I typically have 8-10 meetings a day. I try to either have 60-90 min in the morning and/or 60-90 at the end of the day for focus time... Unfortunately the end of day sometimes gets nuked because I am fried from all of the meetings
Stand up / syncs / recruiter meetings / follow ups - they are usually only 15 minutes, so you can churn em out. They are easier to do than a daily email
My old job I used to have a lot of days where I'd have meetings every half hour or often consecutively. It was impossible to actually get anything big done because I'd just always be organizing notes from the last one or prepping for the next one. I between it was all I could do to put out fires. It was insane.
I'm lucky to not have many meetings in my current dev job, but I get the same effect from having a dozen people a day asking for "quick" fixes for various bugs that are conveniently always more urgent than whatever big task I'm in the middle of.
The bug fixes themselves can have massive cognitive overhead. I’ve spent hours thinking about a problem to make a very small change. It takes focus to fix complex problems correctly.
If only. The past couple jobs I’ve had, everyone acts as if they have multiple jobs. It’s a rare privilege to be focused on a few responsibilities only.
Do you not have a bug tracker or ticketing system of some sort to manage these things coming your way?
Incredibly few people at my work get much more than dismissive small talk from just walking up or from sending me a message expecting me to re-prioritize everything else for their special pet problem.
My manager sets my priorities, any changes to that need to come from him. They can take it up with him if they don't like it or disagree.
I don't respond to IMs or emails not from my boss or from my own team except when I've hit a mental road block and need to think about something else to refresh.
And I don't actually work on any of those requests until there's a ticket in. If someone comes to me asking why my main job duty isn't done, I'm sure as hell going to have a paper trail documenting who fucked up the timeline. No ticket, no work.
That also puts some weight on anyone else able to pick up tickets for your team to do it, so it's not always falling to you because you're not jaded enough to say no.
My previous job didn't have a ticket tracker for my team. It was my first real job, so I didn't realize how far we were straying from best practices. If I had some more experience, I would have pushed hard for ticket tracking. I was constantly disorganized, and my manager blamed me for not keeping track of everything. He was probably in his 50's, he should have known better.
Hahaha I wish. There isn't any real "management" to speak of where I'm at, and it's a flat structure, meaning literally anyone can send me work and I'm just expected to do it. Right now I'm working the weekend to finish a task that someone else couldn't do and it fell to me. There's a ticketing system, but it's only really half-used (of course, I myself turn these tasks into tickets, but that's about it).
Trying to slowly change all this over time, because I love my job outside of this lack of management, but I also don't hold any delusions about that.
Jesus fuck I would hate to work with you. At my job there's a lot of teams working on a lot of projects with very tight deadlines, and if every request had to be routed through managers it would take 10x as long. When we ask people from other teams directly for help, "I'm sorry I'm too busy right now" is a perfectly acceptable response because we've all been there. We don't need our managers to act like playground referees.
We're all intelligent and capable workers and we get paid well to take initiative and solve things without running to mommy.
If every request is an emergency that needs to immediately interrupt everything else, then your throughput is drastically reduced. The extra cognitive load that comes from the interrupts also affects throughput. If you constantly have to watch DMs/channels/email for work that might pull you away from your existing work, you’re not hitting a deep work state.
Unless your role is intentionally interrupt-driven requests, it’s much better to drop items in a queue to be processed regularly. The tighter the deadlines, the more important moving from interrupt-driven to queue-driven is. The last 30+ years of workflow research coupled with neuroscience have really highlighted the efficacy of queues.
If every request is an emergency, then your company is horrible at sharing info because teams don't know the overall goal of the company and where their team's "emergency" ranks in that. Something that's a high priority for my team might not be a high priority overall, and everyone on my team needs to understand when that is the case. There's been plenty of times when teams have had to rebalance priorities because someone with the ability to fix their blocker is tied up with something more important.
That's knowledge that shouldn't be exclusive to managers. There shouldn't be any need to involve managers in that other than to keep them informed of the situation.
The tighter the deadlines, the more important moving from interrupt-driven to queue-driven is.
I heartily disagree. Queues might be good when all the humans involved are shit at their jobs (which admittedly is a lot of workspaces) but otherwise, inserting extra friction between problem and solution is not and cannot be helpful.
I also think a "deep work state" is a myth for anything except certain types of coding, lab work, etc that legitimately require a shift in mental focus due to the nature of the work. For the vast majority of jobs, work is work.
If you're a software programmer or a worker in an industrial factory, sure, you need uninterrupted time to get into the flow of things. For most jobs, interruptions are fine. You can prioritize and either shift focus or put the new request on the back burner.
(which by the way is where I think tickets excel: at keeping track of progress. Not at designating priority.)
Bullshit. Unsourced, but I think I found the study. Sample size: 48 college kids pretending to do a job they have no experience in. Besides, they found that interrupted work gets done faster at the same quality when interrupted! Not that I agree with such a limited study, but if I did, it would support what I'm saying.
Check flow state citations in intro
Sure, "flow" is a thing, but intense, focused concentration on a single task is a small minority of jobs, as I alluded to in my last comment. Most jobs (especially office jobs) require quickly swapping between several different mental points of focus.
Search for “lean [your field]” and whichever lean principle you’re curious about
The least productive meeting I've ever had was where my company brought in some Lean specialist and paid him more money than I think I want to know about to have us play card games and sell us on some oversimplified bullshit that we all promptly forgot after the next day, and gave us some cool certificates. It's a way of thinking about things and organizing priorities that is resonable if you're not an idiot but overly restrictive if you dogmatically adhere to it (which you will do, if you're an idiot). Lean consists of a lot of good ideas that a smart manager will listen to and attempt to implement because they're just good ideas. If you need it wrapped up in a package and labeled as "lean" then you're not a good manager.
I feel like all the various "how to do your job" philosophies are a lot like diets. Sure, they all have pros and cons and some are better researched than other but 98% of it is just make sure calories in < calories out. Picking specific diets is just gonna change that other 2%. For work, the 98% is just "do your job, if a problem comes up fix it". The obvious prerequisite to that is knowledge and ability; a lot of companies are so siloed that individual workers don't understand where they fit in with the company's goals, and that's an institutional problem. And by ability I don't just mean competence, I also mean things like having the permission to fix problems without manager approval, etc. Or the ability to go to someone on another team without having to route everything through your respective managers.
To bring that back to meetings specifically, there's a lot of bullshit meetings out there, I think we all agree on that. But they shouldn't kill your productivity for the rest of the day (or leading up to the meeting). That's not normal. That's why we're in the ADHD community with this post. Minor interruptions may stop your "flow", and if you're in one of those jobs where you need it, that's not good. But for most jobs, you don't need flow. You need flexibility. Minor interruptions should not prevent you from doing your job. For a lot of jobs, minor interruptions are the job, or a critical part of it.
All of the science isn’t based on a single study with fifty college kids. Here’s another one and another one and another one and a meta study. Since you disagree with accepted science and literature, I’m gonna disengage. If you’d like to provide more than your interpretation of the world, I’d be happy to continue. I’d take some analysis on cognitive load, maybe some understanding that people other than you exist, certainly less rambling about a specific bad experience(s) you’ve had with explicit methodologies.
I don't disagree with the experiments themselves, I just think the results are too broadly applied to "work" rather than "the specific task replicated in the study". The meta study you linked actually brings up that point, but it's paywalled and the abstract doesn't give the results. I'd be interested to see their conclusions.
Yup. Thankfully management at my old job understood this, we had one quick 10 minute catchup about 30 minutes into the day every day and that was it.
If a project required several meeting, they were all done as close together as possible over as few days as possible, leaving as many free full days as reasonably could be achieved. It worked really well
I find the idea of mind categorisation very tiresome. I indulge in the concept of simply being and observing. I don’t name my observations, they just are.
Not an interesting answer to your question but an answer nonetheless.
As a neurodivergent who has aphantasia and can't visualize, not like this at all. For me it's more like, what I need is there when I need it (usually), not in a visual sense but a conceptual sense.
I was originally in bupropion for my anxiety and it does help.
I also take concerta after being diagnosed with ADHD, but bupropion absolutely helps with anxiety.
I have a whiteboard in my kitchen. Amongst other things, on it I keep a list of perishable foods that we have on hand. When I am trying to figure out what I am going to cook, I can look at the list and not have to think about every ingredient I own, And only focus on things that will go off soon. I usually don't include the common items we tend to go through often.
Sometimes I also include leftovers that need to be finished, and unusual ingredients I bought impulsively because I thought I wanted to try making something new but than lost focus/motivation to actually make something with them.
It's not a great system, but it helps me waste less.
Never just wait in the kitchen. When something is boiling/cooking/idle use that time to clean.
I'm going to preface this one by saying I have a messy kitchen most of the time. We just take plates there and leave them on the counter. feeding ourselves is hard enough without having to cleanup right after. Then there is some cooking task that requires a but of idle time, I use that time to clean while I wait. This has two advantages: it makes waiting easier (before I did this I regularly undercooked food), and it makes me not leave the kitchen while the stove is on. That is a big no no for me.
Modify instant meals
When feeding myself is hard, I like to modify instant/freezer meals. I always have shelf stable meals ready and a few plans to easily add to them. I find that most of them are a bit lacking in the protein department, so I have some easy ways to add some meat to them (canned sausages, tunna, cheese, peas).
Having a smartwatch with a voice assistant is a godsend
I bought a used galaxy watch 4 and I love it. I set timers and reminders on it all the time, the only time it's not on my wrist is when it's charging. I set timers for the oven, for the washing machine, and in general for something I need to get back to after some time. I set more descriptive reminders to a bunch of things. It finds my phone when I loose it, and it also helped me track my heart rate once I started medication
when it comes to food spoilage and stuff i've just learned to only go shopping for the things i need that day. i'll go shopping more often but it's a little bit easier since i live right across the street from a grocery store.
This is what we do too. I'm really grateful my partner works from home.
He texts me around lunch time about ingredients, then goes to the store in the afternoon. I come home from work and do any prep like marinating, and later on we cook the meal together. ☺️
We both eat better, more regularly, and healthier this way.
A doctor just told me my adhd symptoms are real but its also probably trauma related and prescribed me blood pressure medication and antidepressants (even though i already take antidepressants and go to therapy for trauma)
Depression can worsen or mimic ADHD symptoms and it's common to tackle that first. The ADHD diagnosis is irrelevant, what matters is that your life gets better. :)
It's a good start to a long path :) I'm not a doctor of medicine, and not medical advice, but I know it was really helpful for me when I started recognizing I was on a path to helping myself, not the ADHD, not the trauma, not whatever else it may be diagnosed as, but me, my experiences, my patterns, my brain.
The labels can be helpful for seeing, noticing, understanding, approaching, and getting medical support where needed, but ultimately it's great that the symptoms were validated, and congrats on taking the steps! It's hard work to identify the need, hard work to reach out and get support, and it means you're very likely on a good path.
I've been keeping yogurt drinks around for the same reason that you recommend smoothies. your favorite dried fruit is a good idea too, you get lots of nice dietary fiber that way
interestingly, different hacks have worked and then become unnecessary over time. I used to separate my daily medication into separate pill bottles for each day of the week, with the pill bottle labeled the day of the weekend a.m. or p.m., so I could just go see if the bottle is empty to make sure I'd taken my shit, but that's become unnecessary over the years, a reminder on my phone is good enough. for pills that have to be taken on time though, like my sleep medication, I still have to combine an alarm plus a calendar reminder
getting into the habit of cooking my own food from frozen has definitely been good. I got into the habit of ordering out and that gets real expensive real quick
Yeah, a lot of my systems have been built up by noticing bad patterns and finding easier alternatives. A frozen curry that takes 10 minutes of effort tops, with pre-made masala paste - it may not be the most satisfying, but it's costing me about $4, I'll be eating in less time than ordering in, and I won't get stuck looking at menus for an hour.
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