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The ADHD body double: A unique tool for getting things done

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Re: The ADHD body double: A unique tool for getting things done

#211

Post by Eddy_Viscosity2 »

Tabular-Iceberg wrote: post #208
Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The counter to this is that you can actually have a 5 or 10 minute teams call which was all that was needed to resolve the issue / answer the question / or whatever the meeting was about. Whereas, if it was a physical meeting in a booked room then it would easily expand to fill 30 or 60min or whatever time the room was booked for. I see this myself. I get a teams call with a manager and a few others, get something so…

But then Teams will only let you book calls that start and end at the hour and half hour, making everything either back-to-back or with gaps too long for breaks and too short for focus work. Teams goes out of its way to create colossal amounts of waste by design. Cui bono?

Teams does have the same time booking quanta as physical rooms, but (at least in my experience), the expectation and norms around a teams call is to end when your done and sign off. Whereas in a meeting room you get the "ok, so that's resolved. We have the room for another 25minutes, so what else is going on with everyone?" kind of vibe and we all stay there for the full time block.

Re: The ADHD body double: A unique tool for getting things done

#212

Post by saghm »

erikerikson wrote: post #153
saghm wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They line people up in rows, put headphones on their heads and wire them up to Teams and Jira to spend the whole day in isolation. Because taking a walk to another floor of building to talk to someone like a normal human being is too wasteful, but somehow forcing everyone to spend hours commuting isn’t. Sure, this is pretty much exactly what I'd expect from companies; wasting the employee's time doesn't matter, but…

Except we're largely talking about salaried employees who aren't paid by the hour.

My point isn't that this is likely to happen today with software engineers, but that companies will 100% make decisions to improve their bottom lines at the expense of the well-being of their employees in the absence of other factors preventing this. Wasting time of salaried employees on commutes is a fairly tame version of that compared to what's happened historically, and I used an extreme example because my argument is that the main difference between then and now isn't companies fundamentally caring more about their employees, but improved safeguards for workers. Outside of those safeguards, sadly I'd find it more surprising if companies _didn't_ push to the absolute limit of what they could get away with rather than actually considering whether what they were doing was reasonable.

Re: The ADHD body double: A unique tool for getting things done

#213

Post by erikerikson »

saghm wrote: post #212
erikerikson wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except we're largely talking about salaried employees who aren't paid by the hour.

My point isn't that this is likely to happen today with software engineers, but that companies will 100% make decisions to improve their bottom lines at the expense of the well-being of their employees in the absence of other factors preventing this. Wasting time of salaried employees on commutes is a fairly tame version of that compared to what's happened historically, and I used an extreme example because my argume…

Thank you for moderating and clarifying a bit.

An example I would suggest is the push for "always more" no matter how much has been given.

Employer: "Great job succeeding in delivering our release death march on time! You are all the best!"

Us: "Comp time to rest?"

Employer: .oO(awkward choice employee...) "You agreed to a full time position, it will be fine for you to work your normal 40 and do make work."

That I've experienced almost that directly. Not in every role but it did happen. That particular company lied to me about the role too so I ended up leaving.

The thing that concerns me is that we start with these overly strong statements. The next stage is some of us become convinced of them. After that some of those transition to believing companies are obliged to them and start behaving accordingly. But these beliefs are bad for business and everyone involved. They create iterative counter solving games that reduce satisfaction and productivity. While I've always done my best by my employers, the concrete delivery of that effort has varied based on external factors but mostly the health of the work environment. No one has gotten as much of of me as startups that set a clear goal and let me work.

Re: The ADHD body double: A unique tool for getting things done

#214

Post by sanderjd »

jvanderbot wrote: post #136
goda90 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My employer was very quick to force return to office after covid lockdowns. Like they were willing to pour millions into subdividing offices into closets so people could isolate at work even, but the county health department gave them a stern look and they ended up scraping that and waiting another year to force RTO. But they actually put their money where their mouth is. Ad-hoc conversations in the hallway, going to…

I would love an offline only work environment. Just a small cadre of tech obsessed smart folks working in a room and talking when they need to. In grad school we did this. Everyone was heads down, except when they were stumped they'd go to the whiteboard, which was open invitation to discuss a problem, if you had time. That kind of "opt in" / volunteering help was way more trust building and low pressure than pulling…

Yeah the problem is that as soon as you're doing something that is bigger than like 8 people, it just doesn't really work anymore. Now people sitting in the room with you must coordinate with people sitting outside the room, and so either you have to listen to that, which is distracting, or they have to go elsewhere to do meetings and calls, which breaks the whole magic of the setup. In a big or even medium-sized company, it's nearly impossible to subdivide teams so well that you have small teams like this who are able to work with total autonomy for most of their time.

This is actually something I'm cautiously optimistic about with the advent of AI tooling. Maybe we can make a 5-10 person company work for a much wider range of businesses now? I think it needs to be planned from the start, as all the pressure from investors and just the status quo is to grow headcount at least to an order of magnitude or so larger than that.

But I do think I'd love to work in a very small business (or partnership, or co-op) that is explicitly not trying to grow bigger than a team all working directly together.

Re: The ADHD body double: A unique tool for getting things done

#215

Post by afpx »

kayodelycaon wrote: post #146
01100011 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beyond type II bipolar, I don't have a diagnosis for anything psychological but I'm pretty sure I have ADHD with a touch of Asperger's(based mostly on a review of my behaviors over the past 50 years). But yeah I've found "smoothed brown noise" to work wonders. I also had some success with wearing a snug fitting balaclava. It's odd, but it worked. Nicotine helped, but I now have NAFLD and nicotine might be a factor in…

In my experience, bipolar can be one symptom of larger brain problems. You end up with symptoms of a lot of different mental disorders that have a different underlying cause than normal for those disorders. For example, I have a rather severe impairment of executive function. I have a diagnosis of ADHD, but my internal experience doesn’t seem to match what I’ve read about other people with ADHD and none of the first…

I developed some significant executive functioning issues over the past 15 years. The symptoms started shortly after I started taking bipolar 2 medications.

I suspected that it was from the APs, so I looked for research and found a few papers that showed links between APs and gray matter loss. So, I stopped taking the APs (the side-effects were really bad, anyway), but my mind hasn't really recovered though.

It's extremely frustrating. I have to constantly write 'to do' lists. And, I have to put my thinking down on paper. I used to be able to hold big models in my mind and just code. It's slowed down my productivity probably 70%.

Re: The ADHD body double: A unique tool for getting things done

#216

Post by kubanczyk »

kristianp wrote: post #65
onemoresoop wrote: post #32

I may have ADHD, I never went for a diagnosis and found body doubling useful at times, especially when I was in school some decades ago, back then I had no name for it. However, I find white noise very helpful with staying on the task and with increased focus. My company moved, about a year ago, into a very cramped office that is also extremely noisy. This exasperated me, I would get drained of energy in a couple of…

What do you do about notifications from Slack/Emails/Teams messages?

Process The Comms Async.

Async doesn't mean "rarely", it means you must set the pace. Notifications contradict this paradigm, so they are completely off.

I switch to these tabs/apps manually, at my own pace, which is sometimes relaxed, but at times can be super-dense.

Re: The ADHD body double: A unique tool for getting things done

#217

Post by joquarky »

tanjtanjtanj wrote: post #201
erikerikson wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been evaluated half yearly or annually, never hourly that I've known. Do you work in HR?

The above poster was fairly obviously using a figure of speech, they did not mean that there was a specific formal evaluation like a mid-year review every hour. Think about what the average salaried person (especially outside of tech) might get dinged on either explicitly or implicitly. Come in at 10:00 every day? Not being "seen" enough in your seat or around the office? Not replying quickly enough in Teams/slack? J…

> Not replying quickly enough in Teams/slack?

This has got to be an ADA violation for someone with ADHD.

Not that it matters anymore.

Re: The ADHD body double: A unique tool for getting things done

#218

Post by N2yhWNXQN3k9 »

viraptor wrote: post #110
N2yhWNXQN3k9 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So... you're basically saying it works? Working under pressure isn't a viable therapy, IMO. In my experience, it is a path to burn out and diminishing returns. > Got any support for that? Anecdotally, ~25 years of eating them, but there is plenty of evidence that prolonged use of amphetamine causes structural neuronal changes, even at therapeutic doses. Here is one article: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38665308/…

> Working under pressure isn't a viable therapy, None of ADHD related stuff is really therapy. We only know how to manage symptoms for now. > Anecdotally Yeah... > prolonged use of amphetamine causes structural neuronal changes Sure. But is it worse than unmanaged ADHD which also results in brain changes over time? > What papers? What do they say? It's a whole category, but you could start with this collection: https…

> None of ADHD related stuff is really therapy. We only know how to manage symptoms for now.

Managing symptoms is therapy?

>> Anecdotally

> Yeah...

Then ignore everything that came after that?

> Sure. But is it worse than unmanaged ADHD which also results in brain changes over time?

Physiologically, yes? I am honestly concerned for people who think eating amphetamine or similar drugs daily has no negative outcomes.

> It's a whole category, but you could start with this collection:

There is zero mention of anything discussed here in that root paper, but cool information bomb. No one is going to read 40 papers to respond to you. Honestly, that is a dickhead thing to share.

> shouldn't involve fear

If you've never felt nervous (fear) while pair programming, you might be experiencing a bit of over-confidence.

Re: The ADHD body double: A unique tool for getting things done

#219

Post by N2yhWNXQN3k9 »

pjerem wrote: post #45
N2yhWNXQN3k9 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So... you're basically saying it works? Working under pressure isn't a viable therapy, IMO. In my experience, it is a path to burn out and diminishing returns. > Got any support for that? Anecdotally, ~25 years of eating them, but there is plenty of evidence that prolonged use of amphetamine causes structural neuronal changes, even at therapeutic doses. Here is one article: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38665308/…

> Working under pressure isn't a viable therapy, IMO. In my experience, it is a path to burn out and diminishing returns. Except that pair programming doesn’t make you work under pressure. I extensively use this technique for body doubling as much as I can. It motivates me to start the task and I also love the exchange : you can learn things, teach things, be stuck together, find solutions together, swear together, l…

> Except that pair programming doesn’t make you work under pressure

Sure, in ideal circumstances.

Do you remember your first day on a job anywhere as a programmer? You were so relaxed, no pressure.

It sounds like you have an emotional attachment to pair programming. That is cool, but it certainly isn't the norm.

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