I’m a card carrying medicated ADHD adult. I have this printed and on my door at work. Yesterday at one point I had a queue of people at my office door. The irony of why I didn’t get a lot done yesterday was lost on most people.
this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2025
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I feel you. I'm fearful of being so open about my diagnosis though. These days I "wear so many hats" for my job. Unfortunately I have to be support for a number of related systems, script automations, and a tons of other stuff. Recently I've felt like this last project has taken forever and I've been hard on myself because of it.
Only in the last week or so did I realize that I'm writing scripts far more complex than ever before and I don't get into a flow state until everyone else goes home but then it's time for me to go home. Half of my normal work time is trying to get back into the mindset I need to continue building the project. Then I have to focus on different project for a few days and WTF was I doing with that first project?
Yeah totally. I’m most productive in the super early morning before anyone gets there, like 6-9am. Or in the late evening after everyone has gone home. But the wife is like why are you still at work. When I get in the zone I get total time blindness. What felt like 15 minutes was more like 4 hours.
God I miss WFH
I was so much more healthy and happy
You need to CTRL+S whenever you do something
I’m an old comp sci grad. There was a concept we learned in my operating systems class called a context switch.
So basically, a context switch is when an operating system pauses one running process or thread, saves its state, and loads the saved state of another so the CPU can execute it. This makes multitasking possible by letting multiple processes share a single CPU while each later resumes exactly where it left off.
I would kill for this feature in real life.
the way I think of it is that we do it all the time but its much, much more costly for us humans than for computers
Same
As they say, office is the pinnacle of productivity
Context Switching
It's why I hate when middle managers get a hold of my time allocation. "You have 8 hours a day, so you can spend 1 hour each on these 8 different projects and move them all forward together!" Sprinkle 3-4 pointless meetings throughout the day, and then they wonder why nothing gets done.
I wrote a reply before I got this far down in this thread, but 100% agree.
So for that hour:
10min to stop the last thing I was doing.
10 min to switch to new task (getting environment set up, checking out code, etc).
30 min to figure out where I was the last time I started.
And now 10 min to actually do anything.
God forbid a random pop-in, priority email, slack message, system alert, etc happen in that hour.
Yep seems totally efficient to me.
I'd like to point out that this doesn't just apply to programmers. Other people need to think and concentrate for their jobs too.
Was anybody saying different?
It is usually only talked about in context of programming, it is implicit.
In programmer humour? Hm.
I'm guessing you are only in programming communities, I've seen it talked about in plenty of circles outside of programming
the one thing that made my life better in this regard is: draw/write as you think.
The “poof” still happens, but you have a save state.
Seriously: my notebook is my best tool.
Honestly, writing your thoughts can give you incredible insight into what you’re really thinking.
It’s so easy to just swim in a sea of irreconcilable thoughts nowadays — writing down the first thing that comes to mind can give you an interesting look into your mind.
I have written some seriously profound things off the cuff at a whim, or realized things about myself that I wouldn’t have otherwise.
This comic was done better by Jason Heeris back in 2013. Only reason I know this is because I printed it out and stuck it on my cubicle wall.
Yep printing this one to go on my door right next to the one above.
Thanks; much easier to read on a phone.
This stands today as my favorite demonstration to show people why I'm so grumpy at their meeting invites. Thank you for posting it here, as it was my first thought when seeing the OP.
This is every dang day of my life!
need to get on ADHD meds.
