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Comment by ChrisMarshallNY | Hacker News Reader

As someone that is "on the spectrum," I can report that focus can be pretty awesome. I generate vast amounts of code, in relatively short time, and am an insanely obsessive debugger.

However, it don't come for free. If I get "roused" from my "fugue" (what I call "the zone"), I can be cranky. This has not always been helpful in my marriage.

Also, I find that I can be "vocabularily challenged" for a few minutes after I break out, sounding like a complete moron; struggling for the most basic terminology. "Whatchacallit" is one of my most-uttered phrases.

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I have been experiencing exactly this in the last 10 years without being aware it was a side effect of high focus.

10 years ago I was really bad at studying, then I had a peak of low self esteem, believing I was not intelligent. Ready to give up uni, my GF suggested I'd give myself only one more opportunity.

So I started studying like it was the very last time I'd do it. Like, in an angry state, like I was demonstrating to myself no matter how hard, it was useless.

This is how I discovered my brain only had a "fast gear", and the "slow gear" that normal people used was basically not working for my brain.

I breezed through all my exams, got a series of cool jobs and promotions, now I own my company and sell my own software to Fortune 50 companies.

The side effect of operating at peak concentration levels is becoming socially impaired, and verbally inept exactly like Chris Marshall above described. This has non trivial social consequences.

The amazing thing here is that I just thought I was getting older and grumpier. But now I understand it's in fact tied to the focus. Thanks Chris, now I know what it is, and maybe I can try to tune it down for a period to see what happens.

Does this resonate with anyone else? Is there any studies on this?

I’ve had a similar experience over the past few years — a ton of work focus (at a FAANGM as an ML scientist/engineer) combined with limited social interaction and I’ve noticed my ability to have normal social interactions has declined greatly (“verbally inept” and “difficulty with empathy” pretty much hit it on the head). There’s potentially confounding factors in my case so I’ve been hesitant to attribute it to overfocusing at work although I’ve considered it may be a cause.

In retrospect I’m coming to the conclusion that it’s not really a worthwhile tradeoff and I’ve been pulling back from work a bit. To add to the larger discussion, I thought I was focusing on work for the right reasons (making a difference in the world, gaining skills, self-actualization) but after getting my “dream job” it turned out that it the job wasn’t very fulfilling at all. No technical challenge or abstract impact metrics really did much for my happiness (or money fwiw)... at the end of the day it’s still rewarding social interactions (which don’t necessarily _have_ to be outside of work) that control the needle for me.

It resonates with me from a different direction. Up until I've become a dad I could crank out vast amounts of code and dive very deep into a given topic relatively quickly, producing extensive results when being able to focus, but since then I have a strict schedule, can't easily say "I'm coming home a few hours later today" or things like that to conserve momentum, I feel my output drastically reduced.

I'm currently looking for ways to reorganize my way of working so I get a better output and require less compromises of my family.

I’ve found it extremely useful to keep a detailed log of my thoughts and ideas as I’m working on a problem that requires focus. It’s like a thread dump or memory dump of my thinking. Then, if I get interrupted for whatever reason, I can easily go back to the notes and “restore” from the thread dump.

This is a pretty good blog post I found on the subject: http://faq.sealedabstract.com/uninterruptible_programming_su... .

I’ve found various side benefits in addition to being able to focus in shorter time windows. For example:

- it’s useful for dealing with interruptions that are part of work too - e.g. if you’re helping teammates with different projects, or have to switch contexts for other reasons.

- it can be useful as an artifact of work. For example, you’ve spent a lot of time debugging a weird issue and you’re still not making progress, so you can use a second set of eyes. You can share your work notes with a coworker so they can immediately know what you’ve tried, what worked or didn’t, etc. In that context, I like to think of it as “offline pair programming”.

I feel the same. My attention span is half of what it was before I had a kid and learning new topics at work has significantly become harder. If you ever figure out a solution, I would love to hear it.

It resonates with me. I hit that once, at my 2nd year at university, as I was in a pretty bad emotional state which almost led me to drop off. Something clicked in my brain then, and I rebounded to extreme levels of drive and productivity (and a weird sense of humor). I nailed that year, went straight from "doesn't even attend classes" to the best student on the year. I earned a pretty good reputation with both my fellow students and faculty members alike. Unfortunately, the effect mostly went away the next year; I regressed to the mean, neither at my worst, nor at my best.

I'd really, really like to know how to enter that state again, and sustain it for longer.

Music helps for me. Try to listen music that makes you feel better. I can listen one track in the loop for the whole day and work.

I do that too, and sometimes this gives me bursts of exceptional productivity. But ultimately, it's just a pale shadow of what I had then, a whole year of sustained, exceptional productivity.

Have you changed caffeine consumption? You might be shocked how much of a difference that can make.

Changed in which direction?

I have definitely noticed this in myself and others - after coming out of an intense “in the zone” coding session I’m definitely more cranky and impulsive.

While this is strictly anecdotal, I do believe there is a tight correlation with focus, social and emotional intelligence. In the sense that if I devote all of my “brainpower” to solving a task, I do reduce my ability to understand social queues and other “left brain” stuff.

But as I’ve taken some time to understand my fellow humans better - deliberately putting myself in social situations and reading some great books about it, I’ve noticed the amount of energy required to “process other people” in my brain reducing greatly. This kinda gave me the ability to be pleasant even after doing some coding.

I can think about it like encountering an embedded language inside my templates or something. Like maybe javascript inside html templates.

If I feel comfortable with that language, I don’t even skip a beat, whereas if its something I’m not exactly fluent in, it gets me cranky - who put this in here and ruined its purity kinda feeling.

So it gets better with time, but I had to put deliberate effort into it.

Very much so. As a dev with ADHD, that focus knob is more external than most. But I definitely have noticed the phenomenon where deep focus and verbal/social fluency are rather orthogonal.

I’m interested in how this social breakdown might affect the role of being a scientist. I would think explaining results would be a critical role of your job.

>No technical challenge or abstract impact metrics really did much for my happiness (or money fwiw)

It resonates with me from a different perspective. I can't speak to the technical accomplisments -- I had a mundane tech job -- but I was making nearly 100k in total comp in my mid-20s in a low COL region, and my job was difficult for me. I know this isn't a lot of cash to many here, but it was a lot to me coming from being homeless at 18. However, my life took a bad turn, unfortunately. I had some unbelievable aggressions and weird things happen to me, and I left my job. I remember my history teacher saying of the past "If I was there, I would have done something about it," and yet all everyone told me at this time was something like "You need to stand up for yourself." I think most people today are just like they were back then, even if we are not burning people alive for witch craft, we still sometimes bully people under the name of pretexts and for unacceptable reasons. I then quit, left to try to play one of the most popular online games professionally (I was ranked #40ish at the time). I was really unhappy despite the intense competition and supposed fun and excitement of it. So finally, after that, I started travelling the world. The thing is, I started feeling like I was in heaven. When you travel, it's so easy to make friends and meet so many people in a setting where you are incentivized to share good memories, and not in a rat race or a "keeping up with the Jones's-type" of neighborhood, university or other setting. I mean, maybe it's that I am like a pariah or witch or otherwise bullied person and I dealt with a lot of extreme bullying that destroyed my social life and this contrasted with anything would be good. But I think it's also a lot about what you are saying: it's positive social interactions that really make us happy. I mean, I wouldn't wish my life on anyone, but I somehow found an amazing life out of it this way amidst all of the aggression and chaos.

Thanks for sharing that.

Because of things that don't apply here, I am privileged to constantly be around many folks that have overcome great challenges.

I am at the point in life, where personal happiness is much much more important than money, property or prestige.

I think we agree, but there are disadvantages. One is the power thing. "Your rights are theoretical until you have 100M" and a lot of people treat you differently depending on your wealth and status. That said, we know that's not the world we want to find ourselves in, but sometimes it is unavoidable. I know there is some balance, and that I am at some risk not joining into the rat race.

> This has non trivial social consequences.

I've been learning to apply my ability to focus toward feelings, and the internal states of others. (To the point that I am grumpy to be removed from this flow state also.) This has allowed me to glean insight and deeper meaning into the social lives of my friends, and connect at a slower, deeper level than I could achieve simply with rapid banter. (Which I too am increasingly less capable of as I grow older; now in my mid-30s. I'm slow enough to respond now that people I converse with must think I'm on drugs. I've never done any.)

It is said that few remember exactly what is said in a conversation, but everyone remembers what is felt. If you can use flow to plan and practice the right feelings and feeling-responses, the eloquence of the words you say in the moment does not matter so much.

It is also sometimes stated that "on-the-spectrum"-ness is correlated with heightened sensitivity to emotions. I'm fairly certain that is true for me. If it is for you too, flow is your chance to exploit that trait.

(Probably not applicable to you but maybe applicable to others: I experience ASMR, and use that gift to semi-regularly reset my emotions to a positive state. I utilize that wellspring of good feelings to support my emotional investment in others: it's easier to care about others when you are happy yourself.)

Also, I rarely enter flow for work-work these days. It's rarely needed and sometimes counterproductive for the daily Jira-bug-squashing routine (writing copious notes works better for me), and nearly impossible to maintain in an open office setting. I save it for rare sessions of innovation, and for hobby work.

I have also experienced that. If feels like there direction-less flow of thoughts about a lot of things and nothing to focus on.

I got help from Vivekananda's books. He mentions that the ability to concentrate is the only difference between humans and animals.

And the degree of focus determines success in human life.

But he warns that learning the ability to focus without learning how to completely get out of the mind-thought complex is like going inside a complex maze without the map.

His books are quite small and can be finished in a few hours. Worth reading.

Personally speaking, coming up from deep focus tends to put me in an anxious state and sometimes gives me minor panic attacks.

If anyone reading this is in the same boat, I’d like to pass along some simple advice that a friend gave me: get up and go for a quick vigorous run around the block. I’ve found this to be a very effective way to reset.

I find that about 3 hours of focus followed by an hour of defocus gives closer to optimal results. The defocus time (say, noodling around the net) gives my subconscious time to reconsider the assumptions I was using during the focus time thereby less often going racing down a blind alley.

Are you on the spectrum as well? If so, then I might be too. I have the exact same thing with focus. If you don’t want to reply pubicly, then send me an email.

This makes a lot of sense. I get glimpses of that, particularly when taking stress as seriously as I can. Interacting with others, sharing personal responsibility or unneeded comfort pulls me out of it. Thanks for the anecdote!

> I generate vast amounts of code, in relatively short time

But is it good code?

And I don't mean your code personally, but more in general. I've known people who are able to focus alright but then what they produce -be it code or anything else- is rather mediocre. I knew this person that would get on his workbench, and spend the whole morning in a flash, not noticing anything around him. He has a fairly large collection of rather unimaginative pieces in wood.

Recently, in a new team of programmers a fair number of them seem to be able to focus quite well. And they do produce "vast amounts of code" and it is some of the worst code I've ever seen. In fact, the fact itself that they are vast amounts seems like a detriment. They are proud that the project is some 5-6MLOCs big, but after some months of going through it about 25% of that, should just be trashed.

So yeah, focus is nice, but... being able to produce a lot doesn't necessarily mean you're producing anything particularly interesting, useful or good.

P.S. And, again, I don't mean you personally.

Excellent code.

My screen name here is also my GH handle. See for yourself.

> Also, I find that I can be "vocabularily challenged" for a few minutes after I break out, sounding like a complete moron; struggling for the most basic terminology. "Whatchacallit" is one of my most-uttered phrases.

Yes! Oh I am so glad I'm not the only one.

After spending several hours in the zone programming, I need to sit back and take a recognizance breather before I can speak in effective complete sentences again. It definitely feels like something actively changing in my brain when this happens. Some kind of awareness shift, or orientation shift.

It's like I need to reset from thinking in "parallel" to thinking in "serial" again -- parallel being random-access in a sense, able to go back and update an artifact piecemeal in independent locations, shifting back and forth quickly; while serial being a narrative sense, able to put together a full thought at a time and express it in words.

Re: your last paragraph. It's great to speak in a language that has a ubiquitous "whatchacallit" word. Not only can I use it as a noun, ("pass me the thing"), but even as a verb ("thing me the salt") or both ("thing me the thing")! Or indeed an adjective, adverb, or almost any grammatical function.

what's the language?

It's Portuguese, but many other languages have it. :p The term is "placeholder name". For an extreme example of it, see the Hawaian Creole "da kine".

English

How long are you cranky after you get broken out of it and how severe is the crankiness?

I've found if I get distracted while in the zone I'm frustrated by being interrupted, and any sort of attempt to converse is challenging because while my focus may have been forcibly shifted, it's like my brain is saying "hold up, I'm still working through these problems" and I'm only half present for people because I'm having parallel trains of thought.

This can last anywhere from minutes if the problem was a small relatively trivial thing to several hours if it's a much harder or larger scale problem.

I've noticed the same things! The same happens when I improvise piano. In addition, I cannot attach emotionally (empathy) to others for close to an hour.

I'm bilingual until I've been drowning in code all day, then I need a half-hour or my fluency is just gone and I struggle to understand my own family.

In my case, I have no problem parsing what my family is saying; it simply goes straight to /dev/null. I just can't engage with it.

> However, it don't come for free. If I get "roused" from my "fugue" (what I call "the zone"), I can be cranky. This has not always been helpful in my marriage.

I recognize this.

I figure we need to practice unfocusing as well as focusing. Being able to look closely at an issue is an important skill, but so is “zooming out” and seeing the bigger picture.

I absolutely get this and not just with code - modeling, deep reading, even some simulator style games.

I find my lingual knots tend to get worked out after a short while, but if I have been exceptionally deep focused I can get almost a focus hangover where the lingual hangups last a very long time.

I know most theories about tasks using only one hemisphere of the brain have been debunked but it does seem like language and some logic tasks can be at odds. I wonder if it extends into other things than language.

I don't think you need to be "on the spectrum" to experience what you described.

I might be spectrum but definitely have ADHD-i my wife has ADHD-h

Difference basically being I can only focus on one thing at a time (and the things connected to that thing), but I jump from 1-1-1-1 in a circular mode.

My wife is now like she's mentally got a rope on everything at once but never finishes any of the things in her focus because there's too many.

I guess in programming terms we both have focus issues but she's asynchronous and I'm only synchronus.

If I get bored or my mind wanders of task I end up on hn, Google, Reddit or doing anything that isn't work. Started taking meds a year ago at 39 and light and day difference when I'm on my Vyvanse.

Sometimes I front load a couple days worth of work (freelance by the hour),; I'll literally be up 48 hours and put in 24+ hours of work, insomnia is a side effect of Vyvanse, so I usually when I'm past me limit I'll go off the next day and catch up on sleep and family time and relax a little then the following day jump back in, though I don't always go full in for two days.

Trying to not kill myself cause I have kids, but I work best when everyone is asleep anyways.

No. It's just common for us. A lot of us are also completely undiagnosed. Programming/engineering is a fairly natural habitat for people like us.

Anyone that can get into "the zone" is probably eligible.

I was a manager for many moons. That's really unusual for folks like me. One of my top engineers was absolutely brilliant. Verbally, he was rather reticent, but he could wax eloquent in emails, and his designs were exquisite. He had a high school diploma. That was all.

I remember him sending a rewrite of an image processing filter back to Japan. The Ph.Ds there, had submitted a Monte Carlo-based filter, and he rewrote it with a modeling calculation that improved the performance 100X.

He also submitted the design as a PDF document.

With live Postcript code, generating the charts, using his simulations.

They were flabbergasted.

Sometimes, it's a good idea to let odd just be odd.

I totally relate to this and have often wondered if I might be on the spectrum slightly. I also identify as a socially anxious person and being in the zone is somehow therapeutic..

Reading this thread, so many things apply to me, too.

When I am deep in the zone, I am thinking in... pictures? not really, more like structures and graphs; they don't have colors, but they are connected. And then at a random moment my manager interrupts me to ask for a short summary of current status of the other project I was working on yesterday. For a few seconds I am like when Windows is swapping, because my mind is full of this nonverbal content that has to be thrown away, which means losing many minutes of work, but unless I do it I am unable to provide a coherent verbal answer. I gradually return to the real world, try to remember what was yesterday, find the right words... meanwhile my manager is getting impatient about why it takes me so long to answer such simple question.

Trying to answer before my brain fully reboots leads to imcomplete responses like "uhm, I was fixing this bug with that thing that went wrong" -- "which bug? which thing? can't you speak normally?" -- "uhm, the... what made the problem on the... front end... when the button... when the guy who wanted the report pressed the button... and it didn't return a correct result because it was asynchronously called, and..." -- "okay, why don't you simply say 'I was fixing the bug with asynchronous report generation'?" -- "uhm, yes, that's exactly what I wanted to say" -- "then speak more clearly". Yeah, like it's so easy. Well, maybe it is for a normie, I don't know.

Working in open space is already full of distractions. Someone is talking, someone has a phone call, someone is walking around... The schedule: there will be a meeting, daily stand-up, regular one-on-one meeting, lunch, some report from higher management, and this lesson on safety or compliance I need to complete before the end of the week, I need to update JIRA and also my daily attendance. The knowledge that "within one hour I will have to abandon my work and do something else" is already distracting long before the moment actually comes. Plus an avalanche of e-mails, most of them unimportant to me, but I have to read them all to find out whether I can just safely delete them. An instant messaging application, which in theory is for urgent work, but in practice people keep posting all kinds of stuff. (Why do you need to post dozen updates about the upcoming Christmas party? Why do I get dozen notification about all the "thanks the party was great" responses?)

Then it's five o'clock, people go home, the large room becomes empty and quiet... well, in the past this would be my peak productivity time, but these days I have kids so I get up and return home, too. (No, I can't simply come later and leave later, because we have the daily standups in the early morning.) So, now that I have kids, my total productivity has dropped visibly.

I try to keep written log of my thoughts while working, and yes it helps a lot. Still not the same as having a day in a silent room without interruptions.

I was never officially diagnosed with anything, because when I was a kid we didn't get tested for these things. People like me were simply "not paying attention" or "not trying hard enough". Which is kinda true; I am quite lazy when unmotivated, and I find it almost impossible to pay attention to boring things. (It's just so easier to get motivated when I am not distracted by endless communication.) Anyway, my kids are diagnosed on the spectrum, so it seems quite likely to me that I would have been too.

This is be except it drove me semi suicidal as in I was depressed and thinking or wishing I was dead but not at attempt level yet.

I just had a kid and had another in the way. I told my wife about it and we agreed I should get some therapy.

My therapist deemed I have ADHD inattentive or what used to be ADD. I talked to my Dr and got on Vyvanse, I also went to gym and lost 50 lbs. I don't do therapy any more. I don't know if talking and thinking about things helped but I somehow learned to cope.

But the meds do help me stay in a more focused and alert frame of mind.

I don't feel broken anymore. I still get off topic and focus on the wrong things sometimes but I can be productive when I really want to be and get a ton more shit done.

I'm also convinced I'm on spectrum but therapist didn't really want to go there or test for it. Not sure if that would have changed anything.

Congratulations on finding a solution that works for you!

> I'm also convinced I'm on spectrum but therapist didn't really want to go there or test for it. Not sure if that would have changed anything.

I really don't like this "you don't need to know what exactly is your problem" attitude, that often comes from psychologists. But that would be a long rant. Here are some hypothetical benefits from knowing that you have a specific diagnosis X, whether autism or anything else:

- maybe you could apply for disability benefits (probably not, but at least you would know what exactly to ask);

- you could find a support group for people with X;

- you could exchange information (in the support group or online) about what helps or what hurts people with the same problem;

- you could read scientific research or popular books, ask an expert by e-mail, etc.;

- you could find out the chance that your kids get X, how to find out whether that is the case, and how to help them.

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