How do you stayed focused on a task when the task involves some type of waiting?
For example, I have a really hard time staying focused at work. The problem for me is, our software can be really really really slow. While I’m waiting for Outlook to load an email, or our internal tooling to populate data, I find my mind is wandering. Often, I’ll start on another task or pick up my phone and just completely forget about the first thing I started.
At the end of the day, I have to figure out why I have 8 half written emails open in the background of my PC.
How do you stay on track when your tasks require patience?
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As a software developer I’ve worked to optimize our tooling to minimize this kind of waiting.
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Be transparent about having ADHD and just task switch, keep a rotation of active projects and if one gets blocked just go to the next one.
Oh, I wanted to add that my company recently switched from Gmail to Outlook. Outlook is fucking miserable in terms of responsiveness and accessibility so, unless you can use a custom front end, I’d just try and steer as much discussion as possible away from email so that you ideally only need to check it once a day.
Yeah, I think of my workflow as working on a painting: it’s not one coherent process, I just keep making progress on whichever bit happens to catch my attention (which keeps changing) until the whole thing is done.
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Idk if this will help your situation exactly but: If I’m waiting in a long line & I can’t do something else (like airport security & you can’t use your phone) — I count backwards from 1000 by 7s. It’s hard enough to keep me distracted on that task, it doesn’t remotely matter if I slip or start over, & it eats up tons of time 🤷♂️
Try not to start another task during the waiting time has worked for me. If you are able to listen to music, try an audio visualizer or something like that. That will give you something to look at while you wait. Or find some kind of fidget. I hope that helps, it has helped me some but certainly isn’t for everyone.
Oh, don’t forget to take small breaks if that helps as well.
I used to eat a biscuit every time I was waiting for my PC to reboot. It was hard to stay thin while running Windows 98.
I have a second laptop next to me so I can do something completely unrelated while waiting for my code to compile. If I watch my code compile, I’ll start reading the logs and I WILL start investigating one of the 243 linting errors I inherited from the other devs.
By the end of the week, I’m sometimes switching between 3 different branches and raising a 5-line pull request for the one thing I was asked to do. I then have a 100+ line PR because I refactored some trash module to shave 200ms off the program startup time.
Back to your question of how I manage waiting. I don’t manage. I have a dream that one day my codebase won’t be trash and I can make a change without invoking an 8 minute wait.
At least now that I have stims, I don’t feel the urge to snack every time my mind idles.
I have these things I call “Sacred Rituals”.
Sacred Ritual #2: If it’s in the book (my daily planner) it gets done. If it’s not in the book, it ain’t happening.
I have yet to find an app that I prefer over an actual physical planner. This year I decided to try a bullet journal and I think I like that format a little better. It works for me because I’m a relentless “box checker” and if I hand write something, I can usually remember it. There’s something kind of satisfying about looking at my agenda and seeing a line through every task at the end of the day.
Planner? You mean the ignored booklet of existential dread? I think most of us have a small pile of them leftover from school that we haven’t gotten around to throwing out.
I do something not on my computer and leave the window thatcis loading up so that I don’t forget about it in the background. I know not all jobs have that option but maybe save any non computer tasks you do have until those moments.
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Begleri. You can order them customized and with magnets as an option, just don’t stick them somewhere and forget about them.
This looks cool. What’s the odds of it flying off and hitting the computer monitor though?
Low risk for the unambitious.
If you are just doing the basics to fidget, you won’t have them go sabot on company or your property. If you are trying out the more advanced flourishes where you break contact or capture, probably do that where you won’t bolo pitch your ADHD tamer into sensitive equipment.
They are also less likely to go forward as they are sideways due to ergonomics.
I find it helpful to do tedious tasks like this on a train (or in a busy place), because then if my mind wonders it just gets entertained by the changing countryside.
