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Effect of perceptual load on performance within IDE in people with ADHD symptoms

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Re: Effect of perceptual load on performance within IDE in people with ADHD symptoms

#171

Post by tpmoney »

asyx wrote: post #105
steve_adams_86 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I lost my reading tendency when life got harder. The urgency and anxiety around keeping up with everyday life made activities like reading almost unsettling slow and “unproductive”. I realized that and did something about it, but I didn’t allow myself to enjoy a book for around 10 years. Not sure if that resonates with you (I hope not!) but I figured I’d mention it just in case. I was totally unaware of what I was do…

What did you do about it? I'm exclusively a vacation reader. When I have limited free time, reading competes with other hobbies or media and almost never wins just because a book is such a huge time investment compared to a movie or a video game and I'd really like to change that.

Can’t speak for the OP but in my case, reading is what I do to unwind before sleep. If I let myself work on hobbies or projects until I want to sleep I’ll either be up until 5am doing “one more thing” or won’t be able to sleep because my brain is still working. I need to stop all “thinking” activities at least an hour before I want to sleep. So I read in that space. The caveat to this (because I can also read until 5am if I’m engrossed) is the moment I notice I’m feeling sleepy or I’ve had to go back and re-read a page because I drifted mentally, then it’s time to shut the reader and go to sleep. If I try to power through to finish the chapter, I’m too likely to have caught a second wind and be up all night.

Re: Effect of perceptual load on performance within IDE in people with ADHD symptoms

#173

Post by bbrks »

ribs wrote: post #156
bbrks wrote: post #147

There's also a video presentation JetBrains Research have published alongside this paper: https://youtu.be/ris_UxYMn_Y

Thanks, the article is paywalled, so this link is very helpful

You can find the paper on arxiv.org if you're interested.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.06376

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2302.06376.pdf

Re: Effect of perceptual load on performance within IDE in people with ADHD symptoms

#174

Post by joymonger »

ranting-moth wrote: post #167

> "We found that the perceptual load does affect programmers’ efficiency." Yeah, not a surprise of the century for me. Is there an similar research on interruptions? Especially Slack going ping ping all the day? I wonder how much those interruptions cost the industry. I know they have benefits too.

Everybody's style is different, but for me, I silence... everything. Nothing dings. Nothing pops up. Not on my macbook, or my phone (Do Not Disturb, always), or even my microwave.

For Slack, I watch for a number in the red dot above its icon. Then I know I need to check it. For e-mail, sometimes e-mails just get by me. It's not usually a problem. For calendar, I have to keep a mental note of my next meeting. That is probably the biggest downside of this setup.

Re: Effect of perceptual load on performance within IDE in people with ADHD symptoms

#175

Post by nwallin »

bob1029 wrote: post #122

Even "lite" editors like VSCode, NP++, Sublime Text, etc have become distracting for me. Every time I fire one of these things up, my mental state is eliminated by being forced to dismiss some "hey we got a new version for you :D:D:D" bullshit modal. To whomever is responsible for adding these to apps: please stop. No one is enjoying your shenanigans. It is a text editor . Empathize with the user: People with far les…

> Visual studio proper is a 100% circus for me now. I can power through it, but I lose tabs in about 15 seconds after opening them.

I used to be the same way but then I discovered Visual Studio's vertical tab option. Tabs are displayed vertically on the left side of the editor pane. The filenames are all aligned so it's actually possible to visually scan them. You can group them by project and color code them by file type.

Tabs are unusable otherwise. For me at least.

Re: Effect of perceptual load on performance within IDE in people with ADHD symptoms

#176

Post by nwallin »

badtuple wrote: post #137
digdugdirk wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This hits home. Especially the "hours to recover" part. I never quite appreciate how long it takes to right the ship after a day like that. Do you have any tips for how you structure your digital workspace? Favourite tools or methods to help support your executive functioning?

The only thing that works for me is separating things into very distinct "realms" and only having one realm open at a time. No exceptions. For example one realm is for communication. Slack, Browser, Email, and Calendar can be open. Nothing is really a distraction from anything else here. I'm just being "at work" and communicating in this mode. Another is for coding. Literally the only things open are vim and a termin…

> If I need documentation then I didn't design well enough,

I need documentation because my coworkers didn't design well enough.

Re: Effect of perceptual load on performance within IDE in people with ADHD symptoms

#177

Post by kayodelycaon »

bob1029 wrote: post #122

Even "lite" editors like VSCode, NP++, Sublime Text, etc have become distracting for me. Every time I fire one of these things up, my mental state is eliminated by being forced to dismiss some "hey we got a new version for you :D:D:D" bullshit modal. To whomever is responsible for adding these to apps: please stop. No one is enjoying your shenanigans. It is a text editor . Empathize with the user: People with far les…

For Sublime Text, you should be able to set this in your settings file:

    "update_check": false
In VSCode change the Update Mode setting to manual.

Re: Effect of perceptual load on performance within IDE in people with ADHD symptoms

#178

Post by tpmoney »

rightbyte wrote: post #27
dkh wrote: post #16

As an engineer for 10+ years with pretty severe ADHD (unmedicated, I cannot usually even read more than a few pages of a book before either losing focus or feeling drained) I have always been aware of how much my performance fluctuates based on the cognitive load of dealing with the code I am currently working with, and how it is displayed. I half-jokingly tend to describe it to people as having a "small brain buffer…

> flounder when debugging if I feel unable to visually see or mentally hold the entire problem in my head at once Surely this is a general problem and not specific to programmers with ADD? Or do you mean you are relatively worse at "needle sting debugging"? You second paragraph is just sane things in general. I wish your mindset was more common among my colleagues ...

Like most discussions of ADHD it’s hard for people with it to explain because the only terms they have for it are the same terms everyone else has for things, so it sounds like the sort of problems everyone has. But when you have ADHD it’s also different because you can’t “just do X” where X is something that works for people without ADHD because something that you can’t describe is different.

An (imperfect) analogy I saw recently was it’s like talking about debt between someone in a middle class household (non-ADHD people) and someone in a poverty household. Sure a lot of the problems are similar in both word and shape, but the middle class person can’t imagine “had to take out a pay day loan to buy used tires from joes tire shack” and the poverty person can’t understand “we had to replace the AC this year so we cut back our spending, and had to skip the family reunion at the beach until the credit card was paid off”.

Re: Effect of perceptual load on performance within IDE in people with ADHD symptoms

#179

Post by atq2119 »

joymonger wrote: post #174
ranting-moth wrote: post #167

> "We found that the perceptual load does affect programmers’ efficiency." Yeah, not a surprise of the century for me. Is there an similar research on interruptions? Especially Slack going ping ping all the day? I wonder how much those interruptions cost the industry. I know they have benefits too.

Everybody's style is different, but for me, I silence... everything. Nothing dings. Nothing pops up. Not on my macbook, or my phone (Do Not Disturb, always), or even my microwave. For Slack, I watch for a number in the red dot above its icon. Then I know I need to check it. For e-mail, sometimes e-mails just get by me. It's not usually a problem. For calendar, I have to keep a mental note of my next meeting. That is…

I'm similar, and started to just manually set a timer for upcoming meetings on my phone.

Re: Effect of perceptual load on performance within IDE in people with ADHD symptoms

#180

Post by bob1029 »

kayodelycaon wrote: post #177
bob1029 wrote: post #122

Even "lite" editors like VSCode, NP++, Sublime Text, etc have become distracting for me. Every time I fire one of these things up, my mental state is eliminated by being forced to dismiss some "hey we got a new version for you :D:D:D" bullshit modal. To whomever is responsible for adding these to apps: please stop. No one is enjoying your shenanigans. It is a text editor . Empathize with the user: People with far les…

For Sublime Text, you should be able to set this in your settings file: "update_check": false In VSCode change the Update Mode setting to manual.

> in your settings file

Further into the distracted rabbit hole we go...

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