Do you feel like ADHD is holding you back? Maybe you don't personally have it, but you work with
folks who do and you'd like to support them better. Either way, how ADHD interplays with
programming and programmers is pretty fascinating. On this episode, we have Chris Ferdiniti,
who himself has ADHD and has written a lot about it to share his journey and his advice for thriving
with ADHD as a programmer or data scientist. This is Talk Python to Me, episode 473,
recorded July 11th, 2024.
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You're listening to Michael Kennedy on Talk Python to Me. Live from Portland, Oregon,
and this segment was made with Python.
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Chris, welcome to Talk Python to me. Michael, thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here.
I'm really looking forward to talking about this kind of meta developer topic. You know,
we're both developers and course creators and things like that, but there's a whole
mental side, focus side, flow side of programming that's honestly both important and kind of
interesting, right? If you get it right, it makes a big difference. Yeah, for sure. So looking forward
to talking to you about that stuff and everything else. But before, yeah, before we jump in though,
maybe, you know, tell the world who you are. Introduce yourself just a bit. Absolutely. So
Chris Ferdinand, I'm a web developer. I have ADHD, which is a big part of what we're talking about today.
My, for the last decade or so, I have been focused on building all things front end. Early in my career,
I felt like I couldn't get anything done. But since then, I've discovered a whole bunch of systems and
strategies that have let me turn my ADHD from sometimes a liability into occasionally a superpower.
So I've been talking to folks about tips and tricks for doing that. And when I'm not talking about ADHD,
I'm creating courses and workshops. I publish a couple of daily newsletters, speak at events,
and I work with some really cool clients. Fantastic. And you say you're a web developer,
like what's your tech stack? And we're not here specifically to talk Python, but you know.
Yeah. So for me, it's actually, it's almost exclusively front end. So HTML, CSS, JavaScript.
I occasionally reluctantly dabble in the backend, primarily PHP, because I learned web development
through WordPress. Although as we were talking about pre-show, I actually had the opportunity
recently to work on a project for NASA of all places, which was really cool, where Python was
the backend. And I was tying into some backend APIs with some JavaScript stuff, which was really fun,
really great to work with, super performant. It was a real, real joy to work with.
Oh, that's fantastic. Yeah. I recently had kind of an experience with that, maybe a year ago
with Lauren, the guy who built our mobile apps that was all in Flutter and it was like lots of back
and forth. Now we've got to do that, make the API do this and like, well, and just super fun to work
that way. If you have good people on both ends, you know, I guess. Absolutely. And it was one of the
things where like, I knew a little bit about the backend and the backend guy knew a little bit about
the front end. So we could, we could talk to each other, but like we were not experts at each other's
thing. So it worked out really well. That sounds familiar. So front end stuff are, you got frameworks
that you, you work with? Are you a view person? Are you a rank person or, or something else?
Anti-framework feels a little strong. Earlier in my career, I was anti-framework. These days I am,
I'd say framework reluctant. I, a big part of what I advocate for folks is that on the front end,
there's a simpler, easier way to build things often that involves just using what the browser
gives you out of the box. A big part of that for me is that if you're a backend person, while the tools
you choose do matter, your front end users don't often pay as heavy a tax for those choices, but on
the front end, every... Sure. Unless it's really slow or something, but long as it runs fast enough,
they don't care. Exactly. But on the front end, every kilobyte that gets shipped is a kilobyte. The user has
to download, the browser has to parse, and the front end is just such a, like a, an unpredictable
and unforgiving environment. Unpredictable is the word. Right? Yeah. You just, you really don't know
what you're going to get. So I, I try to advocate for what I think is maybe a little bit more, more
simple or resilient a way of building things for the browser. And I guess a little bit of a dinosaur
in that regard. I love it. And you know, I was just thinking, I honestly thinking about ADHD,
front end stuff. I feel like generally JavaScript front end stuff makes me feel like I have ADHD
just from the pay attention to this. No, now this stop. Now this like, Oh my gosh, I can't focus.
You know, the velocity of change and not just change. Cause it's like, it's great that new stuff's coming
out. The fickleness, I think sometimes of the people who use the tools is really jarring where a thing that
is the right way to do something today is considered obsolete, like six to 12 months from now that can
get really frustrating as someone with ADHD. I think it's a big part of why kind of ignoring a lot of
that stuff is so appealing to me. Cause when you focus on web standards, even though new stuff comes
out, the old stuff continues to work just fine. And you don't have to throw out a whole mountain's
worth of knowledge every, every 12 months. So that's been really helpful as well.
Obviously I know the term ADHD. I know kind of what it means. I don't have a real good sense for in reality
what it is. Be a person with ADHD rather than just, it's hard to focus sometimes, you know, or your thoughts
wonder or something. Let's go with that. Let's yeah, for sure. Yeah. I'm sure that it is. So like, let's start
there. Yeah. So ADHD is, is, it's actually a really terrible name for what it is. So ADHD stands for
attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, but people with ADHD don't actually have a deficit of
attention. I think it seemed that way in the eighties when the term was coined because the most
like stereotypical ADHD person was really hyperactive and kind of all over the place and like poorly
focused on things, but it's actually an executive, an executive functioning disorder. And one of its
hallmark features is that you have trouble regulating your attention. So sometimes that means you've got like
18 things going on in your head and you can't focus on any of them. Other times it causes this other
phenomenon called hyperfocus, which is a little bit like if you go into the zone as a developer,
except way more intense and you can't usually control what you're hyperfocused on. So sometimes
it's something really useful and awesome and like what you're supposed to be doing related.
And then other times it's like, Hey, I've got all these important things to do, but I can't stop
Googling stuff about like RVs and campers because that's currently currently what I'm really obsessed
with.
Right.
There's a whole bunch of other things that can be around ADHD a little bit like autism. ADHD has a
spectrum of symptoms. Not everyone who has it has all of them. Everybody's ADHD experience is a little
bit different, but you know, it can include things like having more, more severe emotional responses to
things than someone neurotypical might. Along with that, there's this other thing called RSD,
rejection sensitivity, dysphoria, where like a perceived slight, you will take much more like
deeply and personally than a neurotypical person might. It usually in a way that is like out,
out of scope for the actual size of the thing that happened to you. And these are things I didn't learn
about some of this stuff until like in the last few years. And it really like, I knew I had ADHD since
I was a kid. I was that stereotypical, really hyper kid. And I always just thought that's what it was.
And then about four or five years ago, I started hearing more about like some of the newer research
and discovered all these like things that I thought were just weird personal failings about me were
actually ADHD related.
Interesting. Okay.
Yeah. Another one is time blindness. So ADHD folks often just literally cannot perceive time accurately.
Sometimes it feels like it's going by really fast. Sometimes it feels like it's going by really slow.
In both cases, it's usually not, it doesn't feel like it, it actually is. And I know everybody experiences that
to some degree, but for ADHD folks, it is much more often, usually all the time. You can imagine if you
work in a situation where you need to make accurate estimates on things and accurately track your hours
that create some unique challenges there. And then the other thing with ADHD is you're not always hyper.
So there's three subtypes inattentive, which is exactly what it sounds like where you, you just,
you have trouble kind of regulating your focus. The other one is hyperactive. And that's actually,
so the impulsive variant is what used to be called ADD way back in the day. Now it's just all ADHD
with three different kinds of variants. And the other one is hyperactive or impulsive, which is,
I think what most people stereotypically think of as ADHD. And that doesn't often appear without
also having that like inattentive, I can't regulate my attention bit. And so many, many people have
what's called combined subtype, which were you're hyper and you have trouble regulating your focus.
I'm blessed with that kind.
Okay.
The inattentive variant is far, I'm rambling and I'm sorry, it's one of my superpowers.
The inattentive variant is both more common in women and far more underdiagnosed because it doesn't
show up with the hyperactivity. And so it's way less obvious. And so historically they thought ADHD was
primarily like a guy thing. And I think it's becoming a lot more obvious that many more women
have it than previously thought. They just don't usually get diagnosed because they don't often
show the hyperactivity part of it.
Right, right. They're not running around the classroom or something along those lines.
And you're like,
This also led to that whole thing in the 80s of like, oh, it's overdiagnosed. That's just boys
being boys. Just all the stuff around that. So anyways, that's, I don't even want to say a nutshell
because that was very long winded, but that's, that's kind of the high level overview of what ADHD
is like. Yeah. It's fun. Except when it's not.
No, I'm sure. Well, you know, it sounds like some of those things are probably annoying when you need
them to not be there, right? Like if times feels like it's going super slowly, but it's not, you know,
like, oh gosh, this hour is like utterly dragging on her, but you can also use it for the powers of good.
Right. One thing I forgot to mention the kind of the, one of the root, like biological aspects of ADHD
is that our brains don't produce as much dopamine as they should. And so a majority of the symptoms
associated with it are related to like a dopamine shortage. So even like I recently learned that
your brain's ability to perceive time is actually related to how much dopamine you have, which I thought
was like a tick tock of like you receiving dopamine is almost like a time flow.
Right. And so a lot of the time flies fast when you're having fun as an ADHD person,
even more intensely, because that dopamine your brain wouldn't normally be producing enough of
gets ramped up when you're excited or you're enjoying yourself.
Like a desert, a dried up desert river versus when the monsoons come, it's like raging, right?
Exactly. Yeah. So there's no normal time for me. It's either moving very slowly or flying by
for better or worse. So I don't know how much you can, how much personal experience you want to can
bring to this really, but Jazzy out there asked like, do you think Python is a good language for
devs with ADHD? It's a great language to get stuff done quickly. It doesn't have too many symbols or
distractive other bits to it. For sure. So I generally think Python, yes. Programming in general is a great
profession. One of the things I'm finding is that ADHD folks seem overrepresented in development and
I would agree with that. Yeah.
I believe a lot of that has to do with the tight feedback loop you get with coding,
where you write some code, you run it, a thing happens or it doesn't. And you get that immediate,
like it worked, it didn't kind of feedback loop, which triggers the dopamine thing in your head
and then causes you to really like start, start digging into it. To answer Jazzy's specific question
though, even though I teach front end stuff over at gomakethings.com, I have so many front end students
who are like, I wanted to learn backend language. And I, I went with Python because it's really,
really clear. And there's a lot of like, this is the correct way to do things. Whereas like JavaScript,
like anything you want to do, there's at least three different ways you could do it. And none of them are
inherently better than the other. Right. And there's four frameworks that came out this week to help you
do it. Yeah. So I probably, I don't have enough Python experience to like accurately say like,
yes, that's the right one. But I just, I think programming in general is a, it is a profession or hobby.
If you just want to do it for fun, that plays well to the ADHD mind. It can trigger that time is flying
by really fast because I'm, if not enjoying it, at least very engaged in the activity. And it can make
what would feel like work for a normal person feel like a really enjoyable, fun thing that you can't
get enough of. There are downsides to that too. Like you could go through like an eight hour,
like just coding bender and find that you haven't eaten, used the bathroom, gotten up to stretch in any way,
taking care of yourself because your body just didn't let you know.
Yeah. Well, I've, I've had those experiences as well. And I don't know if there's some aspect of
ADHD or if it's just, I just got really focused, but I've certainly gotten up and I'm like, why is it
dark? How is it dark? Gosh, I am hungry. I'm going to have to deal with some of this stuff.
Yeah. The thing, so that, that hyper-focus for, for ADHD folks, I heard, I had an old coworker who
used to refer to that as weaponized ADHD. So if you can get yourself into that state often, you can be
like way more productive than your peers. The problem is you can't always like force yourself
into hyper-focus. There's no like, Oh, I just flipped the switch and I'm there. Right? So you will have
periods of intense productivity. And then you might have some periods where you're less productive
than both your average and the average of your coworkers.
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Depending on your work situation, that can lead to some uncomfortable conversations where it's like,
hey, you did really great last quarter and this quarter you can't seem to get anything done.
What's going on?
I can see that. Do you feel like the folks with ADHD, like that, they're more susceptible to
maybe the fluctuations of those two things from a sort of flow state to like, I'm not feeling it,
but I got it. I got a job. It's time to just grind it until I feel it again. Do you feel like those
fluctuations are wider? Like you're less productive when you feel it less and you're maybe even more
productive when you're in the game? The other piece of this that's really tough is so where a
neurotypical person might be like, man, I'm not feeling it today, but I'm not going to keep
working here if I don't do the thing. Right. ADHD person will go into like this almost like freeze
state. Yeah. Okay. And I think that's actually the, like the official like psychology term for it,
but you can stare at your screen for eight hours, not get up and you won't type like a line of code.
You'll just be like trying to just the inertia of getting started is really, really tough.
It's like writer's block, but it is. Yeah. That's literally, it's like writer's block,
except your brain just will not will your body to do what it needs to do. Yeah. And so one of the
things, so over at ADHD for the wind.com, I've been writing a lot about my, my ADHD experience and
kind of some tips and recommendations on how to get around a lot of this stuff. And one of the things
that I, and a lot of other folks have found is that traditional productivity advice just does not
work for most folks with ADHD. So like if you're a proponent of like getting things done or some of
those other, those other systems, a lot of times what they'll tell you is start with your basic,
biggest task and get that done first. That way it's out of the way. Big tasks trigger massive
overwhelm in the ADHD brain. If you are not already like, I cannot wait to chew this task up and spit it
out because I'm so excited about it. Right. And sometimes even then. So one of the things that I wrote
about recently was that I actually think folks should start with their smallest task first,
because the most important thing is getting moving. You're almost like this big rock and you've got a
lot of inertia. And right now that inertia is telling you stay right where you are. Once you get rolling,
sometimes you can move yourself into the state where you become difficult to stop. So the most important
thing is just start doing something that moves you in the direction of work. So maybe go for the small
things, right? Cause they're easy wins and you get, get that dopamine, like prime the pump sort of.
Exactly. So for me, a lot of times that I start my morning off by writing my daily tech article,
because they're really short. It's one of those things where I, it's like a habit for me now.
And it gets me, I'm at a desk, I'm typing and I've produced a thing and I shipped it. And now I can get
on with the rest of my day. And I'm like in work mode. And if I have a day where I have a meeting in
the morning and I don't get to do that, it will derail me for literally hours. That actually happened to me
this morning. Actually, I had a, I had a, like a client meeting and it was first thing in the
morning. It was a really great meeting. It was super productive, but I didn't like ship anything.
And so then when the meeting ended, I was like really underproductive for about two hours,
which is kind of like, kind of stuck, not able to get going again. Interesting.
Interesting. Annoying. Also very, very, very annoying. It is super annoying. However,
knowing at least awareness of that is pretty interesting.
So this is, I guess the next, a nice segue here, Michael, is that one of the big things
that I advocate for, while I admit that ADHD has a lot of challenges, like the one I just described,
I'm also someone who's ADHD positive. I don't think it's like this thing I have to deal with.
I guess in a manner of speaking, it is, but it's not like, oh, this has ruined my life.
And so a big part of what, here's why I can't do anything with the rest of my life. I'm a big part
of what I advocate for is working with your ADHD instead of against it. So like, I know that that,
that is a thing that happens. Like if I feel that I'm in one of those moods where I just can't get
moving, no amount of staring at the screen is going to change that. What is going to change that is
doing a handful of other things that usually involve not using my brain at all. There are a
whole bunch of activities that will produce dopamine in your brain. And that usually helps.
So drinking coffee or soda or something with caffeine in it. The core mechanism by which
most ADHD medicines work is by either making your brain make more dopamine or stopping your brain
from absorbing the stuff it does make so that more of it like floats around exercise, literally just
getting exposure to sun. So I, now that I am old, I've started gardening, which gets me like two for
one. So I'll go outside. I dig some holes. I move some heavy, like literally heavy rocks around,
gets me going. I get some sun. I don't have to think I'm just using my hands. And then I come in
and I will get like eight hours worth of work done in about three or four hours. Cause I, I'm now I'm
ready. That's awesome. It's really like a big, a big part of the ADHD experience is learning to listen
to your body and just step away. Like staring at a screen is not going to help you. Not that you're
weak for stepping away. It's not, your persistence is not necessarily going to help you if you can't sort of
reset a little bit. I think that's, that's true for a lot of people for me. I don't know if it's
the same thing. I'm probably going to say that a lot this episode, but for me, one of the things that
I've tried to embrace that sounds familiar is inspiration. I find that if I'm really psyched to
work on something or I'm just like, I really don't want to do this, but I got to get it done.
There's like a five X difference in productivity for me. And so if, if I, it's, it's like, I'm an adult,
I should be able to just to pay attention. And it's like, there's a right thing. No, no, it's
ridiculously out of whack. And so I can find if, if I can just, okay, now is not the time for that.
This afternoon might be the time for that. What else can I do? Maybe, you know, maybe I'll go for a ride
in my motorcycle for an hour in the mountains and get some sun and come back sort of reset or just,
just grind on email or, or stop grinding email, whatever it is, like just change that up and try to
sense the inspiration or the lack thereof in my brain for some something. And then try to
ride that wave when I see it coming, you know, one of the things that you touched on a couple of times
brought up, Hey, I do that too. So the thing with ADHD is I could describe a whole range of symptoms
and most people will be like, Oh, that happens to me sometimes. And it does because most ADHD symptoms
are things that everybody experiences sometimes. And so kind of the, the difference between I have
ADHD and don't have ADHD or what would lead you to have a doctor be like, yes, you have it. It's
usually a, like a measurement of like how often and how many of these things you experience on the
regular. When you get diagnosed, there's a whole set of questions you have to answer. And the doctor
adds up a bunch of numbers. And if you hit a high enough number, they're like, yeah, you probably have
ADHD. Interesting. Okay. So kind of like, if you ask somebody, have you ever felt like down in the
dumps? Have you ever felt today is hopeless or whatever? Like almost everyone's going to have a
day where they're like, yup, today is hopeless. Crash the car, did this and whatever. But that doesn't
mean you're necessarily have depression, right? And like, for sure. And so the questions will be like,
you know, how often do you have trouble? I'm just making this up. How often do you have trouble
paying attention to something if you're not interested in it? Right. And it's like occasionally
always, you know, like, and so you'll have a bunch of those questions that are basically rewordings of
questions you already answered to account for like bias in yourself. And then you get a number,
like each column has a number, the doctor adds it up. And if you hit the minimum number, you've got ADHD
basically. Yeah. Got it. There are self-assessments that you can do too, by the way, if anybody's
listening, I wonder if I have ADHD. A psychiatrist who diagnoses you will be able to prescribe you
medication, if that's something you're interested in. But if you just think you might have it as a
first step, if you head over to ADHD for the wind.com slash talk Python, I have a bunch of resources.
And one of them is, Oh, how do I know if I have ADHD? I got a link to that self-assessment there. So you
can kind of dig in and, and find that. That's awesome. Yeah. You put together some proper,
well, that way, you know, just a proper stuff for the show that we're going to talk about a bunch of
stuff. If I missed anything that we talk about, I'm going to go back and update this later.
I just want to make sure folks have what they need. Yeah. That's awesome. I'll definitely put
that in the show notes for folks and people can sign up for your newsletter. There's a lot of daily tips
and we can maybe riff on those a little bit before we get to that though. You talked about meetings
and I think meetings, I just saw where, gosh, I can't remember where it was. I think it was the
Atlantic.com Atlantic, the publication. And it said something to the effect of like white collar work
is just meetings now. I don't think that's a hundred percent true with development, but
you know, it's a lot. And I think it's, it can be a challenge. And I think it can be especially a
challenge for people with ADHD. One thing that I read that connected pretty well with me is Paul
Graham's maker schedule, manager schedule. I don't know if people have read this before is from 2009,
but I think it's still, it's probably more relevant than ever. Please email me that Paul Graham is
great or terrible. I'm not trying to promote the guy or not that just, I know VC's always
get a lot of reactions, but this is pretty interesting saying that like, look, there are
people whose job it is to have meetings and to them, they see blocks on the calendar as, well,
here's another part of my job that I can do. And for the rest of us who are trying to write code and
focus, this is a disruption. And you talked about how it can really derail like half a day for you.
So first of all, how's this, are you familiar with this? And how's this idea set with you?
If I weren't on your show, I'd probably be one of those folks emailing you about Paul. So I'm going
to, I'm going to not comment on the article specifically, but what I do want to talk,
let's put it away. Yeah. But what I do related to that, I don't know that I have strong feelings on
like makers versus managers and whatnot, but what I do, what I do know is that task shifting is
particularly difficult for ADHD folks, largely because it's so difficult to get into that focus period.
Like you think about a neurotypical developer gets interrupted from focus and it takes them a little
bit to get back into it. It is way more intense for the average person with ADHD. So they create this
effect that I've heard described as like a temporal dead zone where if I finish a task and I have a
meeting 30 to 60 minutes from when I finished that task, I will not start another task. Because if I do,
I know that by the time I actually get up enough like momentum that I'm doing the task, I'm going to get
interrupted. And that's either going to, I'm going to miss the meeting, which used to happen to me
constantly, or I'm going to get annoyed that I have to stop. And the whole time I'm in the meeting, my brain
will be fixated on the other thing and not the meeting. I won't start a new task. So I've got this whole block of
time that gets eaten. And then when the meeting ends, now I've got this long on ramp to get shifted
back into my next task after the meeting. So meetings are bad for developers in general. They're
extraordinarily bad for folks with ADHD. And one of the things I talk about is some strategies you can
use to try to, you can't always make it work, but I used to employ a ton of strategies when I had
like a day job to prevent myself from getting booked in midday meetings. I don't mind them at
the beginning of the day. I prefer them more in the afternoon when I run out of like developer steam,
but a meeting at like 11 or two in the afternoon just, just destroys my day.
I hear you. Yeah. Where I was going with that article is what I've, I've ended up doing is I have
just certain days blocked off where those are no meeting days. And that's because I have the
flexibility for it. And you know, you'd be in, you're doing this stuff independently now, not a
nine to five. Is that right? Yes. But even when I was at a nine to five, I used to do stuff like that
because you, you just, you gotta, depending on the culture you're in, like some places are just full
of excess meetings and it becomes very necessary. Your job is to go to the meetings. I mean,
there's the whole joke, right? About like this meeting could have been an email. I have found that
some companies are worse at that than others. Some environments I've been in, they're really cool
about async communication. Other places like the de facto is just block time on people's calendar.
And that is awful. I don't, I don't know where this social expectation that you could just block time
on someone's calendar at any point for any reason came from, but it's awful.
Exactly. I'm going to reach out. I'm going to grab some time with you. It's like, hold on.
If that's just open-ended. Yeah. I found that article. I'll link it. A white collar work is just
meetings now. It's interesting.
Yeah. So good blocking, blocking time, I think is a great strategy.
I guess one tangential thing here, cause it's not just meetings, right? It's if you're in office
and you're in an open office environment, the pop-in is an absolute nightmare. If you have ADHD,
I mean, we've, I'm sure you've seen before Michael articles about how open office environments are bad
for productivity. Just generally, again, it's one of those things worse. If you have ADHD,
ADHD, if you're on a remote team, sometimes there's a culture on Slack or discord that like replicates
that open office environment, pop-in where you're expected to just always like respond quickly on
those tools. So there are two paths you can take. If you have ADHD and this stuff is messing with your
day, you can either ask for forgiveness instead of permission and just take what you want.
For a long while, I just, I had this thing where I would, I would just turn off Slack and I would
check it like two, maybe three times a day. And if someone really, really needed me, my manager had
my cell phone and he could call me if it was like super, super important. Same thing with email,
that kind of thing. So that's one path. The other path is you can have a conversation with your manager.
The laws around this vary from country to country, but in America specifically where I live,
the Americans with Disabilities Act requires companies to provide reasonable accommodations
for disabilities and ADHD actually qualifies as one. So you can say things like I need to be able to work
from home or you need to give me a private office where the team lead who keeps shooting Nerf darts at
my head can't do that anymore. Or that's a real story that used to happen to me in a previous employer.
Thank gosh. Or I need to have days where I don't have meetings or it would be really great for me
if more of our communication happened asynchronously. Or if you ask me to do things, I need someone to
follow up in writing with that, or I'm going to forget, right? There's like a whole series of
things you could ask for. I have a list of accommodations over at my site as well that I'll
make sure ends up in the cheat sheet I put together for this episode. But yeah, asking your employer,
if you feel comfortable, can be a great thing to do. I am at a point in my career where I feel
very comfortable having those conversations. And I bring it up with clients. For the last
four or five years of my working career, I brought it up with my employers, any of my managers,
I would bring it up in job interviews. But I am a cisgendered, heterosexual, white dude with a whole
lot of professional experience. And I have talked to more junior developers, people who are LGBTQ,
people who are minorities. And they have all told me some version of, I already feel like I'm under more
scrutiny because of my gender, my skin color, my identity. And I don't want to give my employer
another reason to look at my work more closely. I'm realizing as I'm saying this, I fully acknowledge
that I'm in a privileged position to be able to do that. But if you feel comfortable, it can,
in the right culture, make your life at work a lot better and a lot easier.
I totally agree. Do you feel like the work from home stuff has been a boon?
It has for me. I have also talked to some ADHD folks who they feel like it doesn't have enough
structure. Isn't the right word. There's like a bit of an accountability that can happen when you're in
the office where just seeing other people doing work means that if you are sitting at your desk and you
look like you're not doing work, that's bad. So it gives them at least a bit of a, like a push to start
moving. And there is a technique called body doubling where you literally like just sit on a
live cam with someone else and co-work and silence together that is supposed to address this. I find
it deeply uncomfortable. I actually prefer to not do that, but I do know some ADHD folks find it helpful.
But for me, I went remote pre-pandemic. I had been remote for a while and it had been the single best
thing for my productivity that I've ever done. Even before 2020, it was like a non-starter for me for any job I
applied for after I had gone remote that I would never go into an office again. I mean, I hear you. I did. I've done
that since 2006. And so it's just like, that's how work is for me.
Absolutely. I think it was like 2009-ish for me. I was hybrid and then I went full and it was just
not without its own challenges, right? Because if there are days where you just, you're not into it,
it's really easy for me to then not do anything. And that's fine every now and then. But if it happens
too much, you can find yourself in a situation where you've got like a big backlog of work that
just didn't get done and that's bad. But yeah, on the whole, I would say it's been a huge blessing.
It's not a problem to focus. It's not a problem. Like there's too many distractions. Like over there
is my sim racing machine. If I'm feeling like I can't, I just get up and go do that instead. And
then eventually like I do that half the day. And I, you know, like if that were how work from home
worked for me, I could see that's, that's bad, not at Boone. And so what do you like, there's a negative
side to work from home as well. And like trying to stay focused and not do the dishes and whatever.
Doing dishes, being like pulled to do the dishes is usually not a problem for ADHD folks. We usually
have the other problem, which is, Oh God, I haven't done the dishes in days.
Why does the kitchen look like that? How'd that happen?
Right? No, I know why. I just, I feel a deep shame about it and won't address it. But
the bigger challenge with work from home is if you don't have a dedicated space to do work,
you can run into some of what you just described. You can also run into a situation where there's just
a lot of other stuff around you. If there's other people at home, you have a partner who also works
from home or you have, you have kids and it's like summertime and they're home. Like it can be
loud. It can be noisy. It can be distracting, distracting rather. I don't find the pull of
other stuff in my house that bad because I am coding on what is effectively a very expensive,
like gaming and video streaming machine. And it has enough distractions just on the thing I have to do
work on already. So there's really not much else. Yeah. There's really not much else in my house.
That's more appealing than the thing I'm sitting in front of to do, to do work on.
That's true. Nothing is as distracting as my phone and my computer already. So I'll just go with that.
They're right here with me all the time. Yes. All the time. Yeah. So that part less so it's more
the like the noise. If you don't have a quiet place to work, that can be challenging, but I don't
think any necessarily any more so than the office. It's just, you're in basically the same position.
You're in your own open office sort of deal. Yeah. You put together a couple of tools that you,
maybe we could talk a bit about building a second brain. This comes from the book by Tiago Forte,
I believe, which I read not too long ago. Pretty interesting book. There's lots of software to
accomplish this. I love Notion and actually AnyType is what I've moved away from Notion towards. It was
just like similar, which is super fun. Open source Notion basically. Yeah.
So I've been using Obsidian.
AnyType.io.
Yeah. I've heard that there's a lot of similarities of those. One thing we didn't talk about when we
talked about like symptoms of ADHD, we have ADHD folks usually have a very large hard drive and a
very small amount of RAM. So we can only keep one or two things in our working memory at any particular
point. And second brains are great for everyone. But if you tell me three things, there's a good chance
I will have forgotten the first two by the time I get back to my desk. And so the idea of a second
brain specifically for folks with ADHD is that it becomes the RAM that your brain doesn't have.
So any idea that pops into your head, any task you've been given, any thought, anything that you
don't want to forget 30 seconds from now needs to get written down somewhere. It can be paper. It can
be digital. Both have their pros and cons. I'm biased towards digital for being able to search,
but writing things down seems to make stuff stick a little bit better in a lot of folks' heads.
Are you trying to memorize it or are you trying to store it, put it on a digital ice? So I think a quick
definition for folks, I mean, they can imagine what a second brain is, but give people a definition of
what this means. A second brain, and I'm not gonna, I'm probably not gonna do justice to like the official
definition here, but the idea of a second brain is that it's literally just a place for you to write down
or capture all the things. It's funny, I've read so many different descriptions of it. And in my head,
it always just brings me back to the ubiquitous capture device or UCD from getting things done,
part Lance. I think it's just like a, in my opinion, it's just a, like a rebranding of that
thing. But the idea is you just, you want a place to capture and write down all the things you don't
want to forget later. It sounds good to me. I, as a description, I think what I got from reading the
book, there's a process for capturing the stuff and filtering it and putting, I don't know if I need
any of that. What I need is it's in my mind and it needs to get written down in basically a place
I could get back to it if I, if I want to, or even put a reminder around it. Just, just put it, like
you said, just get it out of RAM, swap it to disk for a while conceptually, and you can get back to it
if you need, right? The thing with, because I know you mentioned Notion, I like Obsidian. There's a lot of
different tools out there. One of the problems for ADHD folks with most digital tools is most of the
tools available today do a lot. And that is kind of the problem. So I'm going to use Obsidian because I
know it well, but Notion, having played with it before is very similar in like capability and what
it can do. So I look at a tool like Obsidian, which is mark down notes that you can kind of access and edit
through a GUI and organize into folders and things like that. And it has a plugin ecosystem. And you
will see similar with like, with a tool like Notion, like there are consultants who specialize in teaching
you how to get the most out of Notion. And you can build these really complicated workflows where
you can tie things from a page into another page and then things show up automatically in these
different views and you get these graphs and that all sounds really fun. It's amazing. I close this thing
in my Kanban board on GitHub, which triggers a thing, which will move this into this page. And then
Sarah gets a notification. You're like, Oh my goodness.
That sounds fun. And that sounds like an interesting challenge. And it sounds almost like a game. And if I
have a brain that craves dopamine and enjoys kind of gamified experiences, I'm going to spend hours,
days, weeks, perfecting my to do system to the expense of doing the actual things I need to do.
And then down the road, I'm going to be like, Oh, this is so complicated and difficult to manage.
This isn't working for me anymore. And I'm going to throw it away. I'm going to go repeat this process
again with something new. I talked to a lot of ADHD folks who feel like productivity systems just don't
stick. And a big part of that is because they're, they're overcomplicated. I think the thing I found
that works best for a lot of, for me, and I've talked to a lot of folks who've had similar experiences
is simple to do lists. Like everything is a bulleted list. Even if it's like an idea you want to remember
later, it's a bulleted list. It might not be a to do that you have to check off, but it's a bullet.
And when I use tools like notion or obsidian, or even a paper notebook, excuse me, everything is,
everything is bullets. I install almost no plugins, no add ons. The only thing I have is a my day view,
where when I tag things with a unicorn emoji, they show up on my day. That way I can just flag the,
and I like unicorns because they're fun, but it's just, it's the place where these are the things I
need to do today. I can see them all on one page and that's it. I think one of the tools I've found
that used to work still works really well for me, but it's occasionally a little bit buggy now,
Microsoft to do, which is their free to do app. I like it because it does less than tools like
to do list, which does a lot. Like it's basically just bulleted lists with sub lists under them.
And you can flag stuff in this special, I'm going to do it today page. And it doesn't have any of the
other stuff, which makes it way less distracting. Sure. I'm a fan of to do is. Oh yeah. The only
reason I moved away from it is I really like authoring and markdown and I wanted something
that let me do that. Yeah. That's why I like notion. You just write markdown and it just becomes,
comes magic or you forward slash it. I'm a fan of to do this, but it's, I try to just not over
complicate it. Just, just kind of have a flow. Yeah. I mean, it's funny. I say, I say like,
oh, do you use obsidian or notion? Just don't make it too complicated, but you could do that
and to do is too. Sure. They're all it's that's the, whatever tool you choose,
just resist the urge to over-engineer it. I know it's tough, but like, you'll be much happier in
the long run. Just put the extensions down. Yeah. Another thing you gave a shout out to
was the Apple watch, which I love my Apple watch. It is increasingly, it is a second brain for me in
weird ways. Like for example, an hour and a half ago, I was recording a course and I put everything
on do not disturb. I'm like, don't forget to come do the podcast with Chris in an hour and a half. So
I just, Hey, set a reminder for an hour and 20 minutes. And then I just, I didn't stress it. I
just took the weight off my brain. I could focus back on the course and then, oh, it's time to go.
Like, all right. My wife is the reason I have an Apple watch. I was very resistant because in my mind,
I'm like, I don't need, I'm already like too distractible. I don't need another thing
chirping at me. That sounds like you literally are putting distractions on my arm. I can't get it off.
What are you thinking here? She was like, please just try it. I think it's going to be really helpful
for you. And I did. And she was right because before I got the Apple watch, I used to miss meetings
constantly. They would go off on my phone. I would snooze them. And then, or I'd more likely I'd just
dismiss them by accident. And then five minutes later, the meeting would start and I wouldn't be there
because I got sucked back into something else. So having that like right on your wrist,
for some reason is a real game changer for me. I set timers for literally everything, laundry,
food that I put in the oven, anything that needs to get done gets a timer. And then the one thing that
I haven't written about yet, but that has really helped is the one place where you don't usually
have your second brain is in the shower. And I do a lot of thinking in the shower and I have some of my
best ideas and I'll be damned if from the time I have the idea to the five minutes later,
when I get out and drying myself off, I have already forgotten it happens all the time.
But if you have the watch, you can just dictate a note to yourself or text yourself or do something.
And then you have it and you can like do stuff with it later. I used to have an old manager who
literally had one of those like scuba diving chalkboards with the, like the grease pen in
his shower. So that he can write down ideas. Yeah. This feels like the digital version of that to me,
where you just, you know, like, Hey Siri, send a, you know, write a note that says,
and then you're off to the races. And for all the failings of Siri, that,
that actually works pretty well. Like the few things like set a timer, set a reminder,
like they actually work quite well. You just hold the crown. And I honestly, though,
now that I'm talking about these two things in parallel with you, I feel like it is sort of my
second brain of like reminders and attention in a sense. One of two things would always happen to me.
I would either over fixate on the thing so that I don't miss it, or I would completely ignore the
thing and miss it. And the Apple watch lets me do the latter without missing the thing. So I can free
my brain to do other stuff. And I know I'm not going to miss my events, my important stuff.
And people out there who are like, I'm not an Apple person. Why are they like,
you couldn't get a Google where Android where and do basically the same thing I imagine.
I don't have a lot of experience with those, unfortunately, because I am
very big into the Apple ecosystem, but I need to stop saying Apple watch and start talking about
smartwatches more generally, because you're right. My biggest disappointment with the Apple watch is
that it requires an iPhone to work. I think that's dumb and annoying.
It's completely dumb. But if that's you, if you don't have an iPhone in the Apple ecosystem,
I would look at some of the Android options because I think just the smartwatch in general has been a
really amazing tool for me, probably one of the most important in my toolkit.
It's so frustrating. I don't want to go down this at all, but I was looking at the nothing,
you know, the nothing phones, nothing. They're super interesting. They're really quite different.
I seem to recall this from a few years ago. Let's see.
They've got some interesting different ways about like, they've got stuff on the back that will
like flash and they communicate things and swap your own or am I thinking of something else?
No, that's framework.
Ah, okay.
So they've got like these, it's like hieroglyphics on the back that mean different things if they like
light up and like, this is cool. I kind of want to play with this stuff, but that my Apple watch
would basically be dead. Like you can't, I'm like, well, I'm not, I'm going nowhere.
I can't imagine why Apple would do that. It's really strange.
I can't. It's so, it's so, it makes no sense. It must be an oversight, right? Clearly.
We've got a little bit of time left, maybe 10 minutes. So what do you think about maybe going
through some of those daily tips or something like the idea of them and maybe just pick a couple
that you want to just give a shout out to? How's that sound?
One of the things I'm, I'm in the middle or I said the beginning of a series on how to get stuff done
when you have ADHD and I'm breaking it into two parts. One of them is like, I'm calling it productivity.app,
which is my, like my approach to getting stuff done. And then the other one is hacking your brain's
operating system. and the hacking your brain's operating system feels like there's potentially some
interesting nuggets in there. I'm looking through the list though. And I actually think
we've talked about most of them. Yeah. That's where just organically they have all, cause you brought
up the Apple watch and that would have been the one that doesn't always get brought up, but you brought
it up.
One other thing though, I will say this happened the other day I wrote about, but I think one of
the things I've, I've come to realize is there are certain types of work that lend within the development
space, which lend themselves better to the ADHD brain than others. And so I look at something like
agency work. Agency work can be like a blessing or a curse depending on the agency. And I know that's,
again, generally true, but quick definition for people who are new to programming or outside of
the consulting world agency work. What is that?
This would be like a development agency that builds some sort of thing. Could be a mobile app,
could be a website, whatever it happens to be for a variety of different clients. So they have a range
of clients they work with and they get contracted and you are a developer on that team. And I contrast
that against being an in-house developer where you're like, I work at IBM and I manage all of the web
properties for IBM, or I build this app for IBM, whatever happens to be.
I build the authentication integration between all our internal apps and keep them running or whatever.
Exactly. So this is more like, you're like a bee floating from client to client. That can be awesome.
If you're the right kind of agency, that means you're constantly getting variety in clients and work.
So you've got novelty and you can just absolutely crush it with that kind of work. However, sometimes you have
agencies that are like, we build WordPress sites for ice cream shops. That's all we do. We know it.
And you get to a point where it's like, it's cookie cutter. And that is just mind-numbingly boring.
It can be easy work. It can be work that you do very effectively, that you can apply unique aspects of
that to each of your different clients in different ways. But it can also run the danger of triggering
the whole like, oh, this is really boring. I can't get anything done. Reflex. Agencies often,
to 90% of the time, are really focused on billable hours. So a lot of what you're doing is saying,
I think it's going to take me X amount of hours to do, then tracking how many hours it took you to do,
and billing those hours. And those two things are absolute nightmares for the ADHD brain.
So if you find an agency that does like flat billing, where they're like, we charge X to build you Y,
awesome. Or they do a variety of different work can be really awesome. But often that's not the case.
So where I find that a lot of folks with ADHD really do their best work is when they are not
time constrained. And the nature of the role is more, we've got this big hairy challenge,
and we're not really sure how to figure it out. We need someone who's really into problem solving to
go like research it and tackle it. And you happen to find the problem interesting. Because if it's just
one of those things, you're in trouble. But if it's a big hairy problem, and you find it interesting,
and they're not like you have 12 hours to figure this out, that can work really, really well for you.
Some of the best roles that I've had, you're riding the wave of the deep, the deep, the super focus,
the hyper focus, and just like killing it. Yeah, it hits multiple things at once. The challenge,
triggers the like the dopamine thing. It allows you to dig into that like hyper focus really,
really deep and crush a whole bunch of work and look like an absolute rock star. It's one of those
things too, where like once you once you get fixated on a thing, it's all you'll think about. And so you'll
just keep pulling at that thread until you've got it figured out. Yeah, so that can work. That can work
really, really well. I don't know where I was going with this. Oh, yeah, we talked it was,
it was a thing I wrote about the other day. That's why we were talking about daily tips.
Yeah, yeah. The daily tips look pretty interesting. Is that free to sign up for?
Yeah, it's just every morning you get a just a little something in your inbox. I try to keep
them short because again, ADHD audience, right? But these are your people. These are my people.
Absolutely. Got it.
Yeah. One of the other things that comes up a lot too is when you should disclose
ADHD to it. Like if you think you're going to do that, when in the process should you disclose it?
So, you know, do you do it during the interview? Right. Is it your employers? Is it their business
to even know? Yeah. So that's what really important. I had someone ask, do I feel like it's unethical
to have a neurological condition that could impact your ability to do the work and not tell them? And I feel
very strongly that it is not in any way a problem to do that because it's none of their damn business.
Like if you're like, if you legitimately think you're not going to be able to do the work,
that's a bigger conversation. But if it means that sometimes you're overproductive and sometimes you're
a little underproductive, it's kind of a wash. I don't have an issue with that. Just the same way
that I think someone not disclosing that they're pregnant during an interview process, or they have
cancer during an interview process or any other sort of medical condition that is none of your
employer's business is totally fine not to disclose. But so for me, my recommendation is that you either
disclose once you've started the job and you have identified the areas where the current working
environment creates challenges for you and you need accommodations, or I will sometimes disclose during
an interview process if I'm really digging the people I'm interviewing with and I feel like we're
all vibing. So I was once on an interview where I was asked whether my preference is to have regular
check-ins with my team on works in progress or to go off and build for a few days and then reconnect
after a few days. Based on everything we've talked about, Michael, I'm sure you're not surprised to hear
my preference is to ignore everybody for a couple of days and then chat. But I didn't want to seem like a
jerk who doesn't like my coworkers for saying that. So I was like, oh, I have ADHD. So blah, blah, blah.
And then I found out the interviewer had ADHD. The other dude on the team we were going to be working
with had ADHD. The manager had ADHD and they were all the same way. Right. Awesome. We all agree.
Right. I was I got a job offer like three days later. It was amazing. So I get best case scenario.
Like you could find that works against you. But yeah, a lot of it is just like a gut vibe thing,
right? Like there's no right answer here. You can disclose early. You can disclose late.
You can disclose not at all. You're under no obligation to do so.
Let's see if we can close up this episode with maybe see if I can get some more mail.
Scrum, agile, paired programming. None of these things sound appealing to me. And along when
agile first came out, I thought I was like, that's really interesting. I find that in practice,
maybe in principle, it sounds cool. In practice for me, it's just it's all distracting. It's all
friction and stuff. What are your thoughts? I don't want to put words here. I'm talking about
myself. So how do you feel about these things?
Yes, I agree. I talked recently or I wrote recently about how standups are just productivity
killers for me, depending on when they happen and how they work. So my productivity is variable. I have
days where I will do like eight hours worth of work in four hours and I'll do that twice. So I'll get
like two or three days worth of work done in a day. I'll have days where I get nothing done.
Something like a daily standup really plays into this idea that you are like consistently productive
every day. And if I have two or three days where I have to stand up, say, yeah, I'm still working on
that thing that probably should have only taken an hour, but I can't make myself do it. I look like a
jerk. I look like a bad employee. Right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's setting up to show how you're not like how you failed that.
Yeah. And then that can create this like self-esteem spiral of like, oh, I'm really bad at this. Everybody
else is getting all this stuff done. Maybe I don't belong here. Imposter syndrome, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Similarly, things like two-week sprints and you know, like a lot of a lot of those rigid processes. I get
why they exist. I understand that they can work well in certain spaces. I think it's good to have deadlines
on when things are going to show some meaningful progress. But for the way that I work, I find that
having those kind of like rigid fixed deadlines creates bad stress for me and doesn't always
align with when my brain is like, yes, we're going to crank out a ton of work. I personally need a
little bit more flexibility than those types of systems allow. So it's one of those maybe good for
other people, not good for me kind of things. Yeah, I don't know. And paired programming,
how's that fit with people with ADHD? Depends. If I am having a problem with code and I am just
absolutely stuck. Pair programming on my way through it can be invaluable. Pair programming
just for the sake of pair programming is a nightmare for me because it makes me feel really self-conscious
about what I'm doing and how quickly my brain processes information and my like my process.
I like pair programming with other people who need help as well, like in a mentoring capacity,
if they're like trying to work through something and they just need someone to kind of like guide them,
happy to do that. Sure. I feel that feeling a little more like mentoring, you know?
Yeah. But like just classic, I just generally, like I know some, some organizations are really
big on you two are going to work on this feature together. Yes. Like that did, that does not work
for me. I know I've heard people who really love it. They find it very valuable. I'm not trying to take
away from that. This is not one of those. Like, I think it's bad for everybody. It sucks for me. I
think it sucks for a lot of folks with ADHD. Yeah. I just can't get in a flow if I'm sitting and working
with somebody. Yeah. I might be having a good time, but it's, it's really hard to like,
like reach that like really high level of productivity. So you talked to, let's close
this out with a bit of a joke. Okay. Maybe, maybe something practical. You talked about the time
blindness. Estimating is hard. Agile is all about estimates and stuff, you know? So I saw this,
this pretty cool article I talked about on other podcasts, Python bytes, basically hard to swallow
a truce. They don't tell you about software engineering, but they have a really great cartoon
in here that says from monkeyuser.com is actually where it's originally from. And it's trying to
reimagine how you might estimate. It says for better estimates, instead of like points or hours,
whatever, we switched to measuring story points too. How many duck sized horses you're willing to fight
rather than implementing this task? There's no duck you would fight for it. Cause it's so easy. Or
you'd take on a whole cavalry of like small duck horses. Like, I don't know. What do you think?
I actually, so I know it's a joke, but I find the stake in the ground comparisons for estimates useful.
I still don't think I'll always get to an accurate place, but if I say, I don't know how long something's
going to take. And someone says, well, do you think it would take 20 hours? That gives me like an instant
grounding of like, Oh, that feels too high. That feels too low or just right. It's still,
in my opinion, a bit of a wild guess. Like once you start doing the work, you will expose things
like unknowns that like make, Oh, we thought this, but based on this other thing, it's going to take
longer or it's going to take way less, or it's going to take about what we thought, but having some sort
of grounding, whether it's a number of hours or horse sized ducks, you'd be willing to fight.
I do actually think that's really useful. It's actually kind of interesting. Yeah. And I feel
there's a human nature, aversion to negativity stronger than a positivity. Right. And this is like,
how much negativity or how much resistance do you feel to this? Like, I think it's,
it's a little bit, maybe not idealistic, but it's, I think it goes in the flow of humanity.
So I think it's, it's a funny one. The one caveat with this is there are tasks that have been on my
to-do list for ages that realistically would only take 15 to 30 minutes that I will put off for ages.
Usually they're phone call related. And I hear this a lot from fellow ADHDers, like making phone calls.
It's just really like, I had make an appointment with a psychiatrist to look into getting ADHD medicine
on my to-do list for, I am not making this up three years. Michael, this was a 15 minute phone call,
three years. Cause it's not just the phone call. It's the find a psychologist or psychiatrist. You
think you're going to hit it off with make the phone call, pick a date to go there, get in the car,
drive there, do the whole like social awkward introductions thing. Talk about your feelings.
Right. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of levels of resistance. Yeah. And the thing that actually got
me over the hurdle, I found a psychiatrist who has like a, you fill out your information,
will call you. And that was the thing that did it for me. I don't have to navigate a, right. One of
these, like press three for this now, seven now enter this, you entered it wrong. Like you did give
me along. I have to look it up. So the number of like duck sized horses, I'd be willing to fight to
avoid making a phone call, which is actually a relatively easy task is much higher than the number
I'd be willing to fight to like implement my own e-commerce platform. You know what I mean? Like,
I'm going to write my own crypto before I make that phone call. Even though one is objectively way
more difficult than the other. It estimated it's a reasonable estimate of the total time,
not the active time. For sure. And so there you go. I think there's something to it. All right,
Chris, this has been a fun conversation and hopefully helpful for a lot of folks out there.
Let's wrap it up with a call to action. People want to learn more. What do you tell them? If you want
to learn more, you think you might have ADHD, you do have ADHD, head over to ADHD for the
the wind.com/talkpython where you can find a whole bunch of resources, daily newsletter,
and my contact information. If you just want to ask questions or fight me about Paul Graham.
Not a fight I want to have. I would say those are all, all those links and all these things will be
in people's show notes. So just flip over in your podcast player and you can get it right there.
Chris, thank you for being on the show. It's been insightful.
Michael, thanks so much for having me. This was truly a pleasure.
Yeah, thanks. Bye now.
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