sacred part of your culture for thousands of years? The definition of problematic drug use is going to be very different for some than others.
As our society changes, and the number of assaults on our focus multiply, I think it is reasonable to expect more ADHD diagnoses.
Another way to think about it is that modern (and future) society will expose ADHD more aggressively. A farmer in 1923 lived a hard and demanding life, but he faced a very different set of cognitive challenges than a software engineer in 2023.
Think about how changing society exposed some humans' susceptibility to motion sickness. Motion sickness was not a thing until we learned to ride animals and build vehicles. Perhaps someday the DSM may contain some disorders specific to humans living in colonies on other planets.
I don’t know where we go from here, but I can say it’s
been an uphill battle to get recent mentoring cohorts
to accept that attention is something they can improve
with practice
I love that we've made great strides toward destigmatizing mental health issues. But holy shit, it feels like younger people wear this shit as a badge of pride and it often feels like an excuse to avoid actual solutioning.
A loved one was recently diagnosed with ADHD. I told them I'll be their best friend and their toughest critic when it comes to ADHD. I told will love you and empathize with your struggles all day long because I have been fighting this shit for almost 50 years and it is soul-draining.
I also told them, watch the fuck out. I accept zero excuses. We can struggle together, we can cry together, but you better be looking at every single facet of your ADHD through the lens of figuring out a working solution.
"I have ADHD!" is not an acceptable excuse or thought-terminator. What I want to hear is, "I have ADHD so what works for me is doing it this way: ______" or perhaps even better yet just leave off the ADHD part and tell me your solution. Or that you are working on the solution. I will be by your side for that too. But overall that has got to be your mindset.
Maybe selection bias, but a significant number of my friends are diagnosed.
For me personally I mostly attribute this to how the circle initially formed - a bunch of outcasts to varying degrees new to college glomping on to any familiar faces from highschool (despite not really interacting during high school)
Any additions since college were adopted into the group through a mutual "we're the weirdos in this world, aren't we?" initial bond.
The better question is how many of the people in these groups have been medically diagnosed?
I get the arguments for self-diagnosis but really it's self hypothesis. I only say diagnosed if they're medically diagnosed. Even doctors shouldn't be self diagnosing
ADHD is a spectrum sure but it has a low-end cap due to the second D, disorder. No disorder, no diagnosis, no ADHD. I'd love to have the same brain wiring without the disorder
I also think it's true that many professions will aggressively surface ADHD.
Imagine a plumber making house calls all day. There's a fair bit of structure and variety baked into his day, he's moving around, gets to use his hands, etc. It's hard and skilled work but it also might be really compatible with ADHD.
Now think of a software engineer. 8-10 hours of monofocus on a single task every day. It's just you and the computer... which also has the largest array of distractions (the internet) just a click away. Fucking nightmare scenario for ADHD. If you've got even a hint of ADHD this career will expose it and expose it hard.
* PA * travel agent * event planner
either nightmare scenarios or dream scenarios
i've actually done some small amount of event planning, an annual event for about 125 people. (i realize that's tiny, obviously people are out there planning events for 100,000 people)
yeah, you're constantly switching your focus back and forth between the 20 things that need to get nailed down in the next 3 months for an upcoming event. and a professional event planner is probably juggling ten small events or several larger ones. it's a juggling act but it's kind of fun. also you have executive freedom to an extent.
engineering is kind of fucked because you are expected to do deep deep deep deep deep big-brain thinking for 2000 hours a year, and yet you are still often bombarded with distractions on a minute to minute basis. absolute MISMATCH.
event planning is chaotic by nature, and hard, and requires context switching, but generally no individual element requires hours of meditative thought and iteration while 3 different managers ping you on fucking Slack and you're also supposed to "keep an eye on production" and also mentor five kids who just graduated from a 6-week code camp like engineering does.
a lot of entrepreneurs are ADHD as hell. the context switching suits them, especially when they are calling the shots.
It sounds stupid, but I will forget to talk for months and people just drift off, not interested in reconnecting.
But other people with ADHD will reconnect after months as if we'd just been talking yesterday, no bad feelings of being ignored at all.
The most important ADHD accommodation for me has been a private office (in my case working from home).
I'm insanely distractible—the slightest noise can throw me off, and even the threat of an impending interruption is enough to make me lose focus thinking about how I'll respond if it comes. In an open office, I had very little control over my environment, and so it was impossible for me to keep focused for any length of time. If it wasn't a coworker interrupting me personally, it was a conversation happening behind me, or even just someone walking by and me wondering if they're going to interrupt.
At home, I have a private office with a locked door, and I put on hearing protection over earbuds, which blocks essentially all sounds from the house. I can control my notifications, so if I'm in flow I'm completely uninterruptible.
The other big benefit from privacy is that I don't have to feel guilty when I do get distracted with something. There's no one to see me and judge me for not "looking like I'm working", so when I do lose focus for hours and then get the whole day's work done in a single hour of hyperfocus, no one knows or cares that I couldn't stay focused that day—all they see is that I finished what I said I would. Privacy allows me to use my strengths (working well under pressure) without fear of judgement.
And, of course, as others point out, the auditory distractions are only part of the problem with an open floor plan.
I have learned at least two things about myself and a few about other people from all of this. For myself, I know I am overly acclimated to blowing past my limits into my reserves. I am used to constantly monitoring my mental state and pushing for breaks.
For others, I know that adrenaline and cortisol reduce everyone’s cognitive abilities. It’s why we do fire drills. It’s why NASA launch facilities ritualize everything. Save your brain cells and improvisational skills for things we can’t predict, not for things we can.
In the first hours of an emergency, everyone else’s brain turns to mush while mine gets just a little squishy. What for them is their worst work day in months is to me just a bad Tuesday. And self monitoring is one of the first things to go. They’re operating at 80% while I’m at 95%, and they absolutely won’t call for breathers without prompting.
On projects where I am at the periphery, we all struggle together. On projects where I get to influence the agenda, or even father chunks of it, people often walk back out of that room feeling like they braced for a collision that never came, because I’ve routed around all of the foot guns and created low cognitive load ways to answer the important questions. If anyone has been complaining about me spending “too much time” on this, about half of them are convinced after one or two non-event events. If the majority of the people didn’t agree with my methods before, they do now.
I used to say I spend my A-game days protecting myself from my C-game days, but these days I’m more likely to cite Kernighan’s aphorism about not being smart enough to debug your own code. Write all of your code like you’re going to have to wrestle with it on an off day, because you certainly will at some point.
And putting high functioning ADHD people in charge of process and tooling is not a terrible idea. If you can figure out who those people are, that is. To be high functioning means constantly masking, because in this world it’s better to be rude and aloof than to be seen as broken.
On my current project our hot fix process is so bullet proof that I could do a hot fix in the middle of our sprint demo. And I have, three times. Once while I was the MC. All of that was me, and the automation tools I wrote for myself are the official process now. And instead of a bus number of 3 it’s somewhere north of 6. Important, especially this time of year.
I suppose this is true of lots of people, I just have different categorizations for what constitutes a dragon.
Of all the optimizations I've done, moving to one screen/monitor ~10 years ago has been the biggest positive impact on my work, anxiety, and overall focus.
When I was younger, I was way too naive in the memetic desire when seeing other more senior folks with multiple screens, or even seeing "hacker" representations in the media with many screens with different orientations (silly, I know...everyone is dumb when they're young.) When you're 22 and insecure about whether or not you're actually "good" or belong, then you try to mimic the "best."
I think we need to really take a hard look at today's world of tech and how we communicate and collaborate.
I find that, if time allows, I get a massive productivity boost after 4:30pm and everyone is either winding down or leaving. All the sudden, the walls flatten, the horizon deepens and I enter a deep state of flow.
Around 10 AM, after an elongated "stand up", I should be ready to go... And yet it's absolutely impossible to not alt-tab 300 times per hour, and I can't seem to even remember the code I just typed or what the hell I'm even trying to do.
Even if I close Slack, Outlook and turn off all notifications, I've got a minute-by-minute cron job in the back of my head that ticks
I remember once I had to travel for family, to a different timezone, I was super productive. Only 1 14" screen and a different timezone. Pedal to the metal.Ah, the 90s. The CRT, the keyboard, the fullscreen applications, the lack of communication. 1 or 2 emails a day. Bliss.
Add to today: kids, imessages, facebook, twitter, mastodon, instagram, emails, slack, discord... How the fuck do I even survive the week?
I think ADHD is the new norm.