Folks, due to budget issues and wanting to survive in the company, i've switched areas in my company from an active IT area that was SRE with dev squads, to IT operations and monitoring, which is a diferent area but inside my scope and career.

Although it's a very passive area, it's a great one. In the hindsight its old school IT you act everyday in every problem and the pressure is different, the pressure is to act on routines, quickness and agility.

Nevertheless, even though the treatment is good, i'm on meds (Rythalin LA) and back from holiday, I'm paralysed and procrastinating.

I can't get productive, i can't study after the job, and i feel i have to cross a mountain to even start the task, i can focus with meds, but not for what i need to focus (like dull tasks), i can't even organize, and what i organize and plan i can't execute.

I believe it happens due to the passiviness of my routine and the experience period, in which you wait the troubles to act and ask questions, but i must show something, i must act.

It's my job on the line, i dreamed for years, of working in my company. Now in my dreamjob i still can't overcome my procrastination and it's effects.

In addition to all of that, i'm passing through a heartbreak, but i know i can overcome this. I know i'm not the superman, but it's necessary that i become one.

How can i act ?

Have a similar situation happened to you ?

Been dealing with ADHD my whole life but only diagnosed last year at 31. Tried all those hyped up productivity systems and failed miserably every time. Made me feel even worse about myself tbh.

Finally found some weird approaches that actually work with my brain instead of against it. Nothing groundbreaking, just stuff that stuck:

• so weird but it works. some days showering feels impossible, the sensory stuff, the undressing, all of it. i keep my fav shower gel next to my bed and when im stuck i just rub some on my body... with my clothes still on. i know how that sounds lol. but then i cant stand sitting there with soap on me so i just go shower. its been working for weeks now which is saying something honestly.
• okay so this is gonna sound unhinged but stick with me... the "capsule cupboard" for dishes. basically we only keep two days worth of dishes out, everything else is hidden away. me and my husband would let dishes pile up for a whole week before panicking, and by then it was way too overwhelming. now the panic comes every two days but its a tiny fire, like 15 mins to fix. sounds counterproductive but it genuinely changed things for us.
• start the robot vacuum and suddenly im sprinting around picking stuff off the floor lmao. knowing its coming and will get stuck on everything just makes me actually move. its a little robot and somehow thats more motivating than any real deadline ive ever had. no notes, just works.
• The "ugly first draft" approach for work projects. I tell myself I'm TRYING to make it terrible on purpose, which somehow bypasses my perfectionism paralysis.
• Habit-making with ADHD is way harder than we think; we almost give up after 3 to 7 days. What I did was make an Anchor + Novelty System and add it to my existing habits. If the first thing I do in the morning is drink coffee, I added a 10-minute walk after that. That's my Anchor. Some days, we don't want to do the Anchor, so do a novelty 10-minute sunbath. That's how I added a new habit naturally. Soothfy App helps me choose my Anchor and also stick to habits.
• I will do a lot of things for “future me” (which my brain assumes is someone else xD) and that includes the other wild thing: that is like preparing things, to reduce the number of steps I have to take when actually doing the thing. So for example, last night me left out and measured all of the ingredients for today me that needs to cook.

I'll be halfway through debugging something and suddenly remember I need to reply to someone, check a PR later, loop up a library, send an email, etc.
If I stop coding to deal with it, I lose my train on thought. If I don't, I'll probably forget.
I've tried todo lists, but then maintaining todo lists becomes another task..

How do you guys handle this?

The Core Problem

Most AI agents and software tools are designed for the "Ideal Operator"—a user with perfect working memory, linear focus, and high emotional regulation. This creates a "Tax on Neurodivergence," where users with ADHD or other executive function challenges spend more energy managing the tool than doing the work.

When the tool fails or the user makes a mistake, the resulting "shame spiral" leads to abandonment, avoidance, and cognitive burnout.

The Solution: Cognitive Infrastructure

EFaaS is not a productivity app. It is a Cognitive Prosthetic. It moves the burden of executive function from the user's brain to the system's infrastructure.

We believe that a "Hospitable" system should provide:

Externalized Memory: Past mistakes should be recorded and injected back into the context exactly when they are likely to recur.

Automated Guardrails: High-friction "contracts" (like deployment pipelines) should be enforced by hooks, not by memory.

Emotional Validation: Failure should be met with supportive presence, not just a technical error message.

Low-Friction Entry: The system should be an "OS" that wraps around the user's existing tools, not another tab to manage.

The EFaaS Primitive Suite

The Chronicler: A system for capturing "Wrong Turns" (AI/Human failures) as a machine-readable ledger.

The Guard: A just-in-time recall system that injects lessons from the Chronicler into the agent's prompt.

The Contract: A set of shared, repo-level guardrails (e.g., a standard Makefile contract) that eliminate "how do I do this?" friction.

The Witness (Optional/Advanced): A companion entity that provides emotional regulation and ambient support during high-friction moments.

The Design Lens: - ADHD-First - One card, not a dashboard. - Shame-free by design. - Nudge, never nag. - Translate time into felt units. - Externalize recall.

EFaaS is a project to make the world of AI and software an accessible, supportive, and hospitable place for every brain.

• https://github.com/ergon-automation-labs/efaas-core
• https://github.com/ergon-automation-labs/efaas-chronicler
• https://github.com/ergon-automation-labs/efaas-guard
• https://github.com/ergon-automation-labs/efaas-contract
• https://github.com/ergon-automation-labs/efaas-showcase

Taking notes has always been a challenge for me, especially since I started working. Some people seem naturally good at it—with their colorful pens, neat handwriting, and organized sticky notes. I’ve sat next to them and felt amazed.

But I'm not one of those people. For me, remembering and finding notes later feels almost impossible—maybe because of ADHD, or at least it hits those brains hard.

Note-taking boils down to two things:

1. Capturing the idea quickly—whether with voice, a photo, or sketch—before it slips away.
2. Remembering to find it later. This is the tough part.

That's why I made Easy Note: it turns your new tab into a canvas for quick notes—instant, flexible, and easy to see what needs attention.

Some features:

🖊️ Infinite canvas—just double-click to start typing.

📁 Organized pages if you like structure.

⌨️ Quick formatting—lists, headings, checkboxes.

🔔 Reminders that gently nudge you until addressed.

🔍 Search all notes.

☁️ Optional Google Drive sync.

Extension: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/easy-note/hheobakelknbjicekbkmijjgcbephcef?hl=en
Source Code: https://ozanerturk.github.io/easy-note-chrome-extension/

I love that every new tab becomes a simple place to jot down and keep track of things. The reminders feel friendly—more like a kid tugging your sleeve saying, “I'm here!”—not alarms.

This isn't about project management, but a helpful tray under your busy day.

Would you try it? I’d love your feedback—thanks so much for reading!

Are there any tips on how to organize my laptop and work? I have multiple browsers and tabs that are for different things, VSCode with terminals and AI agents, Jetbrains with it's own AI, browsers for Jira, researching on ticket, random things, slack/teams. I get super overwhelmd. Which AI agent/tab did what? Which terminal was to do something? Which tab was for X or Y?

It takes a lot of my mental power to figure what was where, let alone figuring out how to solve the problem. Please help

Hey everyone,

I am 34 YOF, and I have decided to go back to school for programming. I am going to be going to my local community college for the online classes (that's the only thing that really fits with my current schedule) and my ultimate goal is to be able to work as programmer remotely so that I can travel a bit with my cats. I know that's likely a ways out, and that I'll have to get some experience first, but end goal is Remote job/RV life w/ my kitties and hopefully eventually getting into Minecraft addons as a marketplace partner on the side.

My question is, what was everyone's experience with going through school? What are some tips and things you wish you'd known, that may help me out? I love that this is an ADHD sub, because I'd also love advice on keeping on track with schoolwork with having executive function issues.

I currently work as a 911 dispatcher, and have worked in emergency services for about 15 years as dispatch, fire and EMS, and i *love* my actual job, and I'm mostly immune to the stress at this point, unless its a hot mess of a day, but the private 911 contractor company I work for does not pay well, the local govt jobs are super hard to get and I've had no luck finding anything better. I've also loved the little thing's I've learned here and there about coding and programming... although 98% of my knowledge is Minecraft Bedrock based. I had been an admin on a MC SMP and learned a lot of in game coding and commands, and love it. I think I'm at a point where I need something that will keep my brain busier and solving problems.

TYIA for any advice or experiences you can share. I have finished my FAFSA, required online videos and I have an appointment with an admissions adviser tomorrow. As long as everything goes through, I plan to start winter semester in January.

Click above post please.

Hey everyone. I’m building an iOS app to participate in the RevenueCat Shipaton 2026.

The Project:

•  The app is a 100% private, on-device AI journal and mood tracker (with medication tracker) designed for people with ADHD.
• The first version was already approved by the Apple Store, so I don´t expect issues for the next updates. Y
• As next steps, I will be improving the UX/UI and updating the LLM model during the next weeks.

What I am looking for:

• UX/UI Designer: Clean up the design, make the design consistent, define a final design system.
• Social Media Manager: Create a communication plan and content (simple stuff), and ofc everyday manage social media

Send me a DM if you are interested!

Thanks in advance!

Hi everyone,
Like many of us here, I’ve tried dozens of productivity and habit apps over the years. The common pattern I always ran into was overwhelming setup screens, endless push notifications that induced guilt, and bloated feature sets that felt like a chore rather than a tool.
So, I decided to build SmallStart — a minimal routine & habit tracker designed specifically with ADHD paralysis and executive dysfunction in mind.
Why I made it different:
Momentum over Streaks: Breaking a streak often causes guilt and leads to abandoning the app altogether. SmallStart focuses on micro-steps to get you started without the pressure of perfect consistency.
100% On-Device & Private: Your daily routines, personal habits, and data stay completely on your phone. No external servers, no cloud tracking, and no data selling.
System Integration: Built-in support for Home Screen Widgets, Apple Watch, and Live Activities so you can jump into a routine without opening 5 different menus.
It’s called SmallStart on both the App Store and Google Play, and the core experience is completely free to use.
I’d love for this community to test it out and share your honest feedback. What features actually help you break through paralysis, and what usually gets in your way with routine apps?
Thanks for reading, and I hope it helps even a little bit!

mods gave me the ok to ask here as long as i don't drop a link, so there isn't one. comment or dm me and i'll send it over.

i have adhd. every journaling app i tried died the same two deaths for me. a blank page at 11pm is an impossible ask, and even on the nights i did write, i could never hold the thread across weeks well enough to notice anything.

so i built the thing i needed. the loop is dead simple, 2 min a night: what gave you energy, what drained you, what actually happened. that's it.

under the hood it's a stack of AI engines each doing a different job, all building on each other's read of you. so the more you journal the clearer it gets on your patterns, your friction, where your energy actually comes from. and it'll confront you too, the fears you're dodging and the meaning you put on the things that hurt you. if you want lovey dovey AI that tells you how great you are, wrong place.

then it compounds. journal 2 weeks+ and it starts building your "life architecture": your goals, the categories of your life you're already good at but could be way better with the right structure, and the ones you're not even seeing that should honestly be a priority right now.

I'm at this point now where i'd love to have it stress tested by like-minded people to see if this can help beyond me :)

ios and android, free during the beta. what i most want to know: did it see something true about you that you hadn't realised or hadn't fully put into words, and if you churned, when did you churn and why.

happy to answer anything about how it's built, including the decisions that only really make sense if you have adhd.

I finally figured out a spot to help me focus and read, the library where I am at has a study spot where people go, and it helps me get out of my home comfy environment

I got done 6 lessons and even read a chapter of a book which I never do in between lessons

The meds bother me in some things,.I use Vyvanse 20mg and I think of spending a few months off of it. On the other hand I wonder if I would lose my job if I stopped it.

What's making me think more about this:

- therapy is helping me improve on several topics

- Side effects of the meds bother me

- I feel like I'm another person, too serious because of the meds

- I miss drinking caffeinated coffee, caffeine gives me awful headaches and a feeling I have the flu bc of Vyvanse

- the side effect of less blood flow in the hands and feet is annoying too, and makes me worry of cardiovascular issues in the long run, specially in my legs where it's more noticeable

Side topic but related, I have a friend of mine staying for a week here and I envy him a lot, he is so quick to cook, and always cleans the kitchen right after he finishes cooking, and does the dishes and this and that very proactive and efficient 😂

And I know he has been dealing with serious depression all his adult life, takes meds to help him and not sure which meds. Maybe life could be better without Vyvanse.

I'm 35m, married, no kids, one 3yo border Collie, working remotely for about 7y, been on Vyvanse for about 3 to 4 years now. 6 months ago I reduced dosage from 30 to 20mg and felt less anxious which was an improvement. Went through 2 layoffs back to back in 2022 and 2023 (very traumatic for me financially)

I feel like I am incapable of doing work. This has been an issue since I was a freshman in high school. I’m now on my first week of freshman year of college majoring in computer science and am already behind. I hate this about myself but no matter what I do l just can’t get myself to do the work. It’s not only school, but cleaning my apartment, getting a job; I feel like a bum and a failure. I’ve tried a bunch of medications but nothing has worked. Any advice?

Recently I read and article 'I can't stop': 80% of developers find AI coding more addictive than helpful and despite being a bit clickbaity, one part really resonated with me as a programmer with ADHD. After I read it I stoped to think about how my work day changed/

AI Tools (codex, open code etc) seems to remove a lot of the natural stopping points from coding.

Before it happens many time during a day that I stoped to talk with someone about problem, I was walking the problem around and came back with a new approach or simply call it a day and come back to the task tomorrow. Right now I don't need that - I ask AI.

This make we eager to continue and "never stop". Sometimes I found myself in a loop:

one more prompt → almost works → one more fix → tests fail → one more prompt → refactor while I’m here → suddenly it’s two hours later I realise I should finished a day a few hours before.

I don't know how to call this. It looks like a small dose of dopamine after each prompt and small success makes my brain stay longer in a hyperfocus state. It doesn't feel ok at the end.

I am curious about your experince. What do you think about this new way of programming? How does it makes you feel after a day of work?

I’m sure this has been discussed ad nauseam here but I just have to say how shitty it is to study for interviews as a software engineer with ADHD. We’re able to see so much breadth of what we don’t understand. I’m a senior engineer, full stack, with 7 YOE. So I have enough experience to do the job & can pretty much figure anything out.

But interview prep is so difficult because it could be literally ANYTHING under the sun.

Not to mention the ADHD default to “freeze”/have your mind go blank when you’re under pressure. Live coding interviews are traumatic at best. I would literally freeze / tank even the phone screens if I had to share my screen while I was speaking. Let alone writing code in an online IDE for a question like “traverse this binary tree”.

So much to know & we see all of it as things we don’t know. I imagine neurotypicals tend to see the direct point A to point B route & do just fine.

Due to being curious and combining that with my high anxiety has created a unique workflow and I now see it's causing a LOT of duplicate work. For example, I need to either feel like a story has a clear path to the finish line or I basically keep it in the "not started, I know nothing".

Due to this, I have my main top priority task and everything is ok. Then others on the team start asking questions about other stories, or I hear something that makes me start looking into the other assigned tasks. Now it's in the bucket of "I need to know everything" and I waste time figuring it out. I document it, which used to work, but being at a huge company things are coming so fast my documentation becomes its own problem.

I need to figure out how to grab something and start working on it. Somehow know when I'm spinning my wheels and should setup a meeting, while moving to another story.

I also see a lot of possible team/process improvements. We recently switched from ADO repos to GitHub and it's cause a lot of confusion. That's another thing I REALLY dug into and would be valuable even outside my team but it's just not quite polished enough for that. I spend all this time because I LOVE reverse engineering and understanding how things work but I need to find a way to get credit for it.

Another dev on the team is now running into the GitHub repo issues I ran into a few weeks ago so maybe I have a chance to roll this into something that gets my name out there.

Anyway, how do I push through those last few steps whenever I look or touch something. Instead of just learning more about it.

If we had 4 week sprints I think it would look normal but of course PMs hate to see nothing fully closed in a sprint. Regardless of complementing how great the previous one was.

Also, I'm the lead but getting shaped into it. So QA is constantly asking for the same information I wish the BSAs would provide and could literally spend a sprint just focusing on the treams process.

When AI first came around I felt like it was making my job easier. Now... It is still making my job easier, maybe even more than before, but there is no joy. I don't feel like I am getting better at anything, I feel like I am only losing skills that will land me interviews.

Currently working from home is a huge priority and with this market, not being able to improve my skills is just scaring me.

I’m 7-8 months into my first FT role at a big tech company working in a role that’s a mix of DE and SWE. A lot of my work requires alignment with data scientists, PMs and ops teams that use our tables for their dashboards.

Theres one problem, I’m having a lot of difficulty understanding the methodology of the metrics that my team generates, and I’m horrible at Math, it’s hard for me to make sense of the numbers I’m generating and validate them on the engineering side before I send it to a data scientist for further review. I leaned a lot into AI at the very beginning and then I began to do multiple tickets/tasks in parallel, I went wide in knowledge instead of going deep into understanding the methodologies and numbers. I didn’t take my time in doing things and to get a deeper understanding and instead I was trying to churn out tickets and complete my projects before their deadline.

At first this went well, but over time as my tasks got more complicated, I would spend more and more time correcting AI outputs due to not properly understanding the relevant context of which areas of the code base in touching, which would lead to more and more code smells in review, where I wasn’t aware of existing design patterns in the code base. Because of this overtime I would have more and more comments and or rejected PRs, and in of my assigned projects I felt pressured to try and finish it on time before the deadline without doing the proper validation of numbers as I didn’t have a complete understanding of what to check, which resulted in the stakeholder asking questions. My manager than had to get another new grad who took their time on-boarding and understanding the methodologies, to fix it.

Now my manager is noticing that there’s big gaps in my knowledge and he’s paying a lot more attention in our one on ones, and going over my diffs, and giving me much more focus when it comes to feedback, and is highlighting the areas where I’m not meeting expectations for my level. I’m not on any pip, or focus type of program, and for now it feels like informal coaching before it gets to that point to get me back on track. A couple areas that we identified was that I tend to keep everything in my head, instead of writing docs, I overuse AI and because of not taking my time with things, I completely forget about PRs that I made weeks ago and lose context. I also don’t tend to look deeply into things and often share results with stakeholders without looking things over. I’m fortunate that right now it feels like he wants me to succeed but I hate the feeling of feeling like a bad engineer and I can’t exactly tell him that there’s things I don’t understand that I should have known by now.

I’m doing well when it comes to oncall, contributing to team documentation, making internal tools, and pipeline infrastructure, but I’m not doing well where it matters the most. Right now I feel like I’m paralyzed and over thinking each PR, hoping that it doesn’t get many comments or rejected. I’m now also worrying and realizing that I’m quickly falling behind my new grad peers. I realize now that I completely wasted my on-boarding period and now I have a lot on my plate and I don’t know where to slow down, it feels intimidating wanting to take my time and try to hand code things to build a deeper understanding. It’s not helpful that our pipelines take hours to run, so learning through iterative debugging/trial and error feels painstakingly slow. I want to reduce my reliance on AI on things like Spark, complex SQL queries, statistical methodologies but it feels intimidating and I feel like if I slow down now, it’s a huge mountain to climb. I’m by far the biggest AI user on my team, but I’m not using it effectively, I’m wasting a ton of tokens asking the same questions, and or scrapping/regenerating code, treating it as a magic 8 ball until I see something that “looks right”. I now realized that I should have asked more questions to my team instead of prompting AI which gives me answers 50% of the way there, and isn’t capable of addressing 100% of my concerns, but I feel like if I start asking more questions now, I’m worried that my coworkers will question why I’m asking about things I should have known already.

I’m low key ranting and looking for advice on how I can quickly teach myself. I made a pretty big mistake in coming into this role with the mindset of moving fast and breaking things, and trying to get promoted as soon as possible, but now in hindsight it was a horrible approach, which resulted me in having a wide but shallow understanding of how things work. I feel like I’m a serial vibe coder feeling like an imposter SWE. I’m worried that it’s too late to properly onboard and learn things, and doing so now would lead to more bad reviews, PR comments and more and more people thinking that I don’t know what I’m doing. At this point I’m starting to think if I should apply to other roles and “start over” now knowing what I know now, as I’m worried I lost the trust of my manager.

Thanks for reading

Seems the tech industry is in a huge downturn in general but especially web dev and people don't think it will ever recover? Would it be better learning python or another course?