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Hacking ADHD: Strategies for the modern developer

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Re: Hacking ADHD: Strategies for the modern developer

#561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that may be true. 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 d…

I’d say nightmare scenarios would be: * PA * travel agent * event planner

It's funny because I could see those going either way for ADHD individuals

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.

Re: Hacking ADHD: Strategies for the modern developer

#562
post #156
post #126

This again? A blog post stuffed with stolen art and often heard but absolutely not working advice? > Every morning, I start my day by planning it out in a custom template that displays my Google Calendar events and Todoist task list. For real? One of the best ADHD tools I am aware of is called the Anti Planner. It doesn't take long to find posts like "why to-do lists don't work for people with ADHD" https://coachjess…

I feel similar with the “every morning” stuff. The problem is I have a very hard time making some happen every morning.

Reeks of the "don't break the chain" cultism that originates from an urban myth of about how Jerry Seinfeld practiced wiriting jokes.

Re: Hacking ADHD: Strategies for the modern developer

#563
post #118

The Blinking LED, A simple Hack that still works for me after years: 1. Place a tiny LED (red or yellow) by the side of your monitor or virtually on the screen corner. Basically anywhere almost bordering your field of view. 2. Make it blink like a fast heartbeat (120-150 bpm) and gradually slowdown to around 60 bpm (or your slow heartbeat base). Make the slope approx 20 to 60 minutes (you can adjust the best rate by…

Intriguing. Wonder if sound would work also.

brain.fm really seems to help me out, when I remember to use it!

Re: Hacking ADHD: Strategies for the modern developer

#564

I used to think I had some ADHD symptoms: growing up I never did any revision for any of my school exams until a couple of days before, all my coursework and projects were done last minute in a week of intense focus, I've had issues with drugs in the past etc. Then I met someone who actually has ADHD and saw them before they'd taken their stimulant drugs. They were completely nonfunctional in any sense of the word, t…

Sourced from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38162133 >Self diagnoses (and diagnoses over the internet) are pretty harmful Self-diagnoses can be legitimate or not - depends on the person doing them. They are often a necessity, in an environment where a professional diagnosis takes thousands of dollars or years in waiting (and is often done badly, by ill-informed professionals, like the many-decades prevailing my…

There are a lot of problems with this comment. It might touch on a few legitimate ideas, like that we should probably consider the value of the patient's actual experience of course.

But even in light of ideas like that, this whole idea has resulted in people getting pills from people they know or websites based in less-scrupulous nations.

There are similar problems with most of the statements here - they make sense on the surface, but once you consider second- and third-order effects, it falls apart. We should not be encouraging moving away from professionals giving medical diagnoses. It may be a necessary evil at times, but it's a bad idea to encourage.

Re: Hacking ADHD: Strategies for the modern developer

#565
post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your source does not support your claim. They say that if every single individual piece of data used to train a model was to be paid out, there would be a lot of payouts. You could just as easily say that if you had to pay the state for every step you took on the sidewalk, you would have to pay the state a lot. This does not prove that you are indebted to the state for millions in sidewalk usage because fortunately f…

> just as it has not decided to make training data have to pay per file. That's quite exactly what the copyright law states, though. I never thought the day will come when I root for Getty Images but the techbros have managed to do it. Congrats, I guess?

Source? I heard there was a trial for this but wasn't aware it had resolved.

Re: Hacking ADHD: Strategies for the modern developer

#566

Can't hack ADHD without first sorting out other problems. It's treated as a singular issue but in my experience it's not. Here are some factors to consider: 1) Does the person have a quiet place get high quality sleep in 2) How is their relationship with family and significant other 3) Do they exercise - physical stamina helps build mental stamina and helps with clarity 4) Do they eat healthy 5) Anxiety or depression…

I think we need to stop these posts. ADHD is a disease, not a symptom and should be treated like that.

For me, my sleep is very good, my mental health is perfect, do exercise, eat healthy. But I have ADHD.

Re: Hacking ADHD: Strategies for the modern developer

#567
post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a coworker a few years ago who worked ONLY on his laptop. No monitors. No keyboard. No mouse. He programmed all day on a 13" Macbook Pro. 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 Du…

Damn, that's crazy. Yeah, I don't see how that's physically or mentally possible. Completely alien to me. 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 runn…

Not sure if you ever watch programmers on twitch, but check out ThePrimeagen, I think he's a perfect example of someone who really understands his tool of choice. One screen, one app, one window, and he navigates through code bases faster than anyone I've seen. It's a pretty entertaining stream too if his super high energy style isn't off-putting to you.

Re: Hacking ADHD: Strategies for the modern developer

#568

The Blinking LED, A simple Hack that still works for me after years: 1. Place a tiny LED (red or yellow) by the side of your monitor or virtually on the screen corner. Basically anywhere almost bordering your field of view. 2. Make it blink like a fast heartbeat (120-150 bpm) and gradually slowdown to around 60 bpm (or your slow heartbeat base). Make the slope approx 20 to 60 minutes (you can adjust the best rate by…

Inspired by this post I threw together a new open source desktop app that has an annoying always on top window that has a flashing timer, this seems to accomplish the same thing. https://github.com/timsayshey/cringe-clock

How were you able to manage the window always being on top? I thought you had to disable SIP for that on MacOS.

Re: Hacking ADHD: Strategies for the modern developer

#569
Sadly won't have time to read all comments, maybe someone said it allready.

Once a commenter here on HN wrote that meditation helps him better than anything else. Still have back into the groove of a regular schedule. The best book on the topic might be Mind Illuminated by John Yates, got it from a recommendation here on HN.

Another good one is ADHD 2.0 by Hallowell and Ratey.

Knowledge helps.

Re: Hacking ADHD: Strategies for the modern developer

#570
post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think ADHD is the new norm. Maybe selection bias, but a significant number of my friends are diagnosed.

There may be a little bit of birds of a feather flocking together on this one. Similarly my closest circle have all got a diagnosis of something or other. Most are in the IT field too. 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)…

or it could be that ADHD is a spectrum with most people having some symptoms of it even if it's not very disruptive.

The better question is how many of the people in these groups have been medically diagnosed?

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