Look up classic ADHD coping mechanisms. Others have mentioned some in this thread like studying with someone (body doubling) or enforcing a schedule. One big reason procrastination works is that the stress/adrenaline acts like a stimulant that is one of the normal medications for ADHD that helps you focus.
One other suggestion is to study when well rested (first or second thing in the morning). ADHD symptoms can be exacerbated by being tired.
Yeah i was thinking about it a little after I commented, and came to the conclusion that it's no wonder I have anxiety and an ulcer and stuff! good times!
Studying first thing it the morning is what works for me.
I get up early, study/work for a few hours, and then go about my day. If I do something else first any chance at studying evaporates (unless of course there's the looming deadline).
One option is trade offs. Tell her if she study's for an hour, you'll do something she likes. That sometimes works for me.
The other option is to just be as gentle as possible, bring it up in a joke(risky). If she's just trying to get motivated, tell her about all the cool things she'll be able to do or become once she finishes classes, while telling her to study.
All this being said if she is just content with getting a C or B in the class and is confident in her current knowledge to get that, then maybe just let it be.
I was going to say the same thing. Doing it with her, and at the same time every day (or every other day) would be the most helpful if she's like me. Even better is getting her to join a study group with others taking the same exam; it's a lot easier to do things for others who depend on me than for myself alone.
Nothing really. I struggle with the same thing in school and college. I would wait until the last day everyday and rush to do my essays or study. Once I got my meds I have drop that habit of mine but it's still there. So much less stress knowing that something needs to be finish but my mind pushing it back.
I felt that being like 15 years old, then got excited over one girl (that worked as a temporary solution), then she ditched me, so I have a good fat trauma to return to if bored.
For software engineers, problem is management thought you could just hire a ton of people to solve the problem. Then the people who could actually solve the problem are stuck in meetings all day explaining it to people who can’t even understand the problem you keep explaining to them. Fun times.
The people that don't understand the problem usually are management, and I have to spend an exhausting time each day explaining to them why the problem exists and why it takes so long to fix it. I once was honestly telling them their meetings were a big part of the delays. Which then obviously led to more meetings on "how we can better communicate so we can have less meetings and more productive time". I wish I was joking.
(In simple terms, as the number of people increases, the communications overheads also increase, generally faster, so if you have more people a greater proportion of time is wasted, hence work done doesn't increase proportionally to the number of people. Or if you just want to inform management that more people won't simply mean the work gets done much faster just give the example of "If takes 9 months for a woman to make a child, it doesn't mean you can get 9 women and make a child in one month")
Or if you just want to inform management that more people won’t simply mean the work gets done much faster just give the example of “If takes 9 months for a woman to make a child, it doesn’t mean you can get 9 women and make a child in one month”
Management: "I don't have time for theoretical discussions. Marketing says this releases in two weeks and you better get it done. Do you need more resources?"
A. You don’t take on any new tasks before the meeting. You’re already too distracted by the meeting to start anything new. So now you’re sitting there killing time for an hour until the meeting starts. You were doodling in a notepad, missed the start of the meeting, and joined 5 minutes late.
B. You were working on something and didn’t realise it was meeting time. Someone messages you 5 minutes after the meeting started, reminding you to join. You’ve completely forgotten what the meeting is about and it takes you a further 5 minutes to get your bearings.
You made me realize the office provided cues and support. If others were collecting their desk, even if for another meeting, it was clear we were 5 to 10 from the half hour. Also, you grabbed your friends on the way. You hustled earlier to get a good seat. You planned breaks, walks, etc to time around you getting back at a certain time. Comparatively, WFH is an unstructured ADHD hell sometimes.
My meetings don't even last 5 mins. I have an alarm 5 minutes before the meeting so I can't forget about it. If I miss it, someone messages me 30 seconds in. Then at 10:05 we all start working.
The time after the meeting is spent not wanting to engage in tasks you can’t accomplish before end of day, and watching the clock knowing the meeting screwed up the day.
This is great, also if you haven’t read it, you should read Makers Schedule, Managers Schedule by Paul Graham, it really helped me describe this concept to all of the managers I have had hah.
Well, damn, I've never seen that put so clearly before. I literally have been trying to schedule myself like a manager using half-day increments like a maker.
Right? It minorities blew my mind when I read it the first time and keeping that in mind has made my life so much easier overall, and definitely made it easier to describe to managers over the years.
I have found that if the meeting is actually quick (sub 20 minutes) rebounding is not as difficult. When the "quick meeting" turns into a check in + "do we have time to talk about..." + any other number of meandering paths a meeting can travel down, I'll have a hard time getting back into task mode.
Something that helps me is to take a walk right after those meetings. Helps me reset when I get back to my desk.
Every medication has conflicts and side effects, ranging from vitamin absorption changes to actual risk of death depending on your situation. Adding another medication adds to the complications, in a 1+1=3 kind of way.
The more you keep going, the more you're taking on. Soon it becomes a "do I like living or do I want to kill my liver for X benefit" choice. "Brain-zap effects or suicidal thoughts?" (Or, with effexor, both!)
Yes medications have potential side effects, but HBP meds have been around for decades, are well studied and shown to be preferable versus the known outcomes of untreated hypertension.
Hypertension will fuck you up way more than taking an additional medication will. On the topic od the liver, It actually causes new blood vessels to be made to circumvent the liver which leads to more waste in bloodstream not being filtered out.
This is why you make your own work better, improve the team’s work, and position yourself as a candidate for team lead by insisting that meeting timeboxes are enforced.
Even if it breaks productivity by cutting things off the first few times, it will train everyone to get to the point, which will make everything better after the first few breakages.
There are many many important meetings to have and to get done. The worst meeting you can have is a status-update call where you mark off items on a checklist. This can be done by automation and status-tracker boards.
Huh. In theory, at least. In IT I've really only seen the status/blamestorm sessions. If I suggest that meetings aren't a good use of time, it's from that bias.
No the worst meeting is when the entire team — CEO, CTO, sales, engineering — spend all of Friday (every Friday) divvying up the tabs in a big excel spreadsheet, going and re-going through workflow checklists.
I knew they had no automated tests when I joined. I was promised, when I joined, that I’d be allowed to spend at least 25% of my time building an automated test suite for our app.
But we never had time to allow me to do that. So instead of spending 25% of my time developing an automated suite, which would steadily reduce the following until it was zero, we spent 20% of the entire company’s time doing human rspec tests.
One time the CTO asked me “Why wasn’t this caught in testing?” and I said “Because we don’t do any testing”
This is why I can't work in an office. The last one I worked in, people kept waking up to chat "for a sec", when it took at least 10 minutes regardless of the inquiry.
Just as I'm starting to get myself back into my workflow.... "Hey, you got a sec?"
Sure, looks like I'm not going to get anything fucking done today, so why the fuck not. The only people I'm disappointing is the employer. I can have a chat. It's fine. Not like this will negatively affect my ongoing employment.
The shitty part to those workplaces is that chitchat often helps your employment more than actually doing work. Likeable people get promoted, effective workers stay where they're at.
That's a terrible workplace culture, but it's fairly common.
I will say that the support I got from co-workers when I was no longer working there. I got a number of messages about how disappointed they were about losing me from the team, etc.
None of that helped me find new employment, nor did it help me move up while I was there, but I was well liked.
Yeah, I have to wrap up what I'm working on so that I can be available for the "quick meeting" which usually means I'm doing nothing for 15-20 minutes as I can't get started on anything else. If I'm caught not doing well, I get in trouble for the productivity, so I have to pretend.
When the 5-10 minute meeting runs closer to 45, I'm out an hour I could have been working.
Not the end of the world, but when we have these at least once, if not twice a day...
Two meetings a day sounds like luxury to me! I don't have ADHD but meetings still absolutely kill my productivity. The switching penalty for technical tasks is much higher than non-technical people realise.
Meetings are rarely productive for anyone, neurotypical or not, once it gets bigger than like five people and/or hierarchy enters the room imo. Then it morphs into politics and showmanship.
Best meeting I’ve ever had was with two engineers. We were all on time, had prepared well, and lasted seven minutes because there were zero pleasantries, got right into breaking down the subject, and the answer was frank and forthright.
I have about 3 meetings a week because I keep only the productive ones. I refuse to attend bullshit meetings.
My graph would look like the first one except after the meeting there's a huge burst of activity because now everyone is more informed about what needs to be done and how to do it.
To be fair, my work has a culture of ridigly policing meetings to keep them on topic, no chitchat, no rambling, anyone who starts that tends to get called out immediately.
I had a former workplace like that, it was beautiful 🥹
We had a hot seat meeting where each department representative wasn’t even in the room until their individual staggered start time kicked in. One out, one in, cycling through each department until the meeting was over. They get to go back to their work and not be ‘meat’ in the room for fifteen minutes or more, we got focused reports from each as they filed in and out.
Sometimes I miss working for Germans, but “alles in Ordnung” cuts both ways - good luck breaking through the bureaucracy reporting chain and getting quick results
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