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Comment by brucificus | Hacker News Reader

I had something flickering in my IDE the other day while I was trying to learn my way around a large monolithic codebase at a new job. I couldn't executive function well enough to stop/hide the flickering, and I couldn't ignore it. I eventually had a meltdown and left the room (wfh, thankfully). It took me hours to recover.

Having a tidy, visually "muted" workspace - both in a literal sense (the IDE) as well as a conceptual sense (the code structure) - is very important for coping with my ADHD+ASD. Unfortunately, trying to sell DRY+KISS+YAGNI+SOLID as an accessibility/inclusivity concern has not worked out for me yet.

There's a lot of intellectual elitism running in the veins of our profession, and it makes me sad that it's often likely just a shield for other people nursing insecurities about similar struggles. We need to work on our empathy, and coding empathetically, and designing UIs empathetically.

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This hits home. Especially the "hours to recover" part. I never quite appreciate how long it takes to right the ship after a day like that.

Do you have any tips for how you structure your digital workspace? Favourite tools or methods to help support your executive functioning?

The only thing that works for me is separating things into very distinct "realms" and only having one realm open at a time. No exceptions.

For example one realm is for communication. Slack, Browser, Email, and Calendar can be open. Nothing is really a distraction from anything else here. I'm just being "at work" and communicating in this mode.

Another is for coding. Literally the only things open are vim and a terminal. NO browser and NO Slack. If I need documentation then I didn't design well enough, and design is it's own realm. I should know the libraries I'm using, and anything else is easily handled by vim's autocomplete/intellisense or navigating to the code.

The other two explicit realms are Writing and Design/Planning. There are more adhoc ones, but I really try to avoid adhoc-ness.

Switching realms is a hassle and requires super deliberate action. This means I can't just randomly switch between tabs and code and Slack and email and social media and just...kinda looking at things? That was my main problem. It was too easy to "move" and so I could never stop moving and somehow the entire day was gone. At no point was I goofing off, but my day just disappeared.

The only issue is that work people really really want my dot to be green on Slack at all times. They even give me the room to be on my own, but literally just having Slack open is a weird attention drain and I don't really know how to convey that. This leads to me getting most of my work done after hours and working way too long :/

> If I need documentation then I didn't design well enough,

I need documentation because my coworkers didn't design well enough.

This series of videos by Airforce Col. Mark D. Jacobsen may be helpful:

"Tools for the Life of the Mind. These videos are intended to help my students at the Air Force's School of Advanced Air & Space Studies (SAASS) develop effective mindsets and workflows for doing rigorous academic work. I will introduce a range of available tools and discuss my own workflows. Although SAASS-focused, they should appeal to anyone interested in productivity and learning."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KE87q3jjFlg&list=PLHmevVAAXt...

I can absolutely relate to that sentiment. A former coworker once gleefully refactored a bunch of unit tests in a way that reduced duplication and made the reporting marginally better, at the cost of making the cognitive load vastly worse to read them. I told them I couldn't review the PR, though neglected to mention that it was because it gave me a meltdown trying.

Manager: "I sympathize, and don't have ADHD, but everyone else seems to be answer slack messages immediately, so why can't you?"

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