ADHD Management The hard way as a software Engineer

I was recently diagnosed with ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) as an adult, and suddenly, an epiphany ran through my eyes.

My life span through my eyes in a short video clip when I learned more about it. It made sense now why I couldn’t sit at a place for a longer duration as a kid or how I never paid any attention to what my teachers were teaching in the classroom.

I somehow managed to do okay somewhat by studying at the last moment before the exams or the deadlines.

I always liked learning new things, solving problems, and building things, so I had that going for me. The periods of exclusive focus that came as an ADHD superpower enabled me to learn complex concepts quickly.

But I would lie if I had everything going well since the start. It was a long process that is still a work in progress.

Some complications do come out with ADHD superpower. I wanted to write a post to share what has helped me, so no one has to go through the same process again.

I don’t use any medications, which makes it hard and not an immediate fix, but it somewhat helps.

I am not perfect yet and still a work in progress, but here is what I have learned so far, and I will keep updating as I discover more things.

Practicing Meditation

This is somewhat unobvious, but meditation had a tremendous effect on me. I have been meditating for over six years every day, but practicing meditation has helped me start sitting down in one place.

This would be hard extremely hard to sit in one place and not do anything.

The results are also not immediate, and I started seeing effective results only after 2-3 years.

It calmed me, and I started helping him develop the habit of reading books that I could not create before.

Read books

There is a lot of value in reading books. Reading good books has been transformational for me, to say the very least.

I have learned a lot from the books I have read, and had I not read different authors’ perspectives, and I would have thought very differently about everything in my life.

I only started reading three years back, and every year I read a book a month.

going to the gym and exercising

Hate to sound obvious but exercising has tremendous benefits for mental health apart from physical health.

Test your code and then test it again

Early in my career, I didn’t realize how vital (end-to-end) testing is. I would release code with bugs mostly because I overlooked things while developing something.

Whenever I can write automated tests (that can also be ideally run via CI/CD), I do that and let the tests do the hard work of catching the bugs I create. In the end, it is slow, but it works, and you wouldn’t notice the code being written differently than a neuro-typical brain would write.

It is not to say if your code has bugs, you have ADHD. But tests are a perfect way to ensure your brain doesn’t make too many silly mistakes.

Have a system for hacking processes (No, I am not talking about OS processes)

Every company has processes, and you must do some things by or on specific dates. A reminder system ensures you don’t forget things by overzealously focusing on another aspect of your work.

I am still not very good at working in process-intensive environments and thrive in meritocratic ones.

But processes are a kind of necessary evil that ensure stability and consistency, which organizations love.

Here are three tips

1. Have a reminder system to make you remember things.
2. Journalling, reflecting, and maintaining a to-do list to ensure you always work on the most impactful stuff helps too.
3. If you are doing a code release with dozens of manual steps, document the steps and follow them to ensure you are complying with them.

Even better have a way to automate and test your post-release process, which would ensure safer releases.

Taking feedback well

Hypersensitivity (especially to critical feedback) is a common aspect of ADHD. I was not used to taking feedback well and would get defensive about it.

Reframing feedback in my mind was what helped me with my hypersensitivity. It is not that I have stopped feeling back when someone gives me critical feedback, but I have learned better to manage my emotions better.

Here are three things I learned about feedback in general which helped me :

1. Feedback is a gift. It is an opportunity to grow. And it is hard to give critical feedback because most people don’t want to risk upsetting anyone else. So person giving feedback has to come out of their comfort zone to do that.
2. Feedback doesn’t need to be always correct. Feedback is someone’s opinion about you, which may or may not be accurate.
3. Irrespective of whether the feedback is correct, the most appropriate way to handle any input is to say, “thank you for the feedback. I will think about it and get back to you.”

working remotely full time

This is somewhat counter intuitive and may be controversial. But not having to commute gave me time to manage all these systems as mentioned above without burning myself out.

So I highly recommend this being super helpful for me personally.

That is all I got to say. Hopefully, it was helpful. If there are any additional steps or lessons you learned, please do leave a comment.