Ask HN: ADHD and focus during meetings: what works for you?

4 points·ainiriand··3 comments

I have ADHD and struggle with long or meandering meetings. One trick that surprisingly helps me is running a Freecell game in parallel — it keeps part of my brain occupied and oddly makes me more attentive.

I’m curious: what techniques have worked for you (with or without a diagnosis)? Any unconventional or surprisingly effective strategies?

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Listening to music, for example have Spotify running while I'm in teams meetings.

Also I'm considering getting a midi bass pedalboard like this https://www.studiologic-music.com/products/mp_pedalboard/ so I can play witouth anyone noticing

scrutinizing peoples' faces, gestures and expressions, tone and emphasis. I read a book once on how to be a better listener and in the same week, coincidentally caught a peculiar pattern of a liar that didn't fit the usual patterns people write about, which I got from Paul Ekman was the name, I think.

Combining the two tasks increased my attention in any gatherings, boring or fun, loud or quite, relevant or nonsensical, 100 fold. It also helped me learn to ignore conversations in the background, or filter them out and zoom in on them, to a moderate degree, for now, but I don't think I'll train that anytime soon.

I don't think about what I see but map what I hear onto how it shows on the face. It took a while but once I spotted idiosyncrasies that match what I knew about a person, or the other way around, it became fun looping through all that stuff over and over and over again.

Very interesting, I will try that too.

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