201–210 of 415 posts
I expect that if you forced yourself to slack less and do more hours of "real work", you would get less done in more time, and with degraded quality.
If you can change your perspective and feel less guilty, I recommend you keep doing what you do for both your sake and your employer's. It's a long term win-win.
Read up a bit on ADHD. That 'hyperfocus' that occurs either with deadlines or on a passion project is a symptom, as is the inability to get excited about projects you simply don't want to do - especially given your otherwise positive reviews and your ability to clear your mind and hyperfocus near a deadline, it's something to consider. I was diagnosed at 33, and it changed my life infinitely for the better. YMMV, and…
What did you do to solve it? I recently saw this Reddit post [1] and immediately booked an appointment with my doctor. He gave me the run around and asked me to book a 15 min call with another doctor to get an anxiety assessment. As soon as the call began they asked if I felt like I had ADHD. I said maybe and they stopped and said that they only diagnose anxiety. Now I am 200$ poorer(thanks American healthcare) and a…
I've had fantastic experiences with donefirst.com, but also chadd.org is a great website with tons of resources.
Don't give up on the medication; finding the right one and right dosage is extremely helpful for many people with ADHD, myself included.
The most important part is: find an expert. Child psychologists/psychiatrists often have a ton of experience with ADHD, and also often treat adults. Someone without experience treating ADHD is almost worse than leaving it untreated, because some of the 'solutions' proposed by folks who don't understand the syndrome serve to only make life worse for ADHD people (negative reinforcement, talk therapy, etc.). Talk therapy, or CBT, for example, can be helpful, but coaching is much more useful.
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As someone who highly suspects they may have ADHD, how was the diagnosis life changing? Was it through medication, or simply through understanding yourself better?
Both; but honestly, the latter was more important. Simply having a name for the reasons why, no matter how hard I tried and no matter how much I really, genuinely, truly wanted to, there were certain things I just couldn't do... that alone was extremely relieving. And infuriating. And vindicating. But mostly, genuinely relieving. I was able to accept that I wasn't an incompetent fool, incapable of being useful - I ha…
Echoing this point. I struggled with depression for much of my life. Being diagnosed with ADHD at 25 and taking medication for it on a regular basis (5-6d/week) has done more for my depression than any depression medication I've tried.
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I'm definitely not in the same boat as the OP (trying to get away with doing the minimum), but because I hate to be the long pole on a project, I always try to get my pieces done well in advance of when they're required. As I work primarily on infra, I can usually manage to pull this off. What this means is that often when crunch time hits, I've got excess capacity I can use to help "row the boat" (or maybe bail out…
I've seen something similar backfire for a guy I worked with. He had this idea that he would get his shit done Monday-Thursday and have an easy WFH Friday. People ended up doing most work towards end of sprint and Friday would usually be really busy - basically he always had to be present and management would offload priority stuff to him since he was done. So he'd end up busting his ass all week. Eventually he got t…
At 3 hours a day, you work as much as everyone else does. [0] [0] https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/in-an-8-hour-day-the-aver...
If I’m your boss, sitting next to you and in full view of your screen, and I’m there for 8 hours working, will the average person work a real 8 hours?
I simply can't sit and focus working for 8 hours a day. Especially if its hard. I'm not a robot.
If I thought you were sitting there just to watch me to try and force me to work more, I'd leave.
I think for me doing dev, 4 hours is about the max before the quality of work drops off significantly.
This sounds like it might be good thing for the company. Having employees who have extra capacity is incredibly important for an organization that wants to get things done; if you're constantly hard at work on something important, when something else comes up (someone has a question, there's a bug or an outage, whatever), you either have to delay the thing you're already working on, or delay the thing that came up. T…
I feel like I am in a similar boat to OP. Often feeling like my regular work doesn't take up a full week and not trying to fill up every bit of that 40 hours. I also spend a lot of my time "poking around" and not doing my own work. Seeing what others are working on, learning random things that may or may not be applicable to my job. But performance reviews come around with words like "very responsive!" and "always knows what's going on in the program and can jump in to any project"
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What is it that changed your life? Medication? Better understanding of yourself?
Medication could also change the life for worse because one risks getting psychosis.
Medication saves lives.
Read up a bit on ADHD. That 'hyperfocus' that occurs either with deadlines or on a passion project is a symptom, as is the inability to get excited about projects you simply don't want to do - especially given your otherwise positive reviews and your ability to clear your mind and hyperfocus near a deadline, it's something to consider. I was diagnosed at 33, and it changed my life infinitely for the better. YMMV, and…
What is it that changed your life? Medication? Better understanding of yourself?