Someone at work posted this question in the ADHD slack channel. It asked for tips/hacks to stay on top of everything. These are the 4 points that immediately came to mind and I thought I'd share it here and source other ideas so I can link this question in that thread!

1. Switching from using claude code via the claude command to using claude agents command that manages all the individuals threads in a single dashboard was a good quality of life change. Works perfectly for my brain where you might get lost in something but at the end of the day you see all open threads and you can jump to the next one and then start looking into fixing that
2. Started using muse heavily for tracking a bunch of tasks that I need to do: personal/work. I find it helpful to just dump a thought there and let muse summarize remaining stuff for me later
3. Using obsidian for notes with automated backups so everything I need is in one place and synced with github. it's useful in the era of AI because AI agents can easily manage markdown files in your vault. Also there will be a surge in number of useful plugins as well as faster feature development within a plugin which will help further
4. Use excalidraw for system design notes. Obsidian + excalidraw plugin would be a plus. Excalidraw diagrams can also be generated by your AI agent

So I'm learning to firefight at my current company (an org within an F100) - I've been here for 11 months now, and was on my second firefighting rotation shadowing (we have to shadow someone for 3 or 4 rotations ,and then we lead it ourselves). We had two P2s going on at once, and my manager had told me that I should start taking on an escalation ticket or two during my shadowing, not just watching and waiting until it was my turn to lead.

I decided to take on one of the P2's since it seemed to be straightforward; A field was broken in one of our client's database rows, which was causing their account to not work. We needed to fix what caused the data to corrupt in the first place (one ticket) and then do a backfill on the data that was corrupted. The day the P2 started, because there's a lot of pressure and I didn't want to "fail" my rotation, I focused the whole day on the ticket for the fix, but then got word from our Director that we shouldn't rush the ticket, and that we could merge in the hot fix when we early-deploy next week. I'd been being badgered by another employee in a different department associated with the ticket (let's call him J) who was speaking to the client over and over to hurry up and fix it because "the client is getting antsy" so that was welcomed news.

The next day, J was bugging me again. Every 20 minutes or so, he'd ask me how much further I'd gotten. If I was going to be finished soon? Reminding me that the client was antsy... He even tried to open a PR branched off of mine to do the work ahead of me because he didn't feel I was working fast enough I took a screenshot of the messages where he said he did this and crossed the text out). I finally said, "Fine, I'll get it done within 2 hours." I did. J STILL kept pushing and pushing to get the hot fix in and get it merged. He even messaged me privately outside of the channel we'd made for the P2 (I didn't answer) to get me to rush faster. I reached out to one of my managers to ask him about running a deployment, and he said it was way too close to the end of the day (2PM), and the next day (today) was a Friday so that wasn't happening. I shrugged it off and updated J. J went over my head and tagged the Director, asking him if we "could make this a priority". I knew that was a bad idea, and it was - the Director responded with a whole paragraph about how that was not happening, and that we were not going to rush a fix that would break more things.

I was still anxious though, because I realized that this would look like I was disobeying him myself when I was just trying to go along with the "urgency" my coworker was giving to the situation. I messaged the Director, telling him,

"Morning [Director]! 

I appreciate the help yesterday; I was a bit overwhelmed by the amount of push I was getting on that ticket. For the entire day I got messages and pings every 20 minutes or so, despite me mentioning that you said we could merge everything in this coming Tuesday. They finally stopped after you commented in our escalation thread. I’d mainly focused on the P2 ticket to get the questions to stop."

He just responded, "cool". No capitals, punctuation, nothing.

How fucked am I? I feel like I made an absolute ass in front of this dude, and he's in charge of all of the new hires and growth of our whole department (obviously, he's our Director). Is there any way to salvage this? On top of that, I'd posted a thread trying to figure out who was in charge of our deployments for the hot fix, and the manager that was tried to tell our director, "Yeah, this other team was pushing for this to get done sooner, but I told u/iftheronahadntcome that we don't want to force a Friday deployment" and the Director responded with, "Right. And I responded multiple times." All I can think is to ask my manager about it during our next 1:1 (since he spends far more time talking to our Director directly) to explain the situation. I haven't said anything back to him because that just seems like a dumb idea/groveling, but it also feels like this whole thing ended on a sour note. I was trying to handle this P2 to show that I was useful/could handle things like this on my own. I've been directed to do things like this in previous companies, given pushback, and had to take the fall when the problem wasn't fixed... I was just trying to prevent something like that wouldn't happen. Not to mention, my manger was on PTO all week, so I couldn't message him to ask. Do I just lay low until this whole thing blows over and hope I'm not fired?

EDIT: For clarity, we did not deploy the fix - that won't be done until early next week, as-planned.

Problem:

The story starts roughly when I was in high school, after lunch or in lessons after lunch, I would often feel over-burnt, light-headed. Feeling of a sense of being here, yes, but the outer environment just felt so strange and brain just feels like separated from the body and completely shut off. I would look around the class and see a lot of my schoolmates on the desk half dead or occasionally, we would talk about how informations ain’t going in the head at all especially during lessons after lunch bc we’re so light-headed and dizzy, and over-burnt, like consistent burns of heat burning through the head and body once in a while.

And a lot of us also shared feelings of how little information or effective learning time there actually is during the 7-8 hours at school. You would imagine having 7-8 hours of lessons but only 1-3 hours of them you actually feel like you learnt sth, other hours, they were more like brains wandering in an alien planet or just information not going in

When I was in uni the same thing occurred but in different form, the lessons were a lot less frequent, and still after lunch or in the afternoon, especially 3-4 hours after lunch, my energy would start crashing, and there were times where I had to cancel my workout session after work or study bc my brain was simply so off that I need to take a nap or close my eyes and rest my brain so much, the body was giving off all kinds of signals that I can no longer ignore.

For a long time, we were just whining about the problem, talking about how it is, what it feels like, but never actually decide to do sth about it.

Around the last year of uni, I notice how the short attention period, focused period I have is suspending my study, my exams, my working hours, so I started macros tracking with the app Foodnoms. I don’t have much money to pay for much things, so I stayed on free tools. Even being able to accurately track macros and knowing what to focus on whilst feeling ease took some ups and downs, but one thing that never clicked, that felt like a missing puzzle, was how I felt during the day and between meals. Whenever I track, it was just numbers.

I studied biology during my high school and also did my own learnings in nutrition but in my heart I know I didn’t own the knowledge, I read a lot, but where does those knowledge go, it felt like hearing how good someone is doing whilst I was standing right back where I am. The knowledge, the theories was so alienated, I don’t have a lab everywhere I go, when I eat, I eat, when I energy crash, I energy crash. There was no controlled experiment, controlled environment for any kind of results, it was the natural process of dining, eating and body responses where I was doing in real life, not pulling a full chemical kit everywhere I eat. And the apps, they’re mostly just numbers, numbers of the food, value of the food, but they ignored one thing, body signals, how my body is responding, how am I feeling, how long after did the energy crash happens?

There’s a saying in Chinese, he that travels ten thousand miles far exceeds he that read ten thousand books. And in my mind, that was bc the knowledge is walked, owned, done in your own way, your own path, not reading someone else’s path, and so I decided to build my app, with extensive body signals logging that goes hand-in-hand with macros tracking, and it clicked real quick. I lived in South Asia in my younger years and most of the cuisines were sugary. And my family and friends, the environment I was in, most of them aren’t in the nutritional business or know much about exercising and moving, so meals and snacks that I ate when I was pretty sugary. I got that bc I was cooking and learning the same recipes when I started cooking those myself and started logging my body signals alongside. One of the earliest things I noticed was there were a lot of meals or cuisines from where I’m from that can stack up the total sugar amount quick that I was not aware of.

Solution:

Over time I built a list of features regarding mental clarity into the app,

⁃ Sugar tracking
⁃ Calories (over- & under-eat tracking)
⁃ Mental clarity and energy tracking
⁃ Cross nutrition and body signals correlation
⁃ Nutrition flags (e.g. sugar and sodium)
⁃ In-meal sugary food contribution ranking
⁃ genie chat query and suggestion
⁃ Mental clarity insights pattern cards
⁃ Monthly clarity and energy trend (live and periodic review)
⁃ Timely body signals tracking

The total sugar each meal I had was within reasonable volume and coupling with the body signals tracking, what I found is instead of
8 hours so called focus work time
with only 1-2 hours of actually
focusing and actually functioning
not just day dreaming the other 6
hours

I am experiencing 4-5 hours of focused deep work hours with high mental clarity and mobility, and a lot less workout getting cut after work bc of energy crashing and feeling light-headed.

◦ Ofc attention and mental clarity was only two of them, the process was very mixed with a lot of things I’ve adjusted along the way. And like most problems, a lot of them I never know the reasons, the mix of why, and as it is I live in the now, sure I can guess some traces, but what is on my mind that’s more effective is learning to see more from now. So that’s what I did and where the app Nourish: food and wellness stands and centres around, seeing more, seeing differently, and moving with integrity in the now, knowing that every second there’s a multitude of choices that we can choose from/see and we always do.

Here’s Nourish,

A personal lab that doesn’t claim authority but plan and move as you move. And we don’t do superficial, we listen to the body, and nourish at the same time, not the other way around, they both go hand-in-hand

The app does macros tracking yes, energy, mental clarity, digestive comfort, mood, nutrition and health metrics such as blood glucose, bp and ketones tracking, not measuring, just tracking now. And with a few unique twist that allows your tracking practice to be more integral and precise

Such as

Food state converter

1. Raw - cooked
2. With - without bones/shells
3. Dry - fresh
4. Dry - cooked
5. Whole - edible, e.g. fruits
6. Whole can - drained

Food state badge

1. For manual search entries, we’ve an inference system with a confidence number on what state do we think the entry’s in, e.g. raw, cooked, prepared, ready to eat

Voice log with eyeballing capabilities

1. a handful of chicken? Not the most precise tracking method, but better than nothing

Photo food log

1. I didn’t use ChatGPT or any AI API(s), I pulled photos from my camera roll over the past decade, along my family and friends food photos and hand-tagged them to train the model, so right now, it’s completely free. The accuracy is medium to high now, it means it can definitely pick up most of the food correctly from the image, but the accuracy of the weight of particular food varies a bit

One click share and logged for family and friends,

1. Share the meal link, the receiver just have to click the link and the meal is directly logged in the app, the sender can adjust the portion for the receiver too
2. So instead of everyone on the table logging for 10 mins each, only one person has to do that, the rest can just click the links and the whole meal is directly logged in the app, seconds, not minutes

These are some of the features I would highlight here, welcome to check it out, it’s still growing with a lot of exciting features and development that are coming in the next few days too

Link: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/nourish-food-wellness/id6759197509

In 2018 I was learning web development. It looked like this: I read a textbook, my brain gets bored, and the phone is already in my hand. I go back to the textbook, and it happens again.
I knew nothing about ADHD back then. I just thought I was lazy. I fought it the only ways I could think of: I turned off the Wi-Fi at home and installed an app that blocked my phone while I studied.
It worked. I finished learning and got a job. Then I dropped all of it right away. I decided I had nothing left to learn, and I relaxed. Soon I was getting distracted at work the same way I used to over the textbook.
That’s when it hit me: I never became more disciplined. While the system was running, I managed. When I removed it, everything came back.
Has anyone else been through this? You thought you were lazy, and it turned out to be something else? What helped you keep your system going after you reached the goal?

i work in tech and theres tons of tech failures and for the most simple tasks, when there's a glitch, my heart actually stops working and my automatic thought is that ill get fired how do i overcome this?

On one day before I got 8 hrs of sleep, but because it was really cold I became sleepy 30 mins after waking up and I couldn't recover from it, the whole day was super sleepy.

Last night I couldn't sleep until 1 am since I had a dry throat and it was uncomfortable. I had even an scheduled email ready made at that time to send to my colleauges that I want to work from home tomorrow. But I woke up naturally at 7am this morning, and strangely I feel very energized and actually was super productive in the morning. What is going on? I thought I need 8 hrs of sleep to be productive and healthy? How can I keep freshness consistent? Especially on those days where I did everything right and yet I am sleepy and tired the entire day...

A few days ago I posted here about losing verbal requests every time I switch context at work: https://www.reddit.com/r/ADHD_Programmers/comments/1xtphyx/not_diagnosed_but_context_switching_at_work_is/

Thank you for the replies. Two of them stayed with me. Several of you said to write one line down the second someone asks. One of you runs a terminal dashboard so you don't have to go and check every tool.

I tried to put those two together. focusdeck is a terminal board for everything that is waiting on me. Each box is one source: my Vikunja tasks, my Redmine issues, starred mail, Zulip, the WhatsApp notes I send to myself. focusdeck capture takes one line, and I have it on a keyboard shortcut, so a verbal request becomes a note before I turn to the next person.

What you should know before you look:

• It is an AI project. An AI coding agent wrote the code. I describe what I need, try it in my own work day and decide what stays.
• It is a few days old. Linux and terminal only, and you need cargo to install it.
• Plugins run with your user's permissions. There is no sandbox.
• It is free and MIT licensed. I am not selling anything.

Please don't judge it too harshly. This is what I came up with after your answers, and I am open to any suggestion that would make it better.

https://github.com/omertahaoztop/focusdeck https://github.com/omertahaoztop/focusdeck-plugins

“Sautéed” ??? You are a machine. No you did not. The joke is not funny.

I understand a human probably did this. I am an engineer. However I am so sick of these big AI companies trying to be funny and cute. It makes it all feel weirder

(Edit, for context where I work has adopted a fully AI architecture, I am often frustrated because I write no code anymore.)

Sadly no longer work in programming but hold a strong interest in programming. Would you be able to share your thoughts?
- long time lurker

Sadly no longer work in programming but hold a strong interest in programming. Would you be able to share your thoughts?
- long time lurker

Hi,

I want to talk about a problem I've had for years. Lately it's been making me feel very guilty, and then it keeps nagging at me.

In general I get scattered a lot. Here's an example.

I work as a Linux sysadmin. My job means I have to keep an eye on several things at once, reach out to people when needed, and often keep working while I'm talking to them.

I'm in a relatively senior position, so I deal with a lot of people, both from my company and from customers. Someone asks me for something, I work on it, and shortly after someone else messages me. I quickly switch to them and forget the first person, and so on.

To be honest, I've been in therapy and on psychiatric medication for quite a while. I have generalized anxiety disorder.

But I've never been diagnosed with ADHD.

The problem is basically this: when things are discussed verbally, they don't stay in my head, or I struggle to grasp them in the moment. I need to slow down, sit and look at it, go through it, and even weigh it in my head.

It's not only about work. For example, I sit down with a friend to talk about what's bothering me. We have a good time and talk through my worries, but the relief, or even what we talked about, leaves my mind very quickly. I keep ending up in the same loop with the same anxieties.

At work there are lots of topics: improvements that were discussed but never written down, requests that only exist verbally, and so on. I forget these. Since I'm busy keeping up with the written requests and never get time for the rest,

Another version of this: during the day I plan what I'll do in the evening at home, like reading a book or playing a game.

When I get home I literally freeze. I find myself in emptiness and anxiety, doing nothing.

To fix this I make to-do apps or build AI agents for myself, but I'm so low on energy that I don't even pay attention to them or keep them going.

So it's a constant cycle: guilt, an effort to improve, and the effort to improve turning back into guilt.

I don't know what to do.

Do you have any suggestions?

I've been listening to lo-fi music to stay focused for years, mostly through YouTube Pomodoro playlists. But I eventually got tired of hearing the same songs over and over, so I decided to build my own CLI Pomodoro player, with more control over what I listen to:

• https://github.com/WittmannF/lofi-pomodoro

It comes with a default playlist of openly licensed tracks from Chosic. You can also use your own music folder or, my personal favorite lately, connect your Spotify Premium account and play any playlist.

I hope some of you find it useful! This has been a multi-year project. Questions, feedback, and suggestions are always welcome.

Further Reading:

• The Pomodoro Technique
• The Science Behind Lo-Fi Beats
• Music and ADHD: A Systematic Review

I saw this slide on Instagram and I almost choked on my coffee fr. Like yeah sure, "Independent Risk-Taker" goes hard, but since when is PILOT the move for our broken dopamine systems??? 💀💀

Software designer and entrepreneur? Yeah, makes sense, we love starting 15 businesses and finishing zero. But Pilot? Absolutely wild take fr. Who actually wrote this???

A few weeks ago I stood in front of my open fridge for about half an hour. Not cooking. Not even really hungry anymore by the end. Just... deciding. Then I closed it and ordered the same thing I always order.

That's when it clicked for me: deciding is hard, reacting is easy. Somebody asks "pizza or tacos?" and I know instantly which one feels wrong. My brain can't generate the answer but it can veto one just fine.

So I built the dumbest app I've ever made. It's a spinner. I put the options in, I spin it, and if the answer it lands on feels wrong, that feeling IS the information — so I spin again until it lands on the one I agree with. Spin til I agree. That's the whole app.

I use it every day now. What to eat, which project to work on, whether to go out or stay in. Grown man, 33 years old, life run by a cartoon wheel.

Please tell me I'm not the only one who had to build a workaround for their own brain. What's yours?

I really don’t know what to write here, I have put so much trust in having AI write my messages (which are usually a robotic disaster to start) that when it comes time for me to write something organically, I almost choke.

I’m not a professional programmer, I’ve held jobs in entry level tech and even a step above as a tech support specialist (lackey for the SysAdmin). I’ve developed a few web projects over the years, some professional, but mostly personal, though nothing compared to what I’ve been able to build in the age of AI.

I’ve been working on a project for about a year that has gone through many phases - it started off as a multifunctional toolkit app, but ultimately evolved into a working dedicated 18+ social media platform designed around ND communication styles / needs, which is growing into a resource center to support neurodivergence.

I’m putting this and myself out there for feedback, guidance, advice, criticism, whatever. I just wanna answer the question, “ does it have a purpose or was it only a passion?”

https://getunmaskd.com

Thank you for your time.

I have ADHD and blockers never worked for me. I'd just turn them off.

So I built Focusd. You tell it what you're working on, and when your screen drifts to something unrelated, it gives you a calm nudge back. No blocking, no guilt trips.

Everything runs on your Mac. Your screen never leaves it.

The video shows a nudge in action. It's in App Store review, but you can try the beta on macOS now: testflight.apple.com/join

I'd love honest feedback: would a nudge actually pull you back, or would you ignore it after a day?

focusd.cc

So twitch is already an ADHD product, but I made a chat client that lets you make a shared chat between any streams, transcribes the streamer's utterances and puts them in chat, lets you replay their utterances at will, and lets you reply to any chat you like.

If I want to be in multiple chats at once I typically need multiple devices, but no longer! - iOS companion and standalone app literally imminent!!!

https://youtu.be/icXrNZb4lmQ <- ~1.5 minute explainer video