| Former / occasional programmer here. I was categorized as having ADD / ADHD and never bothered to take anything for it although it has caused me tremendous problems in my career and school life. If you know you have this problem you can either drug yourself into a coma or make significant life choices (and learn to master your condition) to steer you into career where your strengths come into play and your weaknesses are minimized. I tried both, I like the second option better. I no longer believe there is something wrong with me, I believe society was built for people different than me (sit still, pay attention, do one thing at a time, obey etc) and I am expected to follow and obey their rules. I believe that ADHD is a real condition but the drugs are a false solution that are driven more by pharmaceutical company marketing than reality. If they can make you feel bad about who you are, they can sell more drugs. That is wrong - if you are unhappy its because something deeper is wrong in your life that you need to change and you should find what that is. The Good: There are massive benefits to being an ADD-er in my experience: I can simply handle more volume of work faster and more efficiently than anyone I know. My brain is a 40-lane highway and I have no problem multitasking across many different contexts. If my brain decides to become interested in a topic, I can learn everything there is to know about that topic faster than anyone...I now learn to recognize when something interests me and feed my brain information in that time slot while the opportunity presents itself (I think its called "hyperfocus"). I have learned to work with the peculiarities of my condition and take advantage when the wind is blowing in a useful direction. It wasn't until later in my career that I learned to be extremely detail oriented. The Bad: The ADD super powers come with many downsides. I am chronically bored out of my mind and single-tasking is a challenge (e.g. sitting through a lecture or boring meeting). At most jobs I found myself growing completely bored in six months and being unable to focus on my job. This resulted in a lot of useless job hopping which I now recognize in retrospect as being a symptom of my underlying condition. Learning material which doesn't interest me is impossible, killing my academic performance. I felt strongly that other people around me could simply absorb boring "stuff" without issue and just deal with it and take the pain while my brain simply turned off in that situation, remembering nothing. Finally, I have difficulty communicating with people. When I talk I jump all over the place (often off topic) or I skip three steps ahead. Most people's brains don't work like this. Some Solutions: The most important fix was to find a job or career which, by definition, involved lots of crazy stuff going on all the time. Being a programmer working on a single product for years was simply impossible to me to sustain. Many smaller, single-product, companies work like this: Here is the one thing you do for the next two years. If you have ADHD that isn't going to work. Many developers I know (with more normal brains) prefer to focus on one technology (Say, Ruby on Rails) to the exclusion of everything else for years. I have embraced being a super-generalist. If you are a programmer, I recommend finding one of the following: (a) an agency which has dozens of ongoing projects in many technologies (many digital agencies are like this) so you can never get bored (b) a large company with a lot of interesting stuff going on (e.g. take a company like Microsoft which has ridiculous amounts of different technologies, products and initiatives underway at any given time). In my case I decided that software wasn't for me and found a related career (technical marketing) which was more varied in nature (lots of new products, unexpected surprises and events going on all the time). I thought a large company would be horrible, I was wrong - My current job is like an endless "all you can eat" buffet where I am allowed to eat as much as I want and work on projects that interest me all day long. It probably depends which department you land in. More Immediate Solutions and Strategies: 1.) Lose weight and exercise regularly. This will physiologically change your body and brain and make it easier to sustain focus. Can't recommend going for a run regularly enough. 2.) Embrace a single page "Shit to do" list. Everything you need to do should fit on a single page. I tried many different techniques for time management including any number of ToDo apps etc. Everything was less efficient than Evernote or notepad. If I have something to do, it goes on the list. Then you can ignore it or check it once a day and cross stuff off. I used to be really bad about dropping tasks and forgetting details, now I am at 100% all the time. 3.) Build your entire life around Evernote I now completely live in Evernote. Every meeting, everything gets an Evernote page that I can come back to. The really important stuff goes in Shit To Do. I tend to multitask through every meeting and only have part of my brain in a listening state. I take notes for that meeting in Evernote and come back to them. People with ADD suffer from "poor working memory" which means you forget things much faster than normal people. The cure is to rely on Everynote or some other method to store all the details for you. That way, you can get around the poor working memory issue by letting the computer do the remembering. |
Like Ironchef said: ADD can be a handicap at times, but at other occasions it can be a tremendous asset. Focus on the good parts and build your life around them! In my case, I found out that I like deadlines, they keep me focussed. Also I always got bored in every job after half a year or so, so now I'm a consultant and I'm happily switching companies all the time. So what is a weakness in one situation, can be a strength in another.
Exercising helps. I exercise (mildly) every morning and it helps during the day with keeping me motivated and focussed.
Have realistic goals. I tried a couple of times but learned the hard way that long term studies are not my thing, my attention will fade too quickly. So now I'm doing short online courses all the time, I love Coursera for instance.