#473: Being a developer with ADHD Transcript
00:00 Do you feel like ADHD is holding you back? Maybe you don't personally have it, but you work with
00:04 folks who do, and you'd like to support them better. Either way, how ADHD interplays with
00:09 programming and programmers is pretty fascinating. On this episode, we have Chris Ferdinandi,
00:14 who himself has ADHD and has written a lot about it to share his journey and his advice for thriving
00:21 with ADHD as a programmer or data scientist. This is Talk Python to Me, episode 473,
00:27 recorded July 11th, 2024. Welcome to Talk Python to Me, a weekly podcast on Python.
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02:33 I hope to see you there. Chris, welcome to Talk Python to Me. Michael, thank you so much for
02:37 having me. It's great to be here. I'm really looking forward to talking about this kind of
02:41 meta-developer topic. You know, we're both developers and course creators and things
02:46 like that, but there's a whole mental side, focus side, flow side of programming that's
02:52 honestly both important and kind of interesting, right? If you get it right, it makes a big
02:56 difference. Yeah, for sure. So looking forward to talking to you about that stuff and everything
03:01 else. But before we jump in, though, maybe tell the world who you are. Introduce yourself just a
03:07 bit. Absolutely. So, hey, Chris Ferdinandi. I'm a web developer. I have ADHD, which is a big part
03:11 of what we're talking about today. For the last decade or so, I have been focused on building
03:17 all things front end. Early in my career, I felt like I couldn't get anything done. But since then,
03:22 I've discovered a whole bunch of systems and strategies that have let me turn my ADHD from
03:28 sometimes a liability into occasionally a superpower. So I've been talking to folks
03:33 about tips and tricks for doing that. When I'm not talking about ADHD, I'm creating courses
03:37 and workshops. I publish a couple of daily newsletters, speak at events, and I work with
03:42 some really cool clients. Fantastic. And you say you're a web developer. What's your tech stack?
03:47 And we're not here specifically to talk Python, but you know. Yeah, so for me, it's actually,
03:51 it's almost exclusively front end. So HTML, CSS, JavaScript. I occasionally reluctantly dabble in
03:58 the back end, primarily PHP, because I learned web development through WordPress. Although as we were
04:03 talking about pre-show, I actually had the opportunity recently to work on a project
04:07 for NASA, of all places, which was really cool, where Python was the back end. And I was tying
04:12 into some back end APIs with some JavaScript stuff, which was really fun. Really great to
04:17 work with. Super performant. It was a real joy to work with. That's fantastic. Yeah, I recently had
04:23 kind of an experience with that, maybe a year ago, with Lauren, the guy who built our mobile apps.
04:29 That was all in Flutter. And it was like lots of back and forth. Now we got to make the API do
04:33 this. And it's just super fun to work that way. If you have good people on both ends, I guess.
04:39 Absolutely. And it was one of the things where I knew a little bit about the back end,
04:42 and the back end guy knew a little bit about the front end. So we could talk to each other,
04:46 but we were not experts at each other's thing. So it worked out really well.
04:50 That sounds familiar. So front end stuff, you got frameworks that you work with. Are you a
04:55 vue person? Are you a React person or something else?
04:58 Anti-framework feels a little strong. Earlier in my career, I was anti-framework. These days,
05:03 I am, I'd say, framework reluctant. A big part of what I advocate for folks is that on the front end,
05:10 there is a simpler, easier way to build things often that involves just using what the browser
05:14 gives you out of the box. A big part of that for me is that if you're a back end person,
05:19 while the tools you choose do matter, your front end users don't often pay as heavy a tax for those
05:25 choices. But on the front end, every... Sure. Unless it's really slow or something,
05:29 but as long as it runs fast enough, they don't care.
05:31 Exactly. But on the front end, every kilobyte that gets shipped is a kilobyte. The user has
05:36 to download, the browser has to parse, and the front end is just such an unpredictable and
05:41 unforgiving environment. Unpredictable is the word.
05:43 Right. Yeah. You really don't know what you're going to get. So I try to advocate for what I
05:49 think is maybe a little bit more simple or resilient way of building things for the browser.
05:54 And I guess a little bit of a dinosaur in that regard.
05:57 I love it. And I was just thinking, honestly, thinking about ADHD, front end stuff, I feel like generally JavaScript front end stuff makes me feel like I have ADHD
06:08 just from the... "Pay attention to this. No, now this. Stop paying attention. Now this."
06:12 Like, "Oh my gosh, I can't focus." The velocity of change, and not just change,
06:18 because it's great that new stuff's coming out. The fickleness, I think, sometimes of the people
06:23 who use the tools is really jarring, where a thing that is the right way to do something today
06:29 is considered obsolete six to 12 months from now. That can get really frustrating.
06:33 As someone with ADHD, I think it's a big part of why ignoring a lot of that stuff is so appealing
06:38 to me. Because when you focus on web standards, even though new stuff comes out, the old stuff
06:44 continues to work just fine. And you don't have to throw out a whole mountain's worth of knowledge
06:48 every 12 months. So that's been really helpful as well.
06:50 Obviously, I know the term ADHD. I know kind of what it means. I don't have a real good sense for,
06:57 in reality, what it is. Be a person with ADHD rather than just, "It's hard to focus sometimes."
07:03 Or your thoughts wander or something. Let's go with that.
07:06 Yeah, for sure.
07:06 Yeah, I'm sure that it is. So let's start there.
07:09 Yeah. So ADHD is actually a really terrible name for what it is. So ADHD stands for attention
07:14 deficit hyperactivity disorder. But people with ADHD don't actually have a deficit of attention.
07:21 I think it seemed that way in the 80s when the term was coined, because the most stereotypical
07:27 ADHD person was really hyperactive and kind of all over the place and poorly focused on things.
07:33 But it's actually an executive functioning disorder. And one of its hallmark features
07:38 is that you have trouble regulating your attention. So sometimes that means
07:42 you've got 18 things going on in your head and you can't focus on any of them.
07:46 Other times, it causes this other phenomenon called hyperfocus, which is a little bit like
07:51 if you go into the zone as a developer, except way more intense. And you can't usually control
07:58 what you're hyper focused on. So sometimes it's something really useful and awesome and what
08:03 you're supposed to be doing related. And then other times it's like, "Hey, I've got all these
08:07 important things to do, but I can't stop Googling stuff about RVs and campers because that's
08:12 currently what I'm really obsessed with and my brain won't let me think of anything else."
08:16 Yeah, yeah. It's summertime. Why not be obsessed with that, right?
08:19 There's a whole bunch of other things that can be around ADHD, a little bit like autism.
08:25 ADHD has a spectrum of symptoms. Not everyone who has it has all of them. Everybody's ADHD
08:31 experience is a little bit different, but it can include things like having more severe emotional
08:38 responses to things than someone neurotypical might. Along with that, there's this other thing
08:42 called RSD, Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria, where a perceived slight you will take much more deeply
08:50 and personally than a neurotypical person might, usually in a way that is out of scope for the
08:55 actual size of the thing that happened to you. And these are things I didn't learn about some
08:59 of this stuff until in the last few years. I knew I had ADHD since I was a kid. I was that
09:04 stereotypical really hyper kid. And I always just thought that's what it was. And then about four
09:08 or five years ago, I started hearing more about some of the newer research and discovered all
09:12 these things that I thought were just weird personal failings about me were actually ADHD
09:16 related. Interesting. Okay.
09:17 Yeah. Another one is time blindness. So ADHD folks often just literally cannot perceive time
09:23 accurately. Sometimes it feels like it's going by really fast. Sometimes it feels like it's going by
09:28 really slow. In both cases, it doesn't feel like it actually is. And I know everybody experiences
09:34 that to some degree, but for ADHD folks, it is much more often, usually all the time.
09:40 You can imagine if you work in a situation where you need to make accurate estimates on things and
09:44 accurately track your hours, that creates some unique challenges there. And then the other thing
09:49 with ADHD is you're not always hyper. So there's three subtypes, inattentive, which is exactly what
09:55 it sounds like where you have trouble regulating your focus. The other one is hyperactive. And
10:02 that's actually... So the impulsive variant is what used to be called ADD way back in the day.
10:07 Now it's just all ADHD with three different kinds of variants. And the other one is hyperactive or
10:12 impulsive, which is I think what most people stereotypically think of as ADHD. And that
10:17 doesn't often appear without also having that inattentive, "I can't regulate my attention" bit.
10:22 And so many, many people have what's called combined subtype, which you're hyper and you
10:27 have trouble regulating your focus. I'm blessed with that kind. The inattentive variant is far...
10:33 I'm rambling and I'm sorry, it's one of my superpowers. The inattentive variant is both
10:37 more common in women and far more underdiagnosed because it doesn't show up with the hyperactivity
10:44 and so it's way less obvious. And so historically, they thought ADHD was primarily like a guy thing.
10:52 And I think it's becoming a lot more obvious that many more women have it than previously
10:57 thought. They just don't usually get diagnosed because they don't often show the hyperactivity
11:02 part of it. Right. They're not running around the classroom or something along those lines.
11:07 And you're like... This also led to that whole thing in the 80s of like, "Oh, it's over diagnosed.
11:13 That's just boys being... Boy, just all the stuff around that." So anyways, that's... I don't even
11:19 want to say a nutshell because that was very long-winded, but that's the high-level overview
11:24 of what ADHD is like. Yeah, it's fun. Except when it's not. No, I'm sure. Well, it sounds like some
11:32 of those things are probably annoying when you need them to not be there, right? Like,
11:37 if times feels like it's going super slowly, but it's not. And you're now like, "Oh, this hour is
11:42 like utterly dragging on." But you can also use it for the powers of good, right? One thing I
11:46 forgot to mention, one of the root biological aspects of ADHD is that our brains don't produce
11:54 as much dopamine as they should. And so a majority of the symptoms associated with it are related to
12:00 like a dopamine shortage. So even like I recently learned that your brain's ability to perceive time
12:05 is actually related to how much dopamine you have, which I thought was like a TikTok of like you
12:09 receiving dopamine is almost like a time flow, right? And so a lot of the time flies fast when
12:15 you're having fun as an ADHD person even more intensely because that dopamine your brain
12:20 wouldn't normally be producing enough of gets ramped up when you're excited or you're enjoying
12:25 yourself. Like a desert, a dried up desert river versus when the monsoons come, it's like raging,
12:30 right? Exactly. Yeah. So there's no normal time for me. It's either moving very slowly or flying
12:36 by for better or worse. So I don't know how much personal experience you can bring to this really,
12:42 but Jazzy out there asked, "Do you think Python is a good language for devs with ADHD?" It's a
12:47 great language to get stuff done quickly. It doesn't have too many symbols or distractive
12:51 other bits to it. For sure. So I generally think Python, yes. Programming in general
12:57 is a great profession. One of the things I'm finding is that ADHD folks seem overrepresented
13:04 in development. I would agree with that. Yeah. I believe a lot of that has to do with the tight
13:11 feedback loop you get with coding where you write some code, you run it, a thing happens or it
13:15 doesn't. And you get that immediate, "It worked. It didn't," kind of feedback loop, which triggers
13:20 the dopamine thing in your head and then causes you to really start digging into it. To answer
13:25 Jazz's specific question though, even though I teach front-end stuff over at GoMakeThings.com,
13:31 I have so many front-end students who are like, "I wanted to learn back-end language." And I went
13:36 with Python because it's really, really clear and there's a lot of, "This is the correct way to do
13:41 things," whereas JavaScript, anything you want to do, there's at least three different ways you
13:45 could do it and none of them are inherently better than the other. And there's four frameworks that
13:49 came out this week to help you do it. Yeah. So I probably, I don't have enough
13:54 Python experience to accurately say, "Yes, that's the right one." But I think programming in general
14:00 is a profession or hobby, if you just want to do it for fun, that plays well to the ADHD mind.
14:07 It can trigger that time is flying by really fast because I'm, if not enjoying it, at least very
14:13 engaged in the activity. And it can make what would feel like work for a normal person, feel
14:17 like a really enjoyable, fun thing that you can't get enough of. There are downsides to that too.
14:22 Like you could go through like an eight-hour, like just coding bender and find that you haven't
14:27 eaten, used the bathroom, gotten up to stretch in any way taking care of yourself because your body
14:32 just didn't let you know. Yeah. Well, I've had those experiences as well. And I don't know if
14:37 there's some aspect of ADHD or if it's just, I just got really focused, but I've certainly
14:43 gotten up and I'm, "Why is it dark? How is it dark? Gosh, I am hungry. I'm going to have to
14:48 deal with some of this stuff." Yeah. The thing, so that hyper-focus for ADHD folks, I heard,
14:54 I had an old coworker who used to refer to that as weaponized ADHD. So if you can get yourself into
15:00 that state often, you can be like way more productive than your peers. The problem is you
15:07 can't always like force yourself into hyper-focus. There's no like, "Oh, I just flipped the switch
15:11 and I'm there." Right? So you will have periods of intense productivity. And then you might have
15:15 some periods where you're less productive than both your average and the average of your coworkers.
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16:53 uncomfortable conversations where it's like, "Hey, you did really great last quarter and
16:57 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, they're more susceptible to maybe the
17:06 fluctuations of those two things from a sort of flow state to like, "I'm not feeling it, but I
17:10 got it. I got a job. It's time to just grind it until I feel it again." Do you feel like those
17:15 fluctuations are wider? Like you're less productive when you feel it less and you're maybe even more
17:20 productive when you're in the game? The other piece of this that's really tough is so where
17:25 a neurotypical person might be like, "Man, I'm not feeling it today, but I'm not gonna keep working
17:31 here if I don't do the thing." Right? Yeah. ADHD person will go into like this almost like freeze
17:37 state. Yeah. Okay. And I think that's actually the official psychology term for it. But you can stare
17:42 at your screen for eight hours, not get up and you won't type a line of code. You'll just be like
17:47 trying to... Just the inertia of getting started is really, really tough. It's like writer's block,
17:52 but... It is. Yeah. That's literally... It's like writer's block, except your brain just will not
17:56 will your body to do what it needs to do. Yeah. And so one of the things... So over at
18:01 ADHDforthewin.com, I've been writing a lot about my ADHD experience and some tips and
18:09 recommendations on how to get around a lot of this stuff. And one of the things that I and a lot of
18:14 other folks have found is that traditional productivity advice just does not work for
18:18 most folks with ADHD. So if you're a proponent of getting things done or some of those other
18:26 systems, a lot of times what they'll tell you is start with your biggest task and get that done
18:31 first. That way it's out of the way. Big tasks trigger massive overwhelm in the ADHD brain if
18:37 you're not already like, "I cannot wait to chew this task up and spit it out because I'm so
18:41 excited about it." Right? And sometimes even then. So one of the things that I wrote about recently
18:46 was that I actually think folks should start with their smallest task first, because the most
18:50 important thing is getting moving. You're almost like this big rock and you've got a lot of
18:54 inertia. And right now that inertia is telling you, "Stay right where you are." Once you get
18:58 rolling, sometimes you can move yourself into the state where you become difficult to stop.
19:03 So the most important thing is just start doing something that moves you in the direction of work.
19:08 So maybe go for the small things, right? Because they're easy wins. You get that dopamine,
19:12 like prime the pump sort of.
19:14 Exactly. So for me, a lot of times I start my morning off by writing my daily tech article,
19:20 because they're really short. It's one of those things where it's like a habit for me now.
19:24 And it gets me, I'm at a desk, I'm typing, and I've produced a thing and I shipped it.
19:29 And now I can get on with the rest of my day and I'm in work mode. And if I have a day where I
19:34 have a meeting in the morning and I don't get to do that, it will derail me for literally hours.
19:40 That actually happened to me this morning. Actually, I had a client meeting and it was
19:44 the first thing in the morning. It was a really great meeting. It was super productive, but I
19:47 didn't ship anything. And so then when the meeting ended, I was really underproductive for about two
19:53 hours. I just kind of stuck, not able to get going again.
19:57 Interesting.
19:58 Interesting and annoying. Also very, very, very annoying.
20:01 It is super annoying. However, knowing, at least awareness of that is pretty interesting.
20:06 So this is, I guess, a nice segue here, Michael, is that one of the big things that I advocate for,
20:13 while I admit that ADHD has a lot of challenges, like the one I just described, I'm also someone
20:17 who is ADHD positive. I don't think it's like this thing I have to deal with. I guess in a
20:22 manner of speaking it is, but it's not like, "Oh, this has ruined my life."
20:25 And so a big part of what, "Here's why I can't do anything with the rest of my life."
20:29 A big part of what I advocate for is working with your ADHD instead of against it. So I know
20:34 that that is a thing that happens. If I feel that I'm in one of those moods where I just can't get
20:39 moving, no amount of staring at the screen is going to change that. What is going to change
20:44 that is doing a handful of other things that usually involve not using my brain at all.
20:49 There are a whole bunch of activities that will produce dopamine in your brain,
20:53 and that usually helps. So drinking coffee or soda or something with caffeine in it.
20:58 The core mechanism by which most ADHD medicines work is by either making your brain make more
21:04 dopamine or stopping your brain from absorbing the stuff it does make so that more of it floats
21:09 around. Exercise, literally just getting exposure to sun. So I, now that I am old,
21:15 I've started gardening, which gets me like two for one. So I'll go outside,
21:18 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.
21:26 And then I come in and I will get like eight hours worth of work done in about three or four hours,
21:32 because I'm now I'm ready. That's awesome.
21:34 It's really like a big, a big part of the ADHD experience is learning to listen to your body
21:39 and just step away. Like staring at a screen is not going to help you.
21:43 Not that you're weak for stepping away. It's not, your persistence is not necessarily going
21:47 to help you if you can't sort of reach, reset a little bit. I think that's, that's true for a lot
21:52 of people. For me, I don't know if it's the same thing. Probably going to say that a lot this
21:57 episode. But for me, one of the things that I've tried to embrace that sounds familiar is inspiration.
22:04 I find that if I'm really psyched to work on something, or I'm just like,
22:07 I really don't want to do this, but I got to get it done. There's like a 5x difference in
22:11 productivity for me. And so if, if I, it's like, I'm an adult, I should be able just to pay
22:17 attention. And it's like, there's a, it's a right thing. No, no, it's ridiculously out of whack.
22:22 And so I can find if, if I can just, okay, now is not the time for that. This afternoon might be the
22:27 time for that. What else can I do? Maybe, you know, maybe I'll go for a ride in my motorcycle
22:31 for an hour in the mountains and get some sun and come back sort of reset, or just, just grind on
22:36 email or, or stop grinding email, whatever it is, like just change that up and try to sense the
22:42 inspiration or the lack thereof in my brain for some something, and then try to ride that wave
22:47 when I see it coming, you know, one of the things that you touched on a couple of times brought up,
22:50 Hey, I do that too. So the thing with ADHD is I could describe a whole range of symptoms and most
22:57 people will be like, Oh, that happens to me sometimes. And it does because most ADHD symptoms
23:02 are things that everybody experiences sometimes. And so kind of the, the difference between I have
23:08 ADHD and don't have ADHD or what would lead you to have a doctor be like, yes, you have it.
23:13 It's usually a, like a measurement of like how often and how many of these things you experience
23:19 on the regular. When you get diagnosed, there's a whole set of questions you have to answer.
23:23 And the doctor adds up a bunch of numbers. And if you hit a high enough number, they're like,
23:27 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
23:36 or whatever? Like almost everyone's going to have a day where they, yup, today is hopeless,
23:40 crashed the car, did this and whatever. But that doesn't mean you're necessarily have depression.
23:44 Right. And like, for sure. And so the questions will be like, you know, how often do you have
23:48 trouble? I'm just making this up. How often do you have trouble paying attention to something
23:53 if you're not interested in it? Right. And it's like occasionally, always, you know, like, and so
23:57 you'll have a bunch of those questions that are basically rewordings of questions you already
24:02 answered to account for like bias in yourself. And then you get a number, like each column has a
24:07 number of the doctor adds it up. And if you hit the minimum number, you've got ADHD. Basically.
24:14 Yeah. Got it. There are self-assessments that you can do too, by the way, if anybody's listening.
24:18 Yeah. I wonder if I have ADHD. A psychiatrist who diagnoses you will be able to prescribe
24:22 you medication if that's something you're interested in. But if you just think you
24:26 might have it as a first step, if you head over to ADHD for the wind.com/talk python,
24:31 I have a bunch of resources and one of them is, oh, how do I know if I have ADHD? I got a link
24:36 to that self-assessment there. So you can kind of dig in and find that. Yeah. You put together
24:41 some proper, well that way, you know, just a proper stuff for the show that we're going to
24:45 talk about a bunch of stuff. If I missed anything that we talk about, I'm going to go back and
24:48 update this later. I just want to make sure folks have what they need. Yeah. That's awesome. I'll
24:51 definitely put that in the show notes for folks and people will sign up for your newsletter.
24:55 There's a lot of daily tips and we can maybe riff on those a little bit before we get to that
24:59 though. You talked about meetings and I think meetings, I just saw where, gosh, I can't remember
25:04 where it was. I think it was the Atlantic.com Atlantic, the publication. And it said something
25:08 to the effect of like white collar work is just meetings now. I don't think that's 100% true with
25:15 development, but you know, it's a lot. And I think it's, it can be a challenge and I think it can be
25:20 especially a challenge for people with ADHD. One thing that I read that connected pretty well with
25:25 me is Paul Graham's maker schedule, manager schedule. I don't know if people have read this
25:29 before, it's from 2009, but I think it's still, it's probably more relevant than ever. So email
25:34 me that Paul Graham is great or terrible. I'm not trying to promote the guy or nothing. Just I know
25:39 VCs always get a lot of reactions, but this is pretty interesting saying that like, look, there
25:43 are people whose job it is to have meetings and to them, they see blocks on the calendar as, well,
25:49 here's another part of my job that I can do. And for the rest of us who are trying to write code
25:53 and focus, this is a disruption. And you talked about how it can really derail like half a day for
25:58 you. So first of all, how's this, are you familiar with this and how's this idea sit with you?
26:02 If I weren't on your show, I'd probably be one of those folks emailing you about Paul. So I'm
26:06 going to, I'm going to not comment on the article specifically, but what I do want to talk about,
26:09 let's put it away. Yeah. But what I do related to that, I don't know that I have strong feelings on
26:14 like makers versus managers and whatnot, but what I do, what I do know is that task shifting is
26:22 particularly difficult for ADHD folks, largely because it's so difficult to get into that focus
26:29 period. Like you think about a neurotypical developer gets interrupted from focus and it
26:34 takes them a little bit to get back into it. It is way more intense for the average person with
26:40 ADHD. So they create this effect that I've heard described as like a temporal dead zone, where if
26:46 I finish a task and I have a meeting 30 to 60 minutes from when I finished that task, I will
26:52 not start another task. Because if I do, I know that by the time I actually get up enough, like
26:57 momentum that I'm doing the task, I'm going to get interrupted. And that's either going to, I'm
27:03 going to miss the meeting, which used to happen to me constantly, or I'm going to get annoyed that
27:07 I have to stop. And the whole time I'm in the meeting, my brain will be fixated on the other
27:12 thing and not the meeting. I won't start a new task. So I've got this whole block of time that
27:16 gets eaten. And then when the meeting ends, now I've got this long on-ramp to get shifted back
27:23 into my next task after the meeting. So meetings are bad for developers in general. They're
27:30 extraordinarily bad for folks with ADHD. And one of the things I talk about is some strategies you
27:35 can use to try to, you can't always make it work, but I used to employ a ton of strategies when I
27:40 had like a day job to prevent myself from getting booked in midday meetings. I don't mind them at
27:46 the beginning of the day. I prefer them more in the afternoon when I run out of like developer
27:50 steam, but a meeting at like 11 or two in the afternoon just destroys my day. I hear you. Yeah.
27:57 Where I was going with that article is what I've ended up doing is I have just certain days blocked
28:02 off where those are no meeting days. And that's because I have the flexibility for it. And you
28:07 know, you're doing this stuff independently now, not at nine to five. Is that right?
28:11 Yes. But even when I was at a nine to five, I used to do stuff like that because you just,
28:15 you got to. Depending on the culture you're in, like some places are just full of excess meetings
28:20 and it becomes very necessary. Your job is to go to the meetings. I mean,
28:23 there's the whole joke, right? About like this meeting could have been an email.
28:28 I have found that some companies are worse at that than others. Some environments I've been in,
28:32 they're really cool about async communication. Other places like the de facto is just block
28:37 time on people's calendar. And that is awful. I don't know where this social expectation that
28:43 you could just block time on someone's calendar at any point for any reason came from, but it's
28:48 awful. Exactly. I'm going to reach out. I'm going to grab some time with you. It's like, hold on.
28:51 That's just open-ended. Yeah. I found that article. I'll link it. A white collar work is
28:55 just meetings now. It's interesting. Yeah. So good blocking time, I think is a great strategy.
29:01 I guess one tangential thing here, because it's not just meetings, right? It's if you're in office
29:07 and you're in an open office environment, the pop-in is an absolute nightmare if you have ADHD.
29:13 I'm sure you've seen before, Michael, articles about how open office environments are bad for
29:18 productivity just generally. Again, it's one of those things worse if you have ADHD.
29:22 If you're on a remote team, sometimes there's a culture on Slack or Discord that replicates that
29:29 open office environment pop-in where you're expected to just always respond quickly on those
29:34 tools. So there are two paths you can take. If you have ADHD and this stuff is messing with your day,
29:39 you can either ask for forgiveness instead of permission and just take what you want.
29:44 For a long while, I had this thing where I would just turn off Slack and I would check it like
29:50 two, maybe three times a day. And if someone really, really needed me, my manager had my
29:54 cell phone and he could call me if it was super, super important. Same thing with email,
29:59 that kind of thing. So that's one path. The other path is you can have a conversation with your
30:05 manager. The laws around this vary from country to country. But in America specifically, where I live,
30:10 the Americans with Disabilities Act requires companies to provide reasonable accommodations
30:15 for disabilities. And ADHD actually qualifies as one. So you can say things like, "I need to be
30:21 able to work from home," or, "You need to give me a private office where the team lead who keeps
30:26 shooting Nerf darts at my head can't do that anymore." Or, "That's a real story that used to
30:30 happen to me in a previous employer." My gosh. Or, "I need to have days where I don't have meetings."
30:36 Or, "It would be really great for me if more of our communication happened asynchronously." Or,
30:41 "If you ask me to do things, I need someone to follow up in writing with that or I'm going to
30:45 forget." There's a whole series of things you could ask for. I have a list of accommodations
30:50 over at my site as well that I'll make sure ends up in the cheat sheet I put together for this
30:54 episode. But yeah, asking your employer if you feel comfortable can be a great thing to do.
31:00 I am at a point in my career where I feel very comfortable having those conversations. And I
31:04 bring it up with clients. For the last four or five years of my working career, I brought it up
31:09 with my employers, any of my managers. I would bring it up in job interviews. But I am a cisgendered,
31:16 heterosexual, white dude with a whole lot of professional experience. And I have talked to
31:21 more junior developers, people who are LGBTQ, people who are minorities. And they have all
31:26 told me some version of, "I already feel like I'm under more scrutiny because of my gender,
31:32 my skin color, my identity. And I don't want to give my employer another reason to look at my
31:38 work more closely." I'm realizing as I'm saying this, I fully acknowledge that I'm in a privileged
31:43 position to be able to do that. But if you feel comfortable, it can, in the right culture,
31:48 make your life at work a lot better and a lot easier.
31:51 I totally agree. Do you feel like the work from home stuff been a boon?
31:55 It has for me. I have also talked to some ADHD folks who they feel like it doesn't have enough...
32:03 Structure isn't the right word. There's a bit of an accountability that can happen when you're in
32:07 the office where just seeing other people doing work means that if you are sitting at your desk
32:12 and you look like you're not doing work, that's bad. So it gives them at least a bit of a push
32:18 to start moving. And there is a technique called body doubling where you literally just sit on a
32:23 live cam with someone else and co-work in silence together that is supposed to address this.
32:28 I find it deeply uncomfortable. I actually prefer to not do that, but I do know some ADHD folks find
32:34 it helpful. But for me, I went remote pre-pandemic. I had been remote for a while and it has been the
32:40 single best thing for my productivity that I've ever done. Even before 2020, it was a non-starter
32:47 for me for any job I applied for after I had gone remote that I would never go into an office again.
32:51 I've done that since 2006. And so it's just like, that's how work is for me.
32:58 Absolutely. I think it was 2009-ish for me. I was hybrid and then I went full and it was just
33:04 not without its own challenges, right? Because if there are days where you're not into it,
33:08 it's really easy for me to then not do anything. And that's fine every now and then. But if it
33:14 happens too much, you can find yourself in a situation where you've got a big backlog of work
33:18 that just didn't get done and that's bad. But yeah, on the whole, I would say it's been a huge
33:22 blessing. It's not a problem to focus. It's not a problem. There's too many distractions. Over
33:28 there is my sim racing machine. If I'm feeling like I can't, I just get up and go do that instead.
33:32 And then eventually I do that half the day. If that were how work from home worked for me, I could
33:37 see that's bad, not a boon. And so what do you, there's a negative side to work from home as well,
33:42 and trying to stay focused and not do the dishes and whatever.
33:45 Doing dishes, being pulled to do the dishes is usually not a problem for ADHD folks. We usually
33:51 have the other problem, which is, "Oh God, I haven't done the dishes in days."
33:54 Why does the kitchen look like that? How'd that happen?
33:56 Right? No, I know why. I just, I feel a deep shame about it and won't address it. But
34:01 the bigger challenge with work from home is if you don't have a dedicated space to do work,
34:08 you can run into some of what you just described. You can also run into a situation where there's
34:12 just a lot of other stuff around you. If there's other people at home, you have a partner who also
34:16 works from home, or you have kids and it's like summertime and they're home. It can be loud. It
34:22 can be noisy. It can be distracting. I don't find the pull of other stuff in my house that bad
34:28 because I am coding on what is effectively a very expensive gaming and video streaming machine.
34:36 And it has enough distractions just on the thing I have to do work on already.
34:40 So there's really not much else. Yeah. There's really not much else in my house that's
34:43 more appealing than the thing I'm sitting in front of to do work on.
34:47 That's true. Nothing is as distracting as my phone or my computer already. So I'll just go with that.
34:53 They're right here with me all the time.
34:54 Yes. All the time.
34:55 Yeah. So that part less so. It's more the noise. If you don't have a quiet place to work,
35:00 that can be challenging. But I don't think any necessarily any more so than the office.
35:04 It's just you're in basically the same position.
35:06 You're in your own open office sort of deal.
35:08 Yeah.
35:09 You put together a couple of tools that maybe we could talk a bit about. Building a second brain.
35:14 This comes from the book by Tiago Forte, I believe, which I read not too long ago. Pretty
35:18 interesting book. There's lots of software to accomplish this. I love Notion and actually
35:23 Anytype is what I've moved away from Notion towards it, which is like similar, which is
35:27 super fun. Open source Notion basically. Yeah.
35:30 So I've been using Obsidian.
35:31 Anytype.io.
35:32 Yeah. I've heard that there's a lot of similarities of those.
35:35 One thing we didn't talk about when we talked about like symptoms of ADHD. We have, ADHD folks
35:42 usually have a very large hard drive and a very small amount of RAM. So we can only keep one or
35:47 two things in our working memory at any particular point. And second brains are great for everyone,
35:53 but if you tell me three things, there's a good chance I will have forgotten the first two
35:58 by the time I get back to my desk. And so the idea of a second brain specifically for folks with ADHD
36:07 is that it becomes the RAM that your brain doesn't have. So any idea that pops into your head,
36:13 any task you've been given, any thought, anything that you don't want to forget 30 seconds from now
36:19 needs to get written down somewhere. It can be paper. It can be digital. Both have their pros
36:24 and cons. I'm biased towards digital for being able to search, but writing things down seems to
36:29 make stuff stick a little bit better in a lot of folks' heads. Are you trying to memorize it or
36:32 you're trying to store it, put it on digitalized? So I think a quick definition for folks, I mean,
36:38 they can imagine what a second brain is, but give people a definition of what this means.
36:42 A second brain, and I'm not going to, I'm probably not going to do justice to
36:46 like the official definition here, but the idea of a second brain is that it's literally just a
36:53 place for you to write down or capture all the things. It's funny, I've read so many different
36:59 descriptions of it. And in my head, it always just brings me back to the ubiquitous capture device or
37:05 UCD from getting things done, parlance. I think it's just like a, in my opinion, it's just a,
37:10 like a rebranding of that thing. But the idea is you just, you want a place to capture and write
37:16 down all the things you don't want to forget later. It sounds good to me. I, as a description,
37:20 I think what I got from reading the book, there's a process for capturing the stuff and filtering it
37:25 and putting it. I don't know if I need any of that. What I need is it's in my mind and it needs
37:29 to get written down in basically a place I could get back to it if I, if I want to, or even put a
37:35 reminder around it. Just, just put it, like you said, just get it out of RAM, swap it to disk for
37:40 a while, conceptually, and you can get back to it if you need. Right. The thing with, cause I know
37:45 you mentioned Notion. I like Obsidian. There's a lot of different tools out there. One of the
37:50 problems for ADHD folks with most digital tools is most of the tools available today do a lot.
37:58 And that is kind of the problem. So I'm going to use Obsidian cause I know it well, but Notion,
38:05 having played with it before, is very similar in like capability and what it can do. So I'd look
38:11 at a tool like Obsidian, which is markdown notes that you can kind of access and edit through a
38:17 GUI and organize into folders and things like that. And it has a plugin ecosystem. And you will
38:24 see similar with like with a tool like Notion, like there are consultants who specialize in
38:28 teaching you how to get the most out of Notion. And you can build these really complicated
38:32 workflows where you can tie things from a page into another page and then things show up
38:37 automatically in these different views and you get these graphs. That all sounds really fun.
38:41 It's amazing. I close this thing in my Kanban board on GitHub, which triggers a thing,
38:46 which will move this into this page. And then Sarah gets a notification. Like, oh my goodness.
38:50 That sounds fun. And that sounds like an interesting challenge. And it sounds almost
38:55 like a game. And if I have a brain that craves dopamine and enjoys kind of gamified experiences,
39:01 I'm going to spend hours, days, weeks perfecting my to do system to the expense of doing the actual
39:08 things I need to do. And then down the road, I'm going to be like, oh, this is so complicated and
39:13 difficult to manage. This isn't working for me anymore. And I'm going to throw it away.
39:16 I'm going to go repeat this process again with something new. I talked to a lot of ADHD folks
39:21 who feel like productivity systems just don't stick. And a big part of that is because they're
39:25 they're overcomplicated. I think the thing I found that works best for a lot of for me,
39:29 and I've talked to a lot of folks who have had similar experiences, is simple to do lists.
39:33 Like everything is a bulleted list. Even if it's like an idea you want to remember later,
39:36 it's a bulleted list. It might not be a to do that you have to check off, but it's a bullet.
39:40 And when I use tools like Notion or Obsidian or even a paper notebook, excuse me, everything is
39:47 bullets. I install almost no plugins, no add-ons. The only thing I have is a my day view, where when
39:54 I tag things with a unicorn emoji, they show up on my day. That way I can just flag the thing.
39:59 And I like unicorns because they're fun, but it's just it's the place where these are the
40:03 things I need to do today. I can see them all on one page and that's it. I think one of the tools
40:08 I've found that used to work still works really well for me, but it's occasionally a little bit
40:12 buggy now. Microsoft To Do, which is their free to do app. I like it because it does less than
40:17 tools like Todoist, which does a lot. It's basically just bulleted lists with sub lists
40:23 under them and you can flag stuff in this special I'm going to do it today page. And it doesn't have
40:28 any of the other stuff, which makes it way less distracting. Sure. I'm a fan of Todoist. Oh yeah.
40:34 The only reason I moved away from it is I really like authoring and markdown and I wanted something
40:38 that let me do that. Yeah. That's why I like Notion. You just write markdown and it just
40:42 becomes magic. Where do you forward slash it? I'm a fan of Todoist, but I try to just not
40:48 overcomplicate it. Just kind of have a flow. Yeah. I mean, it's funny I say, I say like,
40:53 Oh, do you use Obsidian or Notion? Just don't make it too complicated, but you could do that
40:56 in Todoist too. Sure. They're all it's that's the, whatever tool you choose, just resist the urge to
41:01 over-engineer it. I know it's tough, but like you'll be much happier in the long run. Just put
41:05 the extensions down. Yeah. Another thing you gave a shout out to is the Apple watch, which I love
41:10 my Apple watch. It is increasingly, it is a second brain for me in weird ways. Like for example,
41:17 an hour and a half ago, I was recording a course and I put everything on do not disturb. I'm like,
41:22 don't forget to come to the podcast with Chris in an hour and a half. So I just, Hey, set a reminder
41:27 for an hour and 20 minutes. And then I just, I didn't stress it. Like just took the weight off
41:31 my brain. I could focus back on the course and then, Oh, it's time to go. Like, all right.
41:36 My wife is the reason I have an Apple watch. I was very resistant because in my mind, I'm like,
41:41 I don't need, I'm already like too distractible. I don't need an other thing chirping at me. That
41:45 sounds like you literally are putting distractions on my arm. I can't get it off. What are you
41:49 thinking here? She was like, please just try it. I think it's going to be really helpful for you.
41:53 And I did. And she was right. Because before I got the Apple watch, I used to miss meetings
41:58 constantly. They would go off on my phone. I would snooze them. And then, or I'd more likely,
42:04 I just dismissed them by accident. And then five minutes later, the meeting would start and I
42:08 wouldn't be there. Cause I got sucked back into something else. So having that like right on your
42:13 wrist for some reason is a real game changer for me. I set timers for literally everything, laundry,
42:19 food that I put in the oven, anything that needs to get done gets a timer. And then the one thing
42:24 that I haven't written about yet, but that has really helped is the one place where you don't
42:29 usually have your second brain is in the shower. And I do a lot of thinking in the shower and I
42:33 have some of my best ideas and I'll be damned if from the time I have the idea to the five minutes
42:38 later, when I get out and drying myself off, I have already forgotten it happens all the time.
42:42 But if you have the watch, you can just dictate a note to yourself or text yourself or do something.
42:47 And then you have it and you can like do stuff with it later. I used to have an old manager
42:52 who literally had one of those like scuba diving chalkboards with the, like the grease pen in his
42:58 shower. So he can write down ideas. This feels like the digital version of that to me, where
43:05 you just, you know, like, Hey Siri, send a, you know, write a note that says, and then you're
43:09 off to the races. And for all the failings of Siri, that, that actually works pretty well.
43:15 Like the few things like set a timer, set a reminder, like they actually work quite well.
43:19 You just hold the crown. And I honestly, the, now that I'm talking about these two things in
43:23 parallel with you, I feel like it is sort of my second brain of like reminders and attention in
43:28 a sense. One of two things would always happen to me. I would either over fixate on the thing
43:32 so that I don't miss it, or I would completely ignore the thing and miss it. And the Apple
43:37 watch lets me do the latter without missing the thing. So I can free my brain to do other stuff.
43:43 And I know I'm not going to miss my events, my important stuff.
43:46 And people out there who are like, I'm not an Apple person. Why are they like,
43:50 you couldn't get a Google wear Android wear and do basically the same thing. I imagine.
43:54 I don't have a lot of experience with those, unfortunately, because I am very big into the
43:58 Apple ecosystem, but I need to stop saying Apple watch and start talking about smart watches more
44:02 generally, because you're right. My biggest disappointment with the Apple watch is that
44:05 it requires an iPhone to work. I think that's dumb and annoying. It's completely dumb.
44:11 But if that's you, if you don't have an iPhone and the Apple ecosystem, I would look at some of the Android options because I think just like a smartwatch in
44:19 general has been a really amazing tool for me. Probably one of the most important in my toolkit.
44:23 It's so frustrating. I don't want to go down this road much, but I was looking at the nothing,
44:27 you know, the nothing phones, nothing. They're super interesting. They're really quite different.
44:32 I seem to recall this from a few years ago. Let's say they've got some interesting
44:37 different ways about like, they've got stuff on the back that will like flash and like communicate
44:43 things and swap your own. Or am I thinking of something else? No, that's a, that's framework.
44:47 So they've got like these, it's like hero graphics on the back that mean different things. If they
44:52 like light up and like, this is cool. I kind of want to play with this stuff, but that my Apple
44:56 watch would basically be dead. Like you can't, I'm like, well, I'm not, I'm going nowhere. I can't
45:00 imagine why Apple would do that. It's really strange. I can't. It's so it's so it makes no
45:04 sense. It must be an oversight. Right? Clearly. We've got a little bit of time left, maybe 10
45:10 minutes. So what do you think about maybe going through some of those daily tips or something like
45:14 the idea of them and maybe just pick a couple that you want to just give a shout out to. How's that
45:18 sound? One of the things I'm, I'm in the middle, or I said the beginning of a series on how to get
45:23 stuff done when you have ADHD and I'm breaking it into two parts. One of them is like, I'm calling
45:29 it productivity.app, which is my, like my approach to getting stuff done. And then the other one is
45:34 hacking your brain's operating system. And the hacking your brain's operating system feels like
45:42 there's potentially some interesting nuggets in there. I'm looking through the list though. And
45:47 I actually think we've talked about most of them. Yeah. That's where just organically they have all
45:53 cause you brought up the Apple watch and that would have been the one that doesn't always get
45:56 brought up, but you brought it up. One other thing though, I will say this happened the other day I
46:01 wrote about, but I think one of the things I've, I've come to realize is there are certain types
46:05 of work that lend within the development space, which lend themselves better to the ADHD brain
46:12 than others. And so I look at something like agency work, agency work can be like a blessing
46:19 or a curse depending on the agency. And I know that's again, generally true, but quick definition
46:24 for people who are new to programming or outside of the consulting world agency work. What is that?
46:29 This would be like a development agency that builds some sort of thing. Could be a mobile
46:35 app, could be a website, whatever it happens to be for a variety of different clients. So they
46:40 have a range of clients they work with and they get contracted and you are a developer on that
46:44 team. And I contrast that against being an in-house developer where you're like, I work at
46:48 IBM and I manage all of the web properties for IBM, or I build this app for IBM, whatever it
46:55 happens to be. I build the authentication integration between all our internal apps
46:58 and keep them running or whatever. Exactly. So this is more like, you're like a bee floating
47:03 from client to client. That can be awesome. If you're the right kind of agency, that means you're
47:09 constantly getting variety in clients and work. So you've got novelty and you can just absolutely
47:16 crush it with that kind of work. However, sometimes you have agencies that are like,
47:20 we build WordPress sites for ice cream shops. That's all we do. We know it. And you get to a
47:25 point where it's cookie cutter. And that is just mind-numbingly boring. It can be easy work. It can
47:33 be work that you do very effectively, that you can apply unique aspects of that to each of your
47:39 different clients in different ways. But it can also run the danger of triggering the whole,
47:45 "Oh, this is really boring. I can't get anything done" reflex. Agencies often, to 90% of the time,
47:51 are really focused on billable hours. So a lot of what you're doing is saying, "I think it's going
47:55 to take me X amount of hours to do," then tracking how many hours it took you to do and billing those
47:59 hours. And those two things are absolute nightmares for the ADHD brain. So if you find an
48:04 agency that does like flat billing, where they're like, "We charge X to build you Y," awesome. Or
48:09 they do a variety of different work, can be really awesome. But often that's not the case.
48:14 So where I find that a lot of folks with ADHD really do their best work is when they are not
48:20 time-constrained and the nature of the role is more, "We've got this big, hairy challenge,
48:25 and we're not really sure how to figure it out. We need someone who's really into problem solving to
48:29 go research it and tackle it. And you happen to find the problem interesting." Because if it's
48:34 just one of those things, you're in trouble. But if it's a big, hairy problem and you find
48:39 it interesting, and they're not like, "You have 12 hours to figure this out," that can work really,
48:44 really well for you. Some of the best roles that I've had. You're riding the wave of the deep,
48:49 the deep, the super focus, the hyper focus, and just like killing it. Yeah.
48:53 It hits multiple things at once. The challenge triggers the dopamine thing. It allows you to
48:58 dig into that hyper focus really, really deep and crush a whole bunch of work and look like an
49:03 absolute rock star. It's one of those things too, where once you get fixated on a thing,
49:08 it's all you'll think about. And so you'll just keep pulling at that thread until you've got it
49:13 figured out. Yeah. So that can work. That can work really, really well. I don't know where I was
49:17 going with this. Oh yeah. We talked, it was a thing I wrote about the other day. That's why
49:20 we were talking about daily tips. Yeah. Yeah. The daily tips look pretty interesting.
49:24 People would say, "Is that free to sign up for?" Yeah. It's just every morning you get
49:27 just a little something in your inbox. I try to keep them short because again, ADHD audience,
49:31 right? But- These are your people.
49:34 These are my people. Absolutely. Got it.
49:36 Yeah. One of the other things that comes up a lot too is when you should disclose
49:40 ADHD to it. If you think you're going to do that, when in the process should you disclose it?
49:45 So do you do it during the interview? Do you-
49:47 Right. Is it your employers? Is it their business to even know?
49:50 Yeah. So that's what really important. I had someone ask, "Do I feel like it's unethical
49:55 to have a neurological condition that could impact your ability to do the work and not tell them?"
50:00 And I feel very strongly that it is not in any way a problem to do that because it's
50:06 none of their damn business. If you legitimately think you're not going to be able to do the work,
50:11 that's a bigger conversation. But if it means that sometimes you're over productive and sometimes
50:15 you're a little underproductive, it's kind of a wash. I don't have an issue with that.
50:19 Just the same way that I think someone not disclosing that they're pregnant during an
50:22 interview process or they have cancer during an interview process or any other sort of medical
50:28 condition that is none of your employer's business is totally fine not to disclose.
50:32 But so for me, my recommendation is that you either disclose once you've started the job
50:41 and you have identified the areas where the current working environment creates challenges for you
50:45 and you need accommodations. Or I will sometimes disclose during an interview process if I'm really
50:51 digging the people I'm interviewing with and I feel like we're all vibing. So I was once on
50:57 an interview where I was asked whether my preference is to have regular check-ins with
51:02 my team on works in progress or to go off and build for a few days and then reconnect after
51:07 a few days. Based on everything we've talked about, Michael, I'm sure you're not surprised
51:10 to hear my preference is to ignore everybody for a couple of days and then chat. But I didn't want
51:15 to seem like a jerk who doesn't like my coworkers for saying that. So I was like, "Oh, I have ADHD,
51:21 so blah, blah, blah." And then I found out the interviewer had ADHD, the other dude on the team
51:25 we were going to be working with had ADHD, the manager had ADHD, and they were all the same way.
51:30 Right. Awesome. We all agree on this.
51:31 Right? I got a job offer three days later. It was amazing. So I get best case scenario. You
51:36 could find that works against you. But yeah, a lot of it is just a gut vibe thing. There's no
51:42 right answer here. You can disclose early, you can disclose late, you can disclose not at all.
51:46 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.
51:52 Scrum, Agile, paired programming. None of these things sound appealing to me.
51:58 And when Agile first came out, I thought, "Oh, that's really interesting." I find that in
52:02 practice, maybe in principle, it sounds cool. In practice, for me, it's all distracting. It's all
52:07 friction and stuff. What are your thoughts? I don't want to put words in your mouth. I'm
52:11 talking about myself. So how do you feel about these things?
52:13 Yes, I agree. I talked recently or I wrote recently about how stand-ups are just productivity
52:20 killers for me, depending on when they happen and how they work. So my productivity is variable.
52:25 I have days where I will do eight hours worth of work in four hours, and I'll do that twice.
52:30 So I'll get two or three days worth of work done in a day. I'll have days where I get nothing done.
52:35 Something like a daily stand-up really plays into this idea that you are
52:38 consistently productive every day. And if I have two or three days where I have to at stand-up say,
52:44 "Yeah, I'm still working on that thing that probably should have only taken an hour,
52:46 but I can't make myself do it. I look like a jerk. I look like a bad employee."
52:50 Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
52:52 It's setting you up to show how you failed that.
52:55 Yeah. And then that can create this self-esteem spiral of like, "Oh, I'm really bad at this.
53:00 Everybody else is getting all this stuff done. Maybe I don't belong here. Impostor syndrome,
53:03 blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." Similarly, things like two-week sprints and a lot of those rigid
53:12 processes, I get why they exist. I understand that they can work well in certain spaces. I think it's
53:17 good to have deadlines on when things are going to show some meaningful progress. But for the way
53:23 that I work, I find that having those rigid fixed deadlines creates bad stress for me and doesn't
53:30 always align with when my brain is like, "Yes, we're going to crank out a ton of work." I personally
53:35 need a little bit more flexibility than those types of systems allow. So it's one of those,
53:40 maybe good for other people, not good for me kind of things.
53:43 Yeah. I don't know. And paired programming, how does that fit with people with ADHD?
53:48 Depends. If I am having a problem with code and I am just absolutely stuck,
53:54 pair programming my way through it can be invaluable. Pair programming just for the
53:58 sake of pair programming is a nightmare for me because it makes me feel really
54:02 self-conscious about what I'm doing and how quickly my brain processes information and my process.
54:08 I like pair programming with other people who need help as well, like in a mentoring capacity,
54:12 if they're trying to work through something and they just need someone to guide them,
54:16 happy to do that.
54:16 Sure. That's a little more like mentoring.
54:19 Yeah. But just classic, I just generally... I know some organizations are really big on,
54:26 "You two are going to work on this feature together." That does not work for me.
54:29 I've heard people who really love it. They find it very valuable. I'm not trying to take away
54:35 from that. This is not one of those, I think it's bad for everybody. It sucks for me. I think it
54:39 sucks for a lot of folks with ADHD.
54:41 Yeah. I just can't get in a flow if I'm sitting and working with somebody.
54:44 Yeah.
54:44 I might be having a good time, but it's really hard to reach that really high level of productivity.
54:51 So you talked... Let's close this out with a bit of a joke. Okay. Maybe something practical.
54:55 You talked about the time blindness, estimating is hard, agile is all about estimates and stuff.
55:02 So I saw this pretty cool article I talked about on other podcasts, Python Bytes,
55:06 basically hard to swallow truths they don't tell you about software engineering, but they have a
55:09 really great cartoon in here that says, from monkeyuser.com is actually where it's originally
55:14 from. And it's trying to reimagine how you might estimate. It says for better estimates, instead
55:20 of points or hours, whatever, we switched to measuring story points too. How many duck-sized
55:26 horses you're willing to fight rather than implementing this task? There's no duck you
55:30 would fight for because it's so easy, or you'd take on a whole cavalry of small duck horses.
55:36 I don't know. What do you think?
55:38 I actually... So I know it's a joke, but I find the stake in the ground comparisons for estimates
55:44 useful. I still don't think I'll always get to an accurate place, but if I say,
55:49 I don't know how long something's going to take. And someone says, well, do you think it would take
55:52 20 hours? That gives me an instant grounding of like, oh, that feels too high. That feels too low
55:57 or just right. It's still, in my opinion, a bit of a wild guess. Once you start doing the work,
56:03 you will expose things like unknowns that make, oh, we thought this, but based on this other
56:09 thing, it's going to take longer, or it's going to take way less, or it's going to take about
56:12 what we thought. But having some sort of grounding, whether it's a number of hours
56:16 or horse-sized ducks you'd be willing to fight, I do actually think that's really useful.
56:20 It's actually kind of interesting. Yeah. And I feel there's a human nature,
56:24 aversion to negativity stronger than a positivity, right? And this is like, how much negativity or
56:30 how much resistance do you feel to this? I kind of think it's a little bit, maybe not idealistic,
56:35 but I think it goes in the flow of humanity. So I think it's a funny one.
56:39 The one caveat with this is there are tasks that have been on my to-do list for ages that
56:46 realistically would only take 15 to 30 minutes that I will put off for ages. Usually they're
56:52 phone call related. And I hear this a lot from fellow ADHDers, like making phone calls is just,
56:57 really, I had make an appointment with a psychiatrist to look into getting ADHD medicine
57:02 on my to-do list for, I'm not making this up, three years. Michael, this was a 15 minute phone
57:07 call, three years. Because it's not just the phone call. It's the, find a psychologist or
57:13 psychiatrist you think you're going to hit it off with, make the phone call, pick a date to go there,
57:18 get in the car, drive there, do the whole social awkward introductions thing,
57:22 talk about your feelings. Right? Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of levels of resistance. Yeah.
57:27 And the thing that actually got me over the hurdle, I found a psychiatrist who has a,
57:32 you fill out your information, we'll call you. And that was the thing that did it for me.
57:35 I don't have to navigate one of these, press three for this, now seven, now enter this. You
57:41 entered it wrong. You didn't give me long enough to look it up. So the number of duck-sized horses
57:45 I'd be willing to fight to avoid making a phone call, which is actually a relatively easy task,
57:50 is much higher than the number I'd be willing to fight to implement my own e-commerce platform.
57:56 You know what I mean? I'm going to write my own crypto before I make that phone call.
57:59 Even though one is objectively way more difficult than the other.
58:02 It estimated, it's a reasonable estimate of the total time, not the active time.
58:07 For sure. So there you go. I think there's something to it.
58:10 All right, Chris, this has been a fun conversation and hopefully helpful for a lot of folks out
58:13 there. Let's wrap it up with a call to action. People want to learn more. What do you tell them?
58:18 If you want to learn more, you think you might have ADHD, you do have ADHD,
58:21 head over to adhdforthewind.com/talkpython where you can find a whole bunch of resources,
58:27 daily newsletter, and my contact information if you just want to ask questions or
58:30 fight me about Paul Graham.
58:31 Not a fight I want to have. I would say all those links and all these things will be in
58:38 people's show notes. So just flip over in your podcast player and you can get it right there.
58:42 Chris, thank you for being on the show. It's been insightful.
58:45 Michael, thanks so much for having me. This was truly a pleasure.
58:47 Yeah, thanks. Bye now.
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01:00:01 at talkpython.fm/youtube. This is your host, Michael Kennedy. Thanks so much for listening.
01:00:06 I really appreciate it. Now get out there and write some Python code.