[Ambele]

A study was done to pay people to build sand castles. In the experimental group, the people were told afterwards to knock down their sand castle (because the researchers said they wanted a different sand castle or something to that effect). In the control group, people were also told to build a new sand castle but in a different spot and so they would leave their other castle there. In the experimental group, people became very very demotivated and felt that their work was pointless and boring. It doesn't matter if you're ADHD or not, if your expectations are greater than reality and you have to kick your sandcastle over after building it, you're not going to do as well at your job.

As a code reviewer they should be giving you a compliment sandwich where the criticism or constructive feedback is placed in between two compliments. As a coder, I've found adding async and await to functions does a lot to make your code look sexier to code reviewers even if it doesn't have a perceptible performance impact on non-network calls.

If I were to comment on a new plan for you, I'd say let flow state be your friend and not your enemy. After all, you have a chair you probably have to sit in for ~8 hours a day while you stare at a computer screen full of code and that's hard for anyone to do for that long let alone someone with ADHD. Flow state will give you an advantage over others. Invariably, your flow state will break. Use that time to spend more time talking to the stakeholders in your group because sometimes stakeholders want what they want and nothing else. They'll appreciate the time you took to listen to them, they'll trust and believe in you more (instead of you being an unknown variable), they'll be more confident that they'll get what they want, and you'll benefit from the confirmation bias. If you deliver what they want, it's less likely that their sandcastle will get kicked over -- though still not unlikely.

[hinkley]

5-10 years ago there was a study that said that contrary to common wisdom, 20 minutes is not the minimum necessary to get cardio benefits from exercise. 3x7 minutes also works. This changed my life. I'd gotten so out of shape that 12 minutes hurt, and also if you disappear at work for 25 minutes at a stretch people will talk. 8 minutes twice a day and once after work is easy.

Getting away from the desk for 5 minutes can give you a lot of perspective, and unstick you from a host of problems. I think if I go back (when I go back?) I'll find a pomodoro app that lets you customize the intervals.

I think I agree with everything except this:

> As a code reviewer they should be giving you a compliment sandwich where the criticism or constructive feedback is placed in between two compliments.

Manageable when the code review is 50 lines. Not so easy to do when it's over 500 lines. Damned awkward when the person outranks you, too. I don't know where the cutoff is, but I feel like there's a point where this advice feels like victim blaming, or at least codependency. Don't put your coworkers in this situation, please.

As for knocking over the sandcastle, I agree this is something all humans wrestle with, maybe developers especially. Almost nobody wants to accept that their code is ephemeral. We always push back. Zen or a little horticulture can give you perspective. Kids might too, but that takes decades to play out. Plants are always changing, and they'll never be exactly the way you picture them in your head for longer than a moment. They're alive, and making them 'do' anything is a negotiation that often goes in directions you didn't anticipate. For good or ill.