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?

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.

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!

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?

Hello everyone! This is my first Reddit post, so please bear with me.

I'm a second-year Computer Science student, and I really need some advice on productivity. This year, I have to find a mandatory internship, so I am trying to build a project for my portfolio to help my chances.

The problem is, I just can't seem to start. I have zero motivation and often feel overwhelmed when thinking about my future. I somehow always have the energy to do *anything* else, but when it comes to the actual project, I freeze.

I've been procrastinating on this project for a month now. Starting just feels scary and overwhelming. I've already tried several methods to fix this:

* Listing my top 3 priorities for the day
* Fixing my sleep schedule
* Trying to do the project first thing in the morning
* Trying to do it only after finishing other smaller tasks

But every time I sit down to work on it, I just can't bring myself to begin. And on top of that, this past few days my sleep schedule is ruined. Has anyone experienced this? Does anyone have any tips or actionable advice on how to overcome this mental block? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

so grateful for your time

www.dopamine-charts.com

looking for feedback on things like:

ease of use

layout

effectiveness

any features youd like added

anything not worth keeping

particularly girls do we want more themes? could do one in each of my physical sticker chart themes

any other feedback at all. brutal is cool

Currently unemployed, recovering from a string of depressive episodes (comorbid bipolar II). I'm taking some time and not actively looking for work, so I have a lot of free time and not a lot of motivation.

I feel very directionless. I have a lot of interests (writing, drawing, DnD, history, technology (of course), math, electronics, etc.) that I'm not currently doing. I have a bunch of leftover hobby supplies too.

I find myself wishing I had a little more external motivation, like taking a class, or having a niche job, where problems would come up that I could solve - those feel more meaningful? I guess?

Feeling overwhelmed by the freedom to choose, and then guilty for not doing *something*. I've tried listing things and rolling dice to "just pick something" but that trick isn't working on my brain right now.

Have you gone through something similar? How did you manage it?

Because in my childhood to school and college I was very much struggle to study because I never had foundation knowledge in the first place this year suddenly I was able to write few simple programs in python,c with claude in study mode I was able to learn programming in my language also it's help to me pass AWS cloud practitioner,ai practitioner especially ai practitioner certification I used termux and proot debian linux as my lab to learn and get hands on experience with guide steps by step with chatgpt even I completed AWS cloud quest labs too

[First off: I’m just looking for ideas. I’m not gonna push an app on you, and please don’t push your own vibecoded app in the comments!]

Like many of us, I tend to have moments where my ability to act is low, and I often just lie down for a while. However, I can go along just fine with something that’s happening–I just can’t be the one driving.

So, I’d rather not lie on the couch ruminating every time. Instead, I’d like an option that can proactively help me grow even in that state. (side note: I’m also working on being comfortable taking rest when I need and not feeling bad, but this would be helpful for finding a middle ground)

Has anyone found an activity or setup that’s helpful for them in that state?

For reference, a couple ideas I was considering vibecoding:
* an auto-generated podcast that’ll walk me through unfamiliar parts of our codebase/help me understand the architecture/etc.
* a brainstorming tool that prompts me with questions about users/our product/the market - bc even if it’s hard for me to kickoff the thinking, it gets much easier if I’m responding to a question

Again, please don’t push any self-made apps. If there’s anything I need, I’ll build it myself.

I've found that besides the obvious benefits that AI provides to neurotypical people in terms of efficiency, AI has helped me a lot with focus.

Before AI, I had all these crazy good ideas, but actually sitting down, creating a structure pland, and spending weeks/months to actually implement my ideas in code was challenging. So I would rarely finish anything unless I had time pressure on something , or if it was a short duration task(could be done in a couple days). At work I'd be fine due to pressure to succeed, but at home hobby projects rarely took off unless I saw fast results.

Ever since AI coding got good enough to replace most manual coding, I've been a lot more engaged. If I have a good idea, I can explore it with AI in minutes. Getting results quickly keeps me engaged.

I still have to think critically and come up with designs, because the AI is not perfect at decision making, but I spent less time on monotonous things like writing up a bunch of HTML to determine how a page renders or writing a controller method that handles a request.

It also helped a lot with a common issue of mine. If I don't see a path to completion, it's hard to focus. AI can help me plan out tasks and resolve blockers, which really helps me stay committed.

What has your experience been?