Ask HN: Devs with ADHD do you use specialized tooling?
People with ADHD, have you ever tried dev tooling to organize or aid with your short attention span?
Yuval
Yuval
I use Todoist. I try to add almost everything I have to do in a day in it, because I enjoy the small release of dopamine when I cross things out, however small they are.
I hate the modern trend of rainbow vomit colour themes in editors. There is no reason to have 25 colours on the screen for keywords, strings, arrays, variables, constants, etc. Consumes too much brain CPU time for nothing, so I tend to prefer minimalistic themes, which are very rare to find.
Brown noise to concentrate, pacing around the house when doing deep thinking, I listen to fast paced psytrance when I'm in the flow but I don't need to think too much. But 99% of the time, silence is better. Nature sounds would be best, still working on it.
Unmedicated I am a person with a ton of great ideas than never go anywhere. Finding a productive balance requires very careful monitoring of diet, medication, mood management, sunlight and sleep. Change one of these slightly, and it's probably going to be an unproductive day.
Lastly, just accepting that 9-to-5 or commuting like a regular person is just not for me. Freelance work is best, because I don't know how to switch off and I get my best ideas whenever I least expect it, like scrolling cat pictures and figuring out the solution for yesterday's problem. The subconscious mind is always working on something.
If you want the best advice I could give you: do not trust your memory. ADHD memory is terrible. Write stuff down. Use calendars, alarms and reminders. Get a small A4 whiteboard and write anything down. DO NOT rely on your memory. Outsource it.
Fully agree with this.
For me, it has also been important to keep the workflow and tools that I do use as streamlined as possible (KISS), so as to stay "in the zone" as long as possible.
For instance, if I will write some code, I don't need bells and whistles, I only need LSP support, split screen and the ability to change files in a split second with a few keypresses. Likewise, to version-control code I need a tool that let's me do that and just that.
And so on.
So I find myself most productive when living in the terminal using things like tmux and vim.
Our concentration is fickle, so streamlining is key.
You need to write stuff down, use it as a guidelines to stay on track (hardest part), and tick it off. Everything else is waste of time that masquerades as "productivity hacks."
The goal is to outsource your list of things to do because you have a fallible memory, but the biggest goal is doing something that drives your life forward. Don't get stuck looking for the new productivity fad or rewriting your todo cli.
I can absolutely recommend this site* so much that I've even donated to it on occasion.
Tweak everything for low latency. Example: Switch IntelliJ to the ZGC garbage collector. Give it extra RAM. Have a fast GPU. Yes, just for throwing windows around.
Fast CPU with lots of cores. Tuned low-latency high-bandwidth RAM. One big SSD RAID for everything.
Get the computer up to the speed of thought.
Automatic tiling window managers. Amethyst is good on macOS.
Organization: Workflowy, notes on paper.
How much and what brand of RAM do you use? What are the rank and CAS numbers?
What about GPU?
What RAID configuration are you using? How many SSDs and which models?
Lowest possible CAS, highest possible clock speed.
Nvidia RTX series is necessary for dabbling with AI at acceptable speeds, which seems to be the future. 3090 or 4090 are best due to higher VRAM.
You don't need raid, just get fast nvram SSDs.
I agree! - The typical fast M.2 drive or an Apple drive: This is plenty. However! It's really, really, really surprisingly nice - surprisingly worthwhile! - to get more of those and stripe RAID the heck out of them.
rn I have a striped array of [Samsung 500GB M.2 (x4)] [Samsung 500GB M.2 (x2)] [Striped sub-array of 83⅓-GB portions of 6 Samsung 500GB SATA drives to use all the I/O bandwidth]. Did it mostly for "teh lulz" but it's actually kinda worth it +shrug+. Ultrasmooth somehow.
(Given that the backup strategy is hundred-percent-ly 100%.!!)
(Also: I like multiple monitors too. 2x32" 4K is pretty great. I've tried 4x24"/27" 1080P and it sort of didn't work for me. Mostly because there's kind of a minimum pixel tax per-display and it takes too much out of a 1080p surface. Hard to explain. It was hard to believe. But it's my experience.)
—It’s tricky with big 4K displays. Subtle. I worked on a 43” 4K IPS display for a while and it didn’t work for me — the pixels were just big enough for the structure of them to have an effect on how things looked. Slightly weird color / light things at the edges.
The 55” 4K OLED doesn’t have this issue even though the pixels are bigger because of how it works fundamentally. No pixel mechanism to see there really.
(It might be possible to build a 43” 4K IPS panel that doesn’t have the issue, idk!, but it would be such a tiny niche product that I doubt it would happen anyway.)
Those were perfect too. Only switched to the 55” OLED TV because I lost those monitors—One had to to back to the company that provided it for working at home… aaaaand I broke the other.
With big top-heavy monitors I have learned the lesson that all surfaces must be grippy towards each other under all circumstances. Also when and if the drawer-stand put under the monitor scooches 1mm out of the desktop area and off its grip-pads.
Actually the lesson is: Always just get adjustable gas-pump monitor arms for everything. Less clutter, more desk space, more flexibility, better ergonomics. It’s even more worth it than I suspected it would be. They cost less than I thought and make a bigger difference.
I have a nice little Ryzen 3900X machine. Reasonably lucky silicon - it runs at 4.2GHz at a slightly reduced voltage. 2 × 16GB DDR4-3200 CL14 sticks which are happy at 3400MHz CL14. I don’t recall the rank – it’s Crucial BallistiX. The sticks were too expensive for what they do! – I bought them as an experiment to see what the difference was if I got the fastest memory I could find without going to the scary steep part of the price-performance curve. There is a difference!, but not strictly worth it.
GPUs: I have Radeons – 5700 XT and 6800 XT. Those are overkill for development-only but very nice. The 6800 XT is smoother and snappier at driving a 4K desktop! I’m curious how the 6600 XT is. (I use AMD because I work on macOS; no Nvidia drivers.)
And I have a “throwaway” SSD RAID experiment right now: A 500GB Samsung 970 Evo Plus in the 4x M.2 slot, a 500GB Samsung 980 in the 2x M.2, and 500GB Samsung 860 Evo SATA drives in all six SATA ports.
Linux MD software RAID.
I made a sub-array that stripes across all the six SATA drives, on partitions that are one-sixth of 500GB. That sub-RAID is allllmost as fast as the NVME SSDs.
Then my nixOS root partition is on a big three-“drive” striped RAID made out of an NVME drive, the other NVME drive, plus the “poor mans sata nvme”. It goes pretty hard. Mostly did it to see what it’s like. It’s quite fast. There’s a sense of a lot of subperceptible bottlenecks all vanishing at once.
This is probably an UNRELIABLE setup! I have at least an eightfold failure rate compared to using a single drive! It’s an experiment! Haha! This-is-not-medical-advice, you know? The speed is noticeably good however.
BUT:
All in all I would just get an M2 mac these days! In the general case!
I did learn a ton building this and it’s very flexible, more flexible than a Mac. (However, flexible in ways that aren’t really that important.)
But yeah, if macs aren’t a preferred option, I want to state that my machine is not the machine I’d build now to match my suggestions on a working setup. I’d try for something maybe half the price with 98% of the performance.
I used to have a setup that would only allow for 30Hz it and it was super painful.
Also: Glitchy animations are the biggest reason I can't use Windows. macos has some too and I find those pretty bad as well.
There are other options like making some animation speeds faster (so fast that the animation is almost imperceptible) and disabling some animations in Finder. The Cocktail utility can do it, and it can be done from the terminal too.
I'm not 100% sure this is up to date, but it might be: https://osxdaily.com/2015/01/06/make-the-window-resizing-ani...
The main one is basically like this:
defaults write -g NSWindowResizeTime -float 0.003
Then there's something called yabai which is a 'window management utility', but afaik it goes a lot deeper than other similar programs for macOS - it can disable animations and do some more stuff up to the point that you need to (partially) disable SIP to be able to make full use of it. Haven't tried but it does seems to be very worthwhile. https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai
I ended up eventually getting diagnosed, even doctors who don't usually prescribe stimulants prescribe them to me. I went from being unemployed and extremely depressed and doing small odd jobs living out of a cheap hotel room, to working at a FAANG like company without even studying for the interview. I am 26 and often wonder what life would have looked like if I got help earlier.
Todo lists help. Exercise helps. Medication did the trick for me.
I thought the constant racing mind (and thoughts constantly dividing like fractal patterns) was _normal_ until diagnosis in late 30s after talking to a friend about it. It boggles my mind how I survived on a daily basis prior to medication.
Medication was a life changing moment and genuinely look forward to what I might accomplish in the future instead of looking back frustrated with the past. It feels like I was operating on just half a brain for decades!
It helps a lot if your workplace can accommodate you a bit on the latter. Previously I've been jumping around on tasks related to code, testing, infrastructure, documentation and customer support, just to be able to avoid the feeling of boreness and repetition.
Working as a consultant and starting my own businesses also helped a lot as then I'm free to work on whenever basically, as long as the contract you accept are not longer than a few months and you do enjoy all aspects of running a business for example.
But no, no specific software or so, just methodology.
Thanks for this awesome comment!
Task 1: open VS code.
Todoist is where I store all my lists: todo, packing list, meals (for cooking ideas).
I install uBlock Origin and uBlacklist in all my browsers. I don't use the web without them.
I'll occasionally use SelfControl if I cycle through time killer websites too much.
I keep my technology as quiet and self-effacing as possible.
Removing the distractions does a great job. I fought those aggressively and now I can't imagine unfiltered technology. I list a few other things I did here: https://nicolasbouliane.com/blog/silence
> The Picture-in-Picture feature allows you to pop videos out of their webpages into floating, always on top, windows, so you can watch while continuing to work in other tabs.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/about-picture-picture-f...
When I'm working, I only watch in my peripherals, if at all. Mostly I like listening to the film soundtrack, effects, and more or less indistinct human voices.
Somewhat counter-intuitively, I focus better this way, compared to having "silence" - because I have sensitive hearing, any slight or distant sound in the real world environment distracts my attention. I wear noise-cancelling headphones, whether any audio/video is playing or not.
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I have a little shell script for taking notes from the terminal command line. I use it throughout the day to to chronicle the endless number of ideas that flow through the brain. The notes go into a plain-text/Markdown journal file.
Before I started this practice a few years ago, I used to feel anxious that so many good ideas and thoughts were getting lost. Now, I just dump everything into notes as fast as I can type them in. Then I can set them aside, forget them and move on with my brainstorming.
Occasionally I review the journal, and copy the best parts into project or subject-based Markdown files.
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Emails only - checking once a day, or 2~3 times a week. No telephone, text or video chat.
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Edit: I haven't been diagnosed with ADHD, but I can relate to other comments in this thread - so might be leaning in that direction. Might also be a bit of an autist.
j() {
local FILE="/home/$USER/notes/journal.md"
if [ -z "$1" ]; then edit $FILE && return; fi
echo >> $FILE
echo "$@" >> $FILE
}
- in the spirit of David Allen’s Getting Things Done, it became an easily searchable place where I can just brain dump anything that’s bouncing around and feel confident that I can find it again down the road. I have about a decade of loosely organized notes that I frequently refer back to: courses I took, projects I worked on, cheat sheets for tools like tcpdump or restic, etc etc.
- When I was consulting I leaned on org-agenda a ton. I drove my entire life into it: birthday reminders, garbage day, room cleaning reminders, taxes, and then all of the project plans for different clients. First thing at the start of the day I’d fire it up and really easily get into the flow of things.
Jira actually helps, but I set some time aside to organize it, typically when I know I can be interrupted because it doesn't require much focus. Split every task into multiple subtasks. This makes your progress more visible and projects less daunting.
Keep a physical notebook by your desk. I've tried alternatives but they're too easy to tinker with and therefore, too distracting. At a minimum you need to offload things you would store in your memory onto something, and the easier and faster that is to do, the better.
TomatoTimer
Dual monitors with one monitor playing YouTube Travel/ASMR/whatever is interesting
radio.garden (playing radio with vocals seems to keep me focused for some reason)
Rewarding myself with foods, drinks, spoiling myself
And lastly, something I recently discovered, edging. When I edge to porn without release I feel much more energetic and focused. Something to do with dopamine apparently. I imagine it's going to fry my receptors on the long term but projects have to be done and money has to be made.
b) as others replied, keep work units small enough to be able to tick off multiple per day.
c) drown out that noise if in a shared office: Get some good headphones, search Youtube for ADHD music.
d) minimize distractions: Don't hesitate to mute your messenger and close your mail app for an hour or two to get that focus time.
e) Use that TO DO list to guide you through the day, amend it and re-prioritize as needed.
f) Try Pomodoro technique. (Disclaimer: I personally hardly ever use it, unless the work is truly horrible.)
g) Try to make your work day as comfortable as needed, don't be hard on yourself. Ideally you should like your way of work. If that's not possible, e.g. you have to clock out to do short breaks, look for a different employer.
h) Automate the hell out of your work day, be it with scripts, keyboard macros, inbound mail rules. Your life is too short to type and click the same things again and again.
Also, maybe have an excel file to not loose track of your projects. This article can be helpful as well https://review.firstround.com/ditch-your-to-do-list-and-use-...
From there it's a matter of getting round to it. If it's not on my task list I'm probably not going to remember to do it in time.
Aside from that I love writing quick thoughts onto cards (blank business cards is what I use) - ideas for later, thoughts towards a back burner project, ideas that don't really have anywhere to be yet. They need somewhere to sit and wait else I'll keep thinking about them.
One idea per card (expand idea on the back if needed), chuck the card into a tub for later review. Then when you come to do something new, have a skim through your idea tub. All sorts of free ideas fall out when you apply old ideas to new projects!
Once a card's done forever bung it in with the recycling :)
I know I’m underperforming what I’m capable of by a long shot, but still doing decent enough.
Things I do though: - notes in meetings with who is in attendance, primary topics, resolutions, etc. - collect a boatload of pdfs and resources. - I’m not going to remember the formula or whatever for most things, but I do remember where I can find the information that will show me the formula.
I also do ~20 minutes of meditation each morning which is extremely helpful. Also very helpful are getting regular exercise - even just walking around for half an hour each day helps a lot if you're mostly sedentary - and taking frequent breaks.
Start slow! Phase productivity hacks in piecemeal over a long period of time. Start projects early and slowly and exploratory. Slow and steady wins the race.
It also fills a need for organization meta-work, but that’s not really a positive hah
Best thing I can recommend is pick ONLY ONE thing to hold onto tasks (notes app, a todo app, a sticky note pad, etc.) and actually commit to it. Force yourself to log a task the second you know about it.
Even make an effort to tell people “I’m adding that to my list” so people start reminding you. Whatever gets things you need to do out of your head asap.
It’s aggravatingly difficult for a while until it’s a habit, but having the stuff you need to do somewhere that ISNT your memory is going to be a massive boost.
Agree completely.
Some of the general organisational advice can be helpful. Keep things in calendars, todo lists, files etc. There is no magic bullet. A todo list won't fix your lack of executive function. Just pick some tools to keep track of everything.
I really like voice assistants. I use an Amazon echo to update my calendar, set timers, reminders etc. For me, pulling out my phone to do any of those is guaranteed distraction.
Some time tracking told are useful for finding out what works for you and what you actually did with you time. "Today felt really bad, but actually I got three hours work done" or "I went on YouTube for 6 hours straight, what sent me off task?"
Have one column just to track what you are actively working on at the moment. (Put only one or maybe two items in it. No more!) When you get distracted, now you can immediately remember what you were (supposed to be) working on.
Have a few other columns to sort items by priority. Now you don't need to remember what other things need doing.
Have one column to track stuff that you're waiting on something external.
And importantly, don't delete stuff that's done. Put all those things in their own column. It feels good to move things there, and see the progress you've made.
For me NeoVim is great because it has zero distractions and clutter. It just does nothing by itself and doesn't try to proactively "help" me. I try to apply similar standards to the rest, with varying success. Muting browser tabs is nice, though I wish I could set it on a timer - I like to forget unmuting things.
I think Kanban boards work better for me than todo lists, or rather they have a better chance at working at all. Might be due to the smooth drag and drop of the tasks once I'm done.
When I'm on calls I compulsively wander around the apartment with my wireless headphones on, I can't stand still. If I'm in a call for 4 hours, I will be walking constantly for 4 hours (often covering 20km in small circles in my apartment).
I got a powered sit/stand desk with presets so I can press a single button to have it raise up or lower down, and it's made me a lot more present at my desk during discussions, because I can sort of fiddle about on my feet while still being in front of my screens.
Strongly considering adding a flat, miniature, quiet walking machine underneath my desk for this stuff, if I can find one which meets my specs.
VS Code with Foam for notes. I plan out my day by hour (sometimes more granular) and make each of those items a todo item so that I'm checking something off at least once an hour. It also helps remind me what to move on to next. I recently incorporated a checklist for starting and ending the day. It's nice because then I don't spend mental energy thinking about how to prepare and shutdown, I just follow a well thought out pattern. The ritual of it helps my brain transition in and out of work.
I don't beat myself up if I don't get to everything. I don't stress about how long the list gets. Sometimes I'll have multiple PostIt's going with some loose association of long term/short term or project-specific tasks. The important part though is the cross off of tasks (progress throughout the day), and the mental reset at the end of the day of what to start with tomorrow.
On a related note I feel the way people frame ADHD, particularly during elementary schooling, is all wrong. It is literally a super power. I can context-switch and am generally more engaged doing so. The idea of slogging away at only one task at a time in a linear fashion gives me hives. Its not to say I can't do it, but its highly dependent on my interest level with the task and my flow state. However, no matter what happens I know I can widdle a task down a bit in 15-30 minute increments with a context switch to something else, then come back later.
Many coworkers of mine over the year have commented on how I can switch between 3-4 things at once. It's common for me to drop a task (interrupted by someone or my interest level), come back, check the PostIt note, and pick right up where I left off. I think there is some truth in ADHD aligning well to entrepreneurship, product ownership, or senior leadership. The other piece of it is being brutally honest with yourself at what your not good at and finding others who can supplement those tasks. I worked closely with a senior dev for a long time who wanted a linear, head down, deep dive task to sink his teeth into. The four or five less understood, needs some research, maybe a quick PoC, pathfinder tasks, sign me up.
My other tools are 3-square meals a day, 8 hrs of sleep a night, and walking the dog before and after work (helps the mind reset). When the urge to do something strikes, try to follow through with it in the moment, there is a high probability it will be lost/forgotten otherwise.
Thats all I got...
The only thing I've found that helps is having a list of things somewhere I can see it. We have a list of tasks next to the fridge on a whiteboard, and it's the only way things get done.
As a side note, I'd suggest looking up ways to improve executive function, as this tends to be the area where this sort of problem falls into. There are tonnes of books out there, as well as ADHD coaches now, which can be pretty helpful.
Writing boilerplate and starting new files was always so slow/boring, but copilot kinda helps me continue my flow (even when its suggestions are completely wrong).
Fair warning that sometimes its suggestions are subtlety wrong so you still need to read it over - but since it’s there my mind immediately jumps to verifying it as opposed to the risk of distraction when having to type things from scratch with limited autocomplete.
You just need to get good at writing comments or descriptive function names.