Ask HN: How do programmers deal with ADD?

I have a lot of days where my mind just wanders to many, many things besides work tasks.

I get focused on work by keeping my diet in check (no junk food), just 1 coffee very early in the day and getting up and walking around a bit frequently, play with my dogs, pick up a book and read it for a few minutes.

Headphones also help me keep my head clear. I pump through them things that are conducive to my working and not getting distracted.

If I just can't focus, despite best efforts, I actually don't. I do something else until I am ready to focus again and then I give my work all of that attention. Sometimes this means working at night after the wife and kids are in bed because that is when my mind is back. Not everyone probably has this luxury as employers may not be this flexible.

One thing that has always helped me is just simple meditation. It trains your brain to rein-in focus, and after you have done it for a while you can recover focus in just a few seconds if you find your mind wandering.

Try nootropics, a good choline source (alpha-gpc), piracetam and aniracetam. Rather than make your condition a problem they'll help you "go with it" and leverage it. Also although I'm not sure of the exact mechanisms of action, whatever it is that gets "drained" in context switching they seem to supply in abundance and you'll be able to context switch all day long without resulting fatigue. They are not stimulants, so don't expect a coffee "rush" ... the effects are evident with mental work done at the end of the day. Another thing that may help you: get into tDCS and use the "positive" side on the left side of your brain with the negative on the right when you need to "focus sequentially" ... but just make sure to balance that out with the reverse say, on the weekends so as to not overly direct your brain in one direction at the expense of balance. Holosync has worked for me as well although I'm not sure of the reasons why, although there is much technical info that comes with the free e-book from the website. It's a bit expensive, but I believe there is a "trial" version on that site by those guys in IKEA land that have funny replies to law firms threatening legal action for copyright infringement. Also I highly recommend a workflowy subscription as a sort of "brian cache" of your random trains of thought; you will need this especially if you try the nootropic route because you will be able to work for many hours at will pausing only for sleep. Also I would recommend you sample "focus@will" they have an experimental ADD channel (maybe part of the free trial?) and there are actually settings based on type (mostly sounds like Skrillex type music?). Various binaural stuff you can find on YouTube for free and high quality goes a long way. The point is any one of these is good, together they are greater than the sum of the parts and your thing can not only be "managed" but actually developed and directed to your advantage. Learn to use your super power. Also I would highly recommend you meditate on the logic of what used to be a nice niche game for the Mac a decade ago: Serenity. Basically it was a 3D polynomial rendering game where you had to "float" but the more direct and oriented the mouse movement, the worse the controls got. You had to "slow down" your brain and move sloooowly, gradually, with much subtlety to gain success. Then you got calm and sleep and could go to bed. Contrast that with the fast, twitchy nature of modern ... everything - cartoons, video games, movies, commercials, music ... and ask yourself if it contributes to your situation if perhaps your brain is a bit more sensitive to such stimulation. Learn when it's useful and when you need to isolate yourself from such inputs so that they don't "tip you over." Good luck.

Mild medication and habits are my saviours.

Habits around when I sleep, wake, eat, and what I eat. Interruptions to habits result in drop-outs, things get forgotten watch, lunch bag, keys, appointments, ...).

Medicatio: be careful exploring what works nd what does not. Ritalin, Adderal, Concerta, are basically Speed, albeit our different brain chemistry reacts to it differently than neurotypical brains. Aderal puts me to sleep. COncerta turned me into an a-hole with an obsessive focus on coding. Three months of hyperfocus. I did an insane amount of coding, and it worked too, but ... Btw, if you use that phrase with your doctor, check his spelling. My record turned out to have "obsession with codeine" in it. Got it caught soon by my therapist and corrected OK, so hopefuly no harm done.

Ritalin is working, after a while spent varying dosage to find a sweet spot. It is good for that, fast acting, fast to clear out, and tiny dosage tablets at 5mg. My sweet spot is two a day, one starting work and one halfway through. At three, my wife complains I tap and grind my teeth too loudly.

Therapist. Alternitvely in ADHD cse know as Life Coach. My saving. I had spent 63 yers developing random baroque and unconsciou compensations to cover up my embarraassment t not even knowing what it was I would get accused of - normal social epecttion for example. I have time blindness - can't plan, don't anticipate, don't remember, or if I do there's no timestamp. It is so bad my compensation for that was to become very very good at "making it up as I go". Including in programming. No good for college, makes me rather useless for the typical line programmer job, but there are a few niches that really need it, where there are no existing patterns or known solutions, for example. As a result, a 50 year career doing stuff nobody else has done before. Always inventing. Almost allways - a few times when I was not doing that, ranging from boring to painfully hellish.

Other than that, what pretty much everybody else has said. For making money, you are best off finding work in which you can easily enter and enjoy hyperfocus. For us folks on this forum, that would probably be programming in some form.

I have been very lucky also in employers and cofounders who, while maybe not knowing about the ADHD (I didn't myself, after all, until recently), had enough confidence in my results to let me get there in my own way, displacement behaviours and all.

Thanks for the encouragement :)