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Comment by _zr37 | Hacker News Reader

several strategies that have worked for me:

1. get yourself checked out for ADD. I'm not saying this is the problem, but it's easy to check for, and if it is the problem, there are drugs that can at least temporarily make the problem just go away. Now if this is something you've never experienced until just now, it's probably not ADD. But if you've had these sorts of problems on and off forever, (I know for me, my performance falls off a cliff after I've had a job for about a year.) ADD is something to check out.

2. Try pair programming. It works really well for me.

3. Move into management. Even if your organizational skills are not great, having the knowledge of the field gives you a pretty good leg up. If you manage your own company, you can hire people specifically to take care of the things you are no good at or hate. You can get a CS student to watch you code and kick your chair when you stop for under ten bucks an hour.

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I second the ADHD check. This sounds like classic ADHD symptoms to me. Once you sort of reach that pinnacle you've been striving for, it's easy to lose the drive when you can relax and quit striving or when things are less challenging. You will find your motivation will wax and wane, week in and week out. You start avoiding the real work so much with distractions that it becomes painful just to face it and your own procrastination, which magnifies the symptoms by an order of magnitude.

Do NOT let this relatively easily solvable problem destroy your career. I made this mistake early on in my career and paid for it with a lost job. I'm glad things ended up the way they did, but it would have been better if I left there on good terms.

Even if medication is a temporary fix, it might be what this situation calls for. Often in life we have to chose the best of two evils, and your career is not something to put on the line. I know that I am way happier working 40 hours a week steady than I was when I would binge hack for 120 hours straight while riding a motivation wave.

If you can get yourself back into the groove and being productive, try to figure out what gives you motivation and try to work your way into a position that continuously feeds you these things. That's what I'm working towards.

> I second the ADHD check. This sounds like classic ADHD symptoms to me. Once you sort of reach that pinnacle you've been striving for, it's easy to lose the drive when you can relax and quit striving or when things are less challenging. You will find your motivation will wax and wane, week in and week out. You start avoiding the real work so much with distractions that it becomes painful just to face it and your own procrastination, which magnifies the symptoms by an order of magnitude.

Holy crap, you just described my life. There's no way I'm an extreme case, but maybe I really do have a little ADHD going on...?

I think everyone finds themselves with those thoughts and feelings.

I think that the lack of drive and focus is a symptom of something, in rare cases perhaps ADD/ADHD. However from personal experience I usually discover a core problem that was causing these symptoms. Resolving that problem takes care of the lack of motivation and focus.

Perhaps the specific work environment isn't for you. One job I worked directly out of university crushed my soul as a developer. As an intern I had vast responsibility and did a lot of interesting projects. Once I joined on fulltime, they were going through a restructuring period and I ended up doing trivial work putting out fires. Luckily they downsized a third of the company a few months later and I was fired - a blessing in disguise there. A week later I was running a small team doing innovative new projects at a large corp.

Often it can be outside factors in life that strangle your productivity. When my father was very sick and hospitalized, my work drastically suffered. I'd like to consider myself a strong individual whose outlook on life would allow me to deal with such events with ease. However, in the situation without knowing it at the time it was impacting my life. Instead of taking a few weeks off and dealing with the issues at hand, I threw myself into my work while my progress continued slowing exponentially. Eventually I was working 16 hours a day and writing 0 lines of code. I ended up quitting that job, and taking time to deal with my life.

Anyways, the moral of the story was stepping back and discovering the root cause of these symptoms can be very beneficial. Don't block it out with meds unless that is really the cause.

I agree with everything you say. Often there are other factors. It sounds like this is a consistent problem with OP though, and regardless of environment or lifestyle, he's still having issues.

>Anyways, the moral of the story was stepping back and discovering the root cause of these symptoms can be very beneficial. Don't block it out with meds unless that is really the cause.

If the meds fix the problem, and they have proven fairly safe, why not use them? (I mean, they aren't absolutely safe, but they are very safe compared to, say, driving to work every day.)

It's not a lifetime choice, either. You can decide that you need some help, and get it for the next six months, then stop and work on your personal issues. This is actually what I'm doing now (though, I'm nearing the end of my rest... it's time to get some work done.)

While we all have a little bit of it in us: let's face it, nobody wants to work on a dull project, ADHD symptoms become so exasperated in these scenarios that they become debilitating and self-destructive. The brain turning to mush that OP described hit it right on the head. The best litmus test I've found is to the conversation test:

"frequent shifts in conversation, not listening to others, not keeping one's mind on conversations"

I can have "black out" episodes where I impulsively and immediately walk away from conversations without finishing them, often with a little amnesia. I've asked my girlfriend a question, essentially immediately forgotten that I did so, and turned up the radio volume.

http://www.addforums.com/

No, it's normal, and blaming it on a medical condition is dangerous and not helping you fix it. Perhaps in some people it's due to ADHD, but in most it's not.

> it's easy to check for

Really? That's news to me. How do they check?

> Move into management

+1. The tech world needs more managers who actually know tech.

> Really? That's news to me. How do they check?

Typically diagnosis is made after an interview (about an hour) and questionnaires. If there's some doubt about the diagnosis you may need to bring in old school reports. It's also possible to diagnose using brain scans now (e.g http://www.sydneydevelopmentalclinic.com.au/brain_scanning.h...), and medication can be trialled and selected on the basis of an individual response to the medication (shown with another brain scan, or using testing, e.g http://www.sydneydevelopmentalclinic.com.au/medication_testi...).

My experience with a neurologist specializing in ADHD treatment:

1. The doctor will interview you and ask you about your history, all the way back to childhood. If you haven't had problems focusing, concentrating, etc. throughout your whole life (even as a child), the doctor might be skeptical.

2. They'll test you to make sure you're not having seizures.

3. They'll also test your focus, concentration and short term memory with a computer test called CPT (continuous performance test).

Assuming you have a history of ADHD symptoms, you currently have symptoms that are interfering with your life, and you do poorly on the computer test, the doctor will probably start some kind of treatment, probably using prescription stimulants.

That said, I'm sure there are a lot of other medical conditions that cause symptoms similar to ADHD's. You might end up learning you have some other problem entirely.

Depends on the doctor really.

The first doctor I tried wanted to have me see a shrink to get tested. The first visit cost me a $50 copay and then I had to have another visit to do the actual test, costing another $50 copay. I skipped that second visit and went to another doctor. (The shrink seemed like a quack anyhow).

My new doctor whipped out a giant book and started reading a battery of questions from the back of it. Based on the answers to those questions he determined I "met the requirements for treatment." Seemed a bit weak, but I didn't ask any questions since I knew I had already been through all the typical tests before. having been diagnosed as a child.

TLDR: YMMV. Just talk to the doc and see what he says.

>How do they check?

It's an interview process. But really, as far as I can tell, the check is "do the drugs make you hyper or do they make you focused" The only definition of ADD that I've heard that differs appreciably from simply being lazy sometimes is that people with ADD respond differently to stimulants. Jack up my nervous system enough and I'll actually lay down for a nap.

There is something called the TOVA test, Test Of Variance of Attention, or something like that.

It's like a very boring 10 minute video game. You click a button when a certain stimulus is presented on screen, but not when a different stimulus is presented. It measures your reaction times and your errors (click when you shouldn't, don't click when you should). Then the program does some statistical comparisons and prints out a report.

At least, that's what was done in 1993. Could be different now.

Combine that with a history. I imagine it's a lot easier to diagnose in adults, because so much more data is available. And the doctor doesn't have the pressure of diagnosing ADHD for a little kid whose parents are worried he'll get less out of school. As an adult, that damage is already done. ;^)

Pair programming is good advice - but then, I have a sneaking suspicion that the majority of what you find in Agile programming methodologies is pretty much designed at overcoming the problem that the OP describes.

I found that morning meetings with the other devs on the project, where we are all publicly assigned stories to complete in the day also helps - you don't want the rest of the team feeling like you're slacking off, so you push on through the distractions. But of course, you need the whole team to be on board, and indeed, you need a team!

As I often work alone, the Agile methodology that helps me the most is TDD. It helps me keep focused on what I need to do next. Conceptually it's similar to a TODO list, as suggested in other posts, but it has the advantage that you can't allow the tool itself to be a distraction (I've tried TODO lists, and I end up playing more with the list than with the work). With TDD, either you're writing tests, or you're writing the product code, but either way you are creating an artifact that is useful to the project.

As others said above I'd also suggest you try out pair programming (with a friend of yours). I find myself more relaxed when I'm with someone I can talk to, make jokes or just bitch about the things not working. When I feel stressed I change place with my friend and he continues with the code while I calm down. Also he might see mistakes you don't and helps you fix them right away avoiding the stress.

Another good strategy is to break everything down to small tasks. Tasks you can do in 30 minutes or less. Watching the list getting shorter makes you feel like you're doing something. I think this is part of the agile approach.

> You can get a CS student to watch you code and kick your chair when you stop for under ten bucks an hour.

Excellent idea.

I've often thought this would be useful. Someone standing behind me to slap me whenever I compulsively checked email for the second time in a minute, checked a news site to see if anything interesting had happened in the last five minutes, etc.

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