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Comment by yabadabadoes | Hacker News Reader

Based on being an occasional technical mentor to a friend with ADHD, I might suggest:

I would experiment with plenty of exercise during the work week to try to find a mellow yet energetic state.

I would look for ways to do something you find fascinating as a way to engage with the work. As an example, experiments with debuggers can give you a different way to engage with code.

Don't be afraid to go back and forth between more and less code centric jobs. You may have a significant advantage context switching for presales engineering and roles that deal with more unexpected runtime problems, etc.

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Great suggestions. I do get plenty of exercise during the week, but not usually BEFORE work. Others have suggested that it has a similar effect to medication, and if I can get my morning in order, then maybe that would help. The engagement is I think the core thing that's really hard to get. I've floated in and out of University for a number of years as I've been fired or have become bored with the work I've been doing. It always provides a renewed sense wonder that is hard to come by I find. Likewise, I've always been in programming centric jobs from day 1 until 2017 when I couldn't find work and took up a moving job. It was incredible. I could hustle and work my ass off all day, then sit down and program during the evening. Likewise, working as a barista at Starbucks last year was refreshing. My first experience in customer service/food service showed me that I'm great at speaking to people and handling cash, but AWFUL at remembering things. As in, 3 months in I still wasn't sure how many pumps of syrup went into X.

> You may have a significant advantage context switching for presales engineering and roles that deal with more unexpected runtime problems, etc.

I would think the opposite: with lower working memory, context switching will be more painful and impose greater performance problems.

ADHD (at least in my case) makes context switching, and switching back, easy (it's a core symptom, this is the reason we have difficulty focusing). It's rare to hear one of us say "now where was I?".

I equate it to the threading model; instead of a single thread, we have a main thread, and x (let's say 5) additional threads running in the background. Our scheduler is peculiar. We can swap the main thread for a background thread easily, but we can't stop the background threads from running, and when unmedicated, they all fight to be the main thread, trying to tempt the scheduler into switching over. Hyperfocus occurs when the main thread panics, and the scheduler assigns all of the other threads to dump their workloads and help. You’ve spent your life adapting to keeping up with expectations using 1/6th of your processing power. Now all 6 cores are working on the same problem and you temporarily have a superpower.

From what I understand (and this is an oversimplified layperson's understanding, so forgive me), we are unusually low on neurotransmitters and messages have a harder time making it across long distances without unusual effort.

It is by default difficult to maintain hyperfocus. It is a skill that needs to be practiced and exercised; but once you get it down, you can maintain it while switching between completely unrelated tasks.

Hyperfocus is triggered when tasks are mentally taxing. As long as everything I am working on is difficult, I can work on 5 tasks at a time (switching between them at interval) and complete them all quickly and effectively. Busywork is what stops me in my tracks; as soon as I don't have to think, I am dead in the water.

How you handle maintaining hyperfocus depends on the situation; early in my career, when presented with a busywork task, I'd either automate it (ramping up the complexity), or take on a difficult stretch goal and switch between that and the busywork every x minutes so I can keep my brain awake. Now that I can pick and choose what I work on, I just take the hard stuff and nobody seems to have a problem with that.

Fun fact: most of the "genius" movie tropes are just exaggerated ADHD symptoms and hyperfocus quirks.

> ADHD (at least in my case) makes context switching, and switching back, easy (it's a core symptom, this is the reason we have difficulty focusing). It's rare to hear one of us say "now where was I?"

This surprises me because my own experience is one where I lack

1) the biological equivalent of an Instruction Pointer.

2) the working memory to hold both my previous task's information and my current task's information in my head.

So, if I have to switch tasks a bunch, I don't properly load the info for my current task into working memory.

To build on this, I find that an arbitrary challenge doesn't really work for me. Deadlines, blackbox debugging, and quizzes fall into this category. I was fired from my first front-end job because much of the work ended up being me trying to debug opaque problems in Ember.js v1, and lack of productively writing CSS after solving the design and layout problems. My job was building UI, but I excelled at solving the CSS, JS, and design problems, then I'd stall at actually productively writing it. I'll usually feel guilty about falling behind and grind myself to sleep deprivation to slowly get it done.

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