How I Manage My ADHD as a Software Engineer
Spoiler Alert: I take my pills. But there are 4 other key habits that matter.
My senior year of High School I was diagnosed with ADHD. Now seven years later I have learned a lot of skills to help me cope with living with ADHD in a world that is often unfriendly to those of us who suffer from it. I’d like to share with you some of the ways I succeed in my role as a software engineer.
1. Sticky Notes are key
Software engineering is not a simple job. It requires complex abstract thinking and the creation of multiple components that need to come together to work as a whole. It comes as no surprise that balancing the creation of these multiple components might not be particularly easy for someone with ADHD. This is where sticky notes come in.
Sticky notes actually provide two benefits to those of us with ADHD. The first is that they help keep us organized. I use them to break down my projects into small and easily achievable tasks and stick each note to the bottom of my monitor. This helps me to remember what needs to be done and prevents me from overlooking small details that can often be the bane of those of us who suffer from ADHD.
Secondly, these notes serve as a reward for completing a task. Whenever I complete one of these tasks I remove the note from my monitor, give it a nice big check mark with my pen (sometimes multiple check marks after completing a particularly tricky task), and add it to my pile of sticky notes whose tasks I have completed. The small boost of dopamine I get from watching the pile of notes grow, goes a long way in keeping me motivated to keep working.
2. Don’t force yourself to work on the same thing all day
There’s nothing that sucks the joy out of my job quite like staring at my monitor all day working on the same task. This can, surprisingly, be an easy trap to fall into when you have ADHD. People with ADHD can tend to want to be good at things immediately and we don’t take it well when we are bad at things. So it can be hard for us to move past something we don’t understand and work on something else.
I try to give myself reminders that I can always come back to a problem and that its okay to let myself work on something else. One concrete way of doing this is to keep a list of different things you are working on. Personally, I like to keep a mix of tasks to complete and new skills I need to learn or documentation to read. Having different kinds of work to do helps keep things fresh.
3. Take Breaks
I actually just got back from taking a break from writing this article. Like many other tools in this list, taking breaks is beneficial for everyone not only those with ADHD. Ask any software engineer, and they will tell you that more than once, they found an answer or came up with a new way of solving a problem during or after walking away from a problem and coming back to it. When working really hard on a problem we can tend to form a narrow view of how we solve the issue and having a break and thinking about other things can allow us to take a step back and look at the problem more broadly. To me this is the next best thing to having another programmer look at your code to fix a bug.
4. Prevent Isolation
Working entirely on your own can lead to a lot of problems when dealing with ADHD. I have found that it is increasingly difficult for me to be disciplined and goal oriented the more time I spend working alone. I lose track of deadlines as well as a sense of urgency when I only have myself to look to for motivation on a project. I have also found that the more time I spend working on something alone, the more hesitant I am to ask for help from others. Which, in turn, leads me to being alone even more and creates this spiral of solitude that can only end in failure.
It’s best if you can get a jump on this from the start and connect yourself with others on a project. This can provide many benefits to those of us with ADHD. Firstly, it provides a sense of urgency and accountability when we have teammates that are relying on us to complete our work. Secondly, our teammates can provide a guide on how much we should be working.
5. Take medicine consistently
Considering how important this is, I find it surprising how little people actually talk about proper medication. Having proper organization and making use of the help of our teams is critical to success in any career when dealing with ADHD. However, ADHD is a real mental illness and there should be no shame in seeking out proper medical treatment.
Writing this article without mentioning medication, to me, seems similar to telling someone with depression that they just need to get outside and get some exercise. Sure, while those are helpful tools, depression is still caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain and should be treated with medication. I believe we need to look at ADHD the same way.
I’ll use myself as an example. I would say that for me being successful is about 30% using the tools that I have listed above and 70% taking my medicine consistently and making sure to eat with it and properly hydrate.
Obviously, just taking your medicine isn’t going to cure your ADHD. It has been very beneficial for me to understand how my medicine effects me and how to make the best use of it. For me, this means taking my medicine at the same time everyday with food so that by the time I get to work I am able to sit down and focus on what needs to be done.
