Ask HN: How do programmers deal with ADD?

I was categorized as having ADD / ADHD and never bothered to take anything for it although it has caused me tremendous problems in my career and school life. If you know you have this problem you can either drug yourself into a coma or make significant life choices (and learn to master your condition) to steer you into career where your strengths come into play and your weaknesses are minimized. I tried both, I like the second option better.

I no longer believe there is something wrong with me, I believe society was built for people different than me (sit still, pay attention, do one thing at a time, obey etc) and I am expected to follow and obey their rules. I believe that ADHD is a real condition but the drugs are a false solution that are driven more by pharmaceutical company marketing than reality. If they can make you feel bad about who you are, they can sell more drugs. That is wrong - if you are unhappy its because something deeper is wrong in your life that you need to change and you should find what that is.

The Good:

There are massive benefits to being an ADD-er in my experience: I can simply handle more volume of work faster and more efficiently than anyone I know. My brain is a 40-lane highway and I have no problem multitasking across many different contexts. If my brain decides to become interested in a topic, I can learn everything there is to know about that topic faster than anyone...I now learn to recognize when something interests me and feed my brain information in that time slot while the opportunity presents itself (I think its called "hyperfocus"). I have learned to work with the peculiarities of my condition and take advantage when the wind is blowing in a useful direction.

It wasn't until later in my career that I learned to be extremely detail oriented.

The Bad:

The ADD super powers come with many downsides. I am chronically bored out of my mind and single-tasking is a challenge (e.g. sitting through a lecture or boring meeting). At most jobs I found myself growing completely bored in six months and being unable to focus on my job. This resulted in a lot of useless job hopping which I now recognize in retrospect as being a symptom of my underlying condition.

Learning material which doesn't interest me is impossible, killing my academic performance. I felt strongly that other people around me could simply absorb boring "stuff" without issue and just deal with it and take the pain while my brain simply turned off in that situation, remembering nothing.

Finally, I have difficulty communicating with people. When I talk I jump all over the place (often off topic) or I skip three steps ahead. Most people's brains don't work like this.

Some Solutions:

The most important fix was to find a job or career which, by definition, involved lots of crazy stuff going on all the time. Being a programmer working on a single product for years was simply impossible to me to sustain.

Many smaller, single-product, companies work like this: Here is the one thing you do for the next two years. If you have ADHD that isn't going to work.

Many developers I know (with more normal brains) prefer to focus on one technology (Say, Ruby on Rails) to the exclusion of everything else for years. I have embraced being a super-generalist.

If you are a programmer, I recommend finding one of the following: (a) an agency which has dozens of ongoing projects in many technologies (many digital agencies are like this) so you can never get bored (b) a large company with a lot of interesting stuff going on (e.g. take a company like Microsoft which has ridiculous amounts of different technologies, products and initiatives underway at any given time).

In my case I decided that software wasn't for me and found a related career (technical marketing) which was more varied in nature (lots of new products, unexpected surprises and events going on all the time).

I thought a large company would be horrible, I was wrong - ...

Here's a shortlist of different things that seem to have helped. One of the usernames I sometimes use online - for example with gmail - is "asmqb7". ;P

- I switched from a "decent" fish oil to Nordic Naturals in 2012. The difference has been really good. Make sure the one you buy is a high-dose one - the only way you can make sure in a retail shop is to always check the back, without fail, to make sure the highest acting compounds are >=1g.

- I take CoQ10 for extra energy because my system is poorly balanced internally and requires more for its cogs to "turn over". Try yourself with different combinations of ubiquinone and ubidecarenone - my system prefers the latter, even though the former is understood to be the more powerful compound. Also don't be afraid to feed yourself a lot of it.

- Have a look at Alpha-lipoec acid. I'll admit I'm not 100% sure what it does but it definitely helps a lot.

- Are you getting enough salt? The medical consensus is "salt is bad for you!!11eleventyfour!"... they forgot to prefix the word table. It's table salt that's bad, other salt (like himalayan crystal salt) are better, and having a lot of salt per day is very good for you.

- See if you have PKU (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenylketonuria), the MTHFR (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methylenetetrahydrofolate_redu...) gene mutation, or Pyrrole's disorder.

- Learn about Leaky Gut Syndrome. Most of the info you'll find is "this is the diet you need to follow"; take all that in your stride (apply it at your own discretion by all means though), I mostly reference this because the mechanics of the theories are good to know and understand.

This is all I can think of right now off the bat.

FWIW, I'm not the walking health encyclopedia, my Mum is :P Feel free to get in touch if you'd like more info.

Now comes the hard part - doing what you 'have' to do.

Few steps

0a. Get excited about what you 'have' to do - whether it be the learning aspect, the mastery of your work (craftsmanship), the purpose of your work (helping users, making money, etc)

0b. Think about what you are going to do, and write down some granular steps (key)

1. Get yourself to start by hook or crook, and remove absolutely all distractions you can find (spend the time doing this). Start the first step you did in 0b.

2. Work for an hour at least.

3. Feel a sense of accomplishment, pat yourself on the back for completing some work. Look back on the work you completed. The goal is to start 'feeling' a positive sense about doing work you 'have' to do, which will make it easier in the future to do more.

Starting is always the hardest part like anything. Once you get into a routine, it becomes much easier. The hardest part is converting feelings of pain / 'have to do' into feelings of 'want to do' or curiosity.

I get focused on work by keeping my diet in check (no junk food), just 1 coffee very early in the day and getting up and walking around a bit frequently, play with my dogs, pick up a book and read it for a few minutes.

Headphones also help me keep my head clear. I pump through them things that are conducive to my working and not getting distracted.

If I just can't focus, despite best efforts, I actually don't. I do something else until I am ready to focus again and then I give my work all of that attention. Sometimes this means working at night after the wife and kids are in bed because that is when my mind is back. Not everyone probably has this luxury as employers may not be this flexible.

Based on the research I've done, Ritalin is more for short term focus boosts. You should try Concerta or Vyvanse. Those are more designed for a daily dose/longer term usage.

Habits around when I sleep, wake, eat, and what I eat. Interruptions to habits result in drop-outs, things get forgotten watch, lunch bag, keys, appointments, ...).

Medicatio: be careful exploring what works nd what does not. Ritalin, Adderal, Concerta, are basically Speed, albeit our different brain chemistry reacts to it differently than neurotypical brains. Aderal puts me to sleep. COncerta turned me into an a-hole with an obsessive focus on coding. Three months of hyperfocus. I did an insane amount of coding, and it worked too, but ... Btw, if you use that phrase with your doctor, check his spelling. My record turned out to have "obsession with codeine" in it. Got it caught soon by my therapist and corrected OK, so hopefuly no harm done.

Ritalin is working, after a while spent varying dosage to find a sweet spot. It is good for that, fast acting, fast to clear out, and tiny dosage tablets at 5mg. My sweet spot is two a day, one starting work and one halfway through. At three, my wife complains I tap and grind my teeth too loudly.

Therapist. Alternitvely in ADHD cse know as Life Coach. My saving. I had spent 63 yers developing random baroque and unconsciou compensations to cover up my embarraassment t not even knowing what it was I would get accused of - normal social epecttion for example. I have time blindness - can't plan, don't anticipate, don't remember, or if I do there's no timestamp. It is so bad my compensation for that was to become very very good at "making it up as I go". Including in programming. No good for college, makes me rather useless for the typical line programmer job, but there are a few niches that really need it, where there are no existing patterns or known solutions, for example. As a result, a 50 year career doing stuff nobody else has done before. Always inventing. Almost allways - a few times when I was not doing that, ranging from boring to painfully hellish.

Other than that, what pretty much everybody else has said. For making money, you are best off finding work in which you can easily enter and enjoy hyperfocus. For us folks on this forum, that would probably be programming in some form.

I have been very lucky also in employers and cofounders who, while maybe not knowing about the ADHD (I didn't myself, after all, until recently), had enough confidence in my results to let me get there in my own way, displacement behaviours and all.

Daily exercise To-do list for EVERYTHING. If it isn't on the list I don't get it done. Time-boxing and frequent breaks. Work a single task for 30 minutes. Then switch to something else or take a 5 minute break.

I also tend to keep a few tasks on top of the stack and try to keep enough room before deadlines to let my self switch to something else when I feel blocked or unmotivated.

Also helps having a boss that is well aware of ADD tendencies and can work with them.