This is going to take me a few posts, bear with me.
I've not had a good day at work since coming back from vacation in September. It's been nothing but a grind and I'm pretty mentally toast. I'm really disinterested in my work right now.
"Disinterested" is a key word here. "Interest" for someone with ADHD is _very_ important. Why?
Because without it, it can be _extremely_ difficult to engage one's executive function to do _anything_.
@kyleshevlin Note: I'm not diagnosed with anything, just notice my brain seems to be similar to ADHD/neurodivergent folks sometimes.
I can have good days at work, and I can really dig into what I'm doing. But I have _so many_ interests that sometimes work is just so boring and hard to get started. I was kicking off an epic, and day 1 I was so disinterested in it I worked on a completely different feature.
Thank you for sharing your experience, wish there was an answer
@lindsaykwardell oh this resonates. I sometimes go build something I’m more interested in just so I can feel pleasure, tbh. Sometimes it’s a good thing, too. Like, a dev on a team needs something and I can drop what I’m doing and fix that instead. The urgency can help my executive function as well.
@kyleshevlin 100%! I have gone on the record with my team that I love bugfixing because it can engage me sometimes when other work just doesn't.
@kyleshevlin @lindsaykwardell is there a way to create "artificial" deadlines to help that urgency? Or would that lead to longer term exhaustion/burnout?
@gwmccull @lindsaykwardell that’s what a “sprint” is supposed to do, but you know idgaf about that.
Urgency created by capitalism/business don’t do shit for me.
@kyleshevlin @lindsaykwardell yeah, I don't want to do a sprint either. But as a team, we could say, "we have to get this shit done by the end of the month" or whatever
@kyleshevlin @lindsaykwardell I guess that's a sprint without the ceremony
@gwmccull @kyleshevlin with my example, I had just kicked off a 3 or 4 sprint epic. I had spent weeks planning and coordinating it between teams, and convincing them why it was essential for certain features to be included.
By the time it kicked off… I just couldn’t focus on it. I found I could do none of the tasks I had written, not because it wasn’t urgent, but because the other thing was stuck in my head and I had to get it out.
@lindsaykwardell @kyleshevlin oh, this sounds like what I do. I was supposed to be working on a build pipeline for our website but then I got it in my head that I should change how we handle commits & pushes in our mobile app so I spent a bunch of time diagramming the flow cause I couldn't get back to my original task I until I got that idea out of my head
@gwmccull nope, that’s just begging for burnout & not meaningful to me. And frankly that’s what kinda sucks right now, the grind it induces. Feel like a team of one working on the base components, and it’s all a bunch of bullshit problems made harder because we can’t use any prefabbed solutions.
The interest for trying to solve for 2 platforms has waned. I’m not convinced it’s a good idea beyond the most base primitives anymore.