This is where remote work goes off the rails, but then it’s wild how intentionally isolating the implementation of RTO that many large corporations are doing now.
They line people up in rows, put headphones on their heads and wire them up to Teams and Jira to spend the whole day in isolation. Because taking a walk to another floor of building to talk to someone like a normal human being is too wasteful, but somehow forcing everyone to spend hours commuting isn’t.
> They line people up in rows, put headphones on their heads and wire them up to Teams and Jira to spend the whole day in isolation. Because taking a walk to another floor of building to talk to someone like a normal human being is too wasteful, but somehow forcing everyone to spend hours commuting isn’t.
Sure, this is pretty much exactly what I'd expect from companies; wasting the employee's time doesn't matter, but wasting the _company's_ time is anathema. In the absence of something to push back against it, companies will always make decisions like this. We're only a bit over a century and a few repealed regulations from another Triangle Shirtwaist Factory after all.
My employer was very quick to force return to office after covid lockdowns. Like they were willing to pour millions into subdividing offices into closets so people could isolate at work even, but the county health department gave them a stern look and they ended up scraping that and waiting another year to force RTO.
But they actually put their money where their mouth is. Ad-hoc conversations in the hallway, going to chat in person, etc were all encouraged. Holding a meeting over Teams when everyone was in office became almost a taboo. Even team building activities and events saw an increase in frequency.
I would love an offline only work environment. Just a small cadre of tech obsessed smart folks working in a room and talking when they need to.
In grad school we did this. Everyone was heads down, except when they were stumped they'd go to the whiteboard, which was open invitation to discuss a problem, if you had time.
That kind of "opt in" / volunteering help was way more trust building and low pressure than pulling someone from their flow to ask for help. And otherwise being around a bunch of hard workers helped build motivation.
It just doesn't translate though. No work environment I've experienced recreated that spirit of autonomy and esprit de corps. Instead you get open offices and a ton of "calls" and meetings subdividing time. Add in some boss standing over your shoulder and you bet I'll take my basement office over that any time.
It's about maintaining a feeling of control, it's not about collaboration. Thats just the lie they tell to RTO.
Ive worked in:
1) collaborative in office
2) uncollaborative in office
3) collaborative wfh
4) uncollaborative wfh
Personally i found 4 to be the most tortuous (because of ADHD), but 2 isnt much better.
1 and 3 i think are roughly equally good while you're there but wfh has so many ancillary benefits like not commuting that it wins overall.
After experiencing 4 and before I experienced 3 I actually desperately wanted to RTO.
I think a collaborative environment is only quite tangentially related to inhabiting the same space, though. It's more about culture, trust and shared goals.
for me, #3 is the ideal, but communication and collaboration being primarily async is the key. face to face has a place but 90% of the time it “could/should have been an email”, and just exhausts me like nothing else… (“high functioning” AuDHDer)
The commute isn’t paid, so who cares. Let them drive 4 hours a day. But don’t you dare stealing a few minutes in idle talk, because yes, not being valuable every second you are on company premises is stealing. You should feel bad. Now put on your headphones and work through your task list, you miserable ant.
As much as I dislike the isolation of WFH, particularly since leaving the job I had pre-2020 that began in office and started doing fractional work at fully remote companies, I keep reminding myself that offices aren’t what they used to be.
Also, the kind of relationships I had in office as a 25 year old grinding it out on a sales floor aren’t going to be the ones I’d find as a 35 year old in revenue operations.
That sounds awful. I go to the office to chat with everyone, it's incredible how much work gets done when you can just walk over to someone and debug or rubbery ducky in real time.
Yes. I got fired from that place for being too negative and now work somewhere much more sane.
The CEO to his credit went on a campaign to improve the culture, but middle management obstinately refused to change a single thing. I recently heard he got fired by the board too, go figure.
Everybody is different. When I visit the office sometimes, I do it to socialize and talk about things not related to work mainly. And then I get back to do the actual work. If I need to communicate with someone, I simply ask them for their time - they can get back to me whenever they are free. This system serves me and my coworkers well but it's obvious there are many people who prefer synchronous in-person communication for most tasks.
Working in an open office on cool stuff with legitimate friends was the best work experience I've ever had by far. Most days it didn't even feel like work. Now I wfh full time with people who are just coworkers and I'm miserable.
That's the core aspect of my open-office experience too. Working together on cool stuff with legitimate friends? Best thing ever. Take away even one of {together, cool stuff, legitimate friends} - just a single thing - and open-office instantly becomes psychological torture for me, because for some reason, my mind parses this as feeling under threat, and gives me large amount of anxiety to deal with.
I also had a fun experience in an open office, but the key element of it was that the office was only about 15-20 people and we were all on the same project and team.
When I visited the Big Tech office (as a remote employee), it was an entire floor with rows of unrelated people all together. My team was together but it felt much different, more distracting, and hard to have a conversation without feeling like you are bothering other people.
I feel a bit like that, when we in the team started to introduce agile practices. Corporate agile practices, of course.
And while some of those aspects are important and we sucked at it, we are also stripping away any relation we had with each other. Insight into what we really struggle with, releasing tension...
Twist is that it's driven by youngest team members and they love it, because that's what they did in past jobs. So we cut some meetings time, but now we have no idea what we are doing and need more meetings ;) Incentive to actually be on the same page dropped, we are becoming strangers.
I still struggle if I should keep trying to fix that or if it's just "going upstream" and will make me seen as problem maker.
I pretty sure that Teams has tanked productivity in some offices. It used to be that arranging a meeting required finding a physical space. Now some people are spending their days in back-to-back teams meetings and never get any actual work done.
The counter to this is that you can actually have a 5 or 10 minute teams call which was all that was needed to resolve the issue / answer the question / or whatever the meeting was about. Whereas, if it was a physical meeting in a booked room then it would easily expand to fill 30 or 60min or whatever time the room was booked for.
I see this myself. I get a teams call with a manager and a few others, get something sorted and then end the call. Boom. done. The same in a physical meeting would have been a huge time suck.
Having said that. I like being in the office because there are tons of coffee room and hallway conversations that would not have happened if WFH, but were actually really beneficial to keeping everyone informed about whats happening.
I have ADHD. I doubled my productivity going remote and working from a well curated home office.
Charging station for my phone just inside the room, good sitting/standing desk and chair, good laptop, with a dock, 3 displays. A desktop with a vertical monitor I use for teams chat, technical documents, and work management only. Second laptop used for secure prod access tucked under a monitor riser until needed. Whiteboard. Couch with a small station for engineering journaling. I also take video calls from the couch often. Treadmill and elliptical, TV for watching YouTube tech videos while I'm taking a fitness break, bookshelves for my collected engineering journals and useful books. Roughly 275 sqft. Virtual body doubling helps sometimes but is hardly needed.
I am ADHD. I work remotely. My productivity went up substantially after leaving the open office. Body doubling is one of many tools, and it is not a required one. I do however often livestream my coding work in an open teams chat meeting and hang out with others im working with relatively often.
God yes. I’ve spent 8 years working remote before the pandemic hit.
Only after that I started coming into offices again because my local freelance customers demanded it.
Spent most days looking at a bunch of nerds with headphones, being ignored until lunch. I had to drag people out of their cocoons to have conversations. Nobody had any collaboration lined up the days I came in.
I mean I see the collaboration thing, but most teams are more autistic working in-office than I was working remote. Apparently I was the only person reaching to other people all the time?
Meh, we haven't seen anything yet. Just wait till the AI managers take over. Keystroke, app usage, bugs, velocity, eye tracking, stool samples... All logged and dash boarded in real time.
The real value of AI is if they could make one that is capable of looking at dashboards. So much time is wasted making dashboards that nobody cares enough to look at.
An online application of this principle is Focusmate, where you schedule calls with essentially random strangers and just work together. There's very little chit chat and it's not some weird front for a hookup scheme. I've been amazed at how well it works for me. I can't really explain why, after all the other person can't see my screen so I could just be doom scrolling YouTube the whole time, but for some reason I don't. I don't use it all the time, but when I need to get something unappealing done I still use it. I've also used it for exercise, and I've had partners use it for all sorts of weird things that they had been procrastinating. I highly recommend it, I thought it would be far weirder than it turned out to be, and it's really useful.
I 2nd focusmate. I feel like it creates an unwritten contract with my partner when I state my goals for the session. If I get distracted I'm disappointing more than myself.
The more I work with a partner the easier it is to work with focus too. Though I feel it can be double edged sword in some instances where I feel like I owe people progress. Though I feel that's probably a me problem.
Once you've got a few regular partners Focusmate blossoms.
I used https://www.flow.club/ which i found very helpful, they do small groups rather than one on one, and you can sign up ahead of time or join spontaneously
I could have written this. I have ADHD and I've done 500+ FocusMate sessions in the last year. I've found it sticky and helpful like nothing else I've ever tried, and I can't even explain why. It just feels like some kind of brain hack.
There was a recent discussion about body doubling on HN. One of the theories is that prior to modernity, people mostly worked together and that’s how we are wired. Doubly so for us ADHD people, who would tend to partake in hunting, war or such activities.
I've used it for writing sessions and just knocking out random life admin stuff I've been avoiding forever. Definitely not something I use every day, but when I'm stuck, it helps way more than I expected
Hey, you can share your screen in Focusmate. I also started doing body doubling with Focusmate & Focus101 since a month or so, I read about it on HN. Agreed its extremely effective (I have ADHD too). I alternate between the two services so I can stay on the free tiers ;)
This is a completely free discord server that has pomodoro channels, screen share, cam share etc and also tracks your progress. Hope it helps people like it has helped me.
I may have ADHD, I never went for a diagnosis and found body doubling useful at times, especially when I was in school some decades ago, back then I had no name for it. However, I find white noise very helpful with staying on the task and with increased focus. My company moved, about a year ago, into a very cramped office that is also extremely noisy. This exasperated me, I would get drained of energy in a couple of hours and my focus was being severy affected. I even considered quitting and looking for something else. As a last resort I started listening to white noise. I’ve been using white noise (white+brown+pink) for about a year now and find that it helps not only with cancelling out the noise but with focus and staying on task in general. I even use it at home at times. I know this may not be useful for everybody but I’m sure it could help out some of you. I use https://noises.online/ and mix all the types of white noise at the same time for maximim coverage but any type of white noise generator would do. To me it feels like being close to a waterfall. At first my ears hurt a bit after a few hours of white noise but got used to it after a while.
Beyond type II bipolar, I don't have a diagnosis for anything psychological but I'm pretty sure I have ADHD with a touch of Asperger's(based mostly on a review of my behaviors over the past 50 years). But yeah I've found "smoothed brown noise" to work wonders.
I also had some success with wearing a snug fitting balaclava. It's odd, but it worked.
Nicotine helped, but I now have NAFLD and nicotine might be a factor in it so I quit.
Modafinil really worked, despite leaving my body feeling drained and sore. I didn't want to keep taking it though.
In my experience, bipolar can be one symptom of larger brain problems.
You end up with symptoms of a lot of different mental disorders that have a different underlying cause than normal for those disorders.
For example, I have a rather severe impairment of executive function. I have a diagnosis of ADHD, but my internal experience doesn’t seem to match what I’ve read about other people with ADHD and none of the first or second line treatments for ADHD work on me.
I also have a significant overlap in the symptoms of autism, but I do not have the internal experience of someone who is autistic.
Rather than stream noise over the network, I've generated it locally with either Sox or Chuck. I've since lost the Chuck script, but this is one for Sox:
Unless is a very small company you won't be the only one with this problem and management should do something about if it drains your energy which long-term will cause you health problems.
To help me with my ADHD (diagnosed at 42) I put on some Jungle[A], listen to the repetitive Mountain[B] or even a modern classic like Phillip Glass or Terry Riley[C]. I know it sounds mad, but it gets some body part whipping and just overwhelms any distracting thought I could possibly have.
as an AuDHDer, noise cancellation and white noise are critical for my mental health (at work and elsewhere), but near constant _interruptions_ of my flow state by coworkers in the same physical space causes me almost visceral pain, and has only been amplified to unsustainable levels (for me) from forced RTO. I started fully remote at my current employer, so I communicate effectively and prolifically on async comm channels like slack, but even that can get to distractible levels for me. I recently implemented schedulable “office hours” for folks to access my time, so we’ll see if that helps in either case.
If my current mitigations don’t help, i’ll be forced to file for a wfh exception, but those tend to be denied where i work (fang). I’m already on medications to manage my stressors (of which there are many), so i feel like i’m almost out of options in an RTO world…
This issue is compounded by presenting as neurotypical, as i’m forced to mask when sharing physical space with neurotypicals. this is exhausting on its own, and i’ve found to be largely unavoidable in a large setting via trial and error spanning 20+ years in industry.
AuDHD is almost a full contradictions of needs. I excel with body doubles, but they can’t regularly interact with me without me loosing the current “thread”. I crave novelty, but require structure. It’s a difficult thing to understand, let alone live with…
if my post above resonates with you, i can say from personal experience that inaction and carrying on the status quo (continual masking, enduring the “pain”, etc) inevitably leads to burnout and possible further mental and physical health complications. Please don’t just “tough it out”, you won’t like the end results. It takes a toll on you physically and mentally that can take months or years to recover from (if you ever do)
Not ADHD (as far as I know), but I'm terribly prone to procrastination. I too find white noise helpful - I use and would recommemd an Android app called "A Soft Murmer" which lets you have rain noise and throws in a rumble of thunder etc. from time to time.
I feel the same about being drained with noises.
I use white noise too. But make sure to only use white noise when I want to focus, as it feels like I've conditioned myself to be focused when it's on.
Previously, I had it permanently on and I found the effectiveness dropped
That actually sounds super familiar... I've had a similar experience with noisy work environments just tanking my energy and focus. White noise is such an underrated lifesaver. It's wild how something so simple can create that mental "bubble" where your brain finally chills out enough to focus.
I come to shill my webapp for background noise because it has a twist not appearing in anyone's recommendations.
Whenever I'm switching between tasks (thinking vs reading vs writing) I'd either turn the sound off or on, given I needed more or less attention at the moment. Minor problem with that was that sometimes unexpectedly I'd stick with the new task longer than expected, start to get bored, but w/e background sound I had on didn't match the task, so I'd look for something else... Overall a bit annoying for some groups of tasks.
I'm experimenting with mixing music with podcasts with extra noise and turning it on and off, but I also made https://stimulantnoi.se/ (with extra reading on psychological basis of the design and link to open source standalone desktop app on https://incentiveassemblage.substack.com/p/why-is-nobody-ser...). It allows for mixing (including uploading additional) sounds into sets and binds switching between those whole sets to media keys for quick access.
Nice job. I played with the industrial set (grouping) and it worked well. The groupings concept looks good. And the intensity adjusting is an interesting concept. I've tried or signed up for a lot of ambient sites over the years, and this one definitely introduces a few concepts I haven't previously seen. Good luck!
For some reason I don't hear anything in Safari on macOS. I tried disabling all of my browser-based content blockers. I see the 'audio playing' icon but I don't hear anything.
Interesting. I'm surprised how much I enjoyed the Human playlist, especially the High setting with those percussive sounds that were quite grating at first. I could easily see myself getting in a productive trance to that. It reminded me of why I like techno, drone, and ambient music. I'm surprised how well BPM Forest worked too. Imo it could use some variety in kicks and longer forest/rain loops.
There’s an app/service called Endel which makes music I find helpful for focus too. My family finds it eerily void and dead, like it’s technically music but lacks any soul. I don’t mind; I don’t listen to it for entertainment. It’s like the white noise.
I also like the white/brown/pink noise a lot. I think sometimes I crave a bit more texture and feature in the noise and so I’ll pull up endel, but I get by really well without it a lot of the time too.
1. I hope you're saying your ears hurt from physically wearing headphones, not from volume.
2. Many responses in this thread self-diagnose with many disorders because of the need to wear headphones in an open office environment. Open office environments are like emergency rooms filled with crying babies -- they feel almost intended to distract. This is true of "baseline", "normal", "non-disordered", whatever the codeword of the day is for average humans.
Open offices save employers more money (they hope) in space than they lose in lowered productivity. There's no reason to think your average Joe or Jane can just carry on working in one as efficiently as in a private office.
White noise and similar soundscapes (rain, water…) help me focus much better than pure silence.
Perhaps a predictable sound that drowns all others allows my brain to “shut down” the little part of it that is on edge waiting for noises and distractions.
I actually wrote my diploma theses for 6 month in a very crowded student bar / café . I didn't even suspected such diagnosis, but I guess it is not so much about diagnosis as finding the things that work. A former colleague always had TV series on while working. Brains are sometimes strange. Also now beyond 45, it seems I have to find new things that work for me.
Notifications need to be off if you’re doing focused work, and good managers will not only know this, but support you in it, or even expect you to set this boundary in order to do your best work.
Simplest version is to have agreed upon avenues of escalation, which can be ”if someone doesn’t respond in the timeframe you need, pick up the phone and call them, and if they still don’t respond, pick up the phone and call their boss”.
Then from your end, you just need to make sure your boss is set as a favorite contact or whatever is required for them to be allowed through your do-not-disturb settings.
You can also set other routines like weekly check in meetings with certain groups. Often times people don’t need you right now, but they think blowing you up on slack is the only way to get what they need. By setting aside a couple hours one morning and having several “office hours” style meetings, you give people the comfort of knowing they have a time they can get your attention, and that often cuts down on 50-80% of the ad-hoc interruptions.
I have my notifications for Slack and Outlook turned off. I get a Dock tile badge, and Slack does ping my wrist via smartwatch, but not much else. Most emails I get are not vitally important, nor do most of the things I get on Slack immediately required reading or actionable.
I’m sure this works for some people. Personally I loathe social interaction of any kind, and mixing that with engineering gets me to my mental/emotional limits much faster.
On my own I can work about 2 hours on and 10 mins off, sometimes for 10+ hours total. If I have a 2 hour collab coding call, that’s about all I’ll do that’s productive that day. I’l literally have to spend the rest of that day mentally recovering from the stress of the call.
Whenever I read about pair programming as a standard technique (like XP) it sounds so great in theory but in practice I find it extremely draining whenever I’ve dabbled.
If you have psychological safety and develop a bond of trust with the person it is far less draining. Those things need to be developed and the working environment needs to make them possible, though.
I find that the fact that I rarely get stuck for long and the mistakes I make tend to get caught more quickly makes pairing vastly more productive in practice.
The productivity isnt directly in the speed of code output but the compounded effect over time of it being higher quality - meaning vastly less time doing post hoc debugging, bugfixing, reworking code, etc. It is invisible over the space of one or two tickets, visible over weeks and overwhelming over months.
At one company my pairing team routinely (and quietly) worked 9-3:30pm or 4pm while the surrounding nonpairing teams worked overtime and still delivered way less. If you can nail it it really is almost unreasonably effective.
In general I agree but with a caveat: for me it's draining when there is a big difference in thought speed/way of thinking between me and my peer. If I'm with someone "on the same page" we can achieve awesome results, but if OTOH I have to explain why my brain just jumped to that other part, give context etc this is terribly draining for me as well, and after a 2 hours session I'm out for 2-3 hours when I need to recharge.
Like other bad ideas (TDD) it seemed to rise to prominence during the heydey of Ruby and untyped JS, when it was so much easier to fuck everything up. I think lots of managers haven't written a line of code since then and still hold such a cargo cult mentality about prescribing it.
It does a massive disservice to everybody involved, especially juniors who are never given the chance to prove themselves.
Same here. I started an in-office job recently as the company’s highest ranking engineer and my productivity has plummeted vs WFH.
I found myself having to allocate mental bandwidth to my environment to allow for the possibility of being interrupted by others, so I ended up both less productive and more tired.
What you see as an interruption is somebody else clearing their path. It could be that your personal productivity drop is resulting in a productivity gain for the group.
Idk, was diagnosed very young and haven’t seen anyone professionally about it as an adult. Tbh I didn’t know there were different subtypes until your comment.
I struggled a lot with impulse control but that’s managed well with meds. I often “zone out” when doing.. well pretty much anything that I’m not very interested in
Not the OP, but I have the "yeah you have ADHD according to this survey" from my GP, along with an adderall Rx. I didn't know there were documented subtypes.
Honestly, your solo workflow sounds super efficient. If you've found a rhythm that lets you focus and stay productive without burning out, that's gold.
My roommate comes in and talks, and while they're doing that I automatically start cleaning my room. I am a slob otherwise. But something about that, it gives me a chance to be away from "online" while also giving me a sort of mental "space"/distraction so I'm not focused/anxious/worried and seems to help me reduce my "executive dysfunction". I also have a tendency to place self-demands and so it makes me doing things I want to do (not like cleaning room but projects) more difficulty because I feel the pressure to do it, so I resist. Having someone in the room helps me relax that self-demand. I don't "should" I just "do".
I used to do a lot more socially and my computer was in the living room with the roomie, but I'm just in my room most of the time, and this is making me think - maybe I should go back to the living room with my computer (since she's out there too most days), maybe that will help me be more productive in programming/projects, etc...
>My roommate comes in and talks, and while they're doing that I automatically start cleaning my room.
The moment a guest enters my apartment, my body immediately begins cleaning my kitchen and putting away dishes and cleaning up messes or tidying my living room.
I never thought of this in the body doubling context, but as a self-soothing thing for social pressure. Or maybe genuine guilt for the state of my apartment. It gives me something to do instead of just standing around maintaining eye contact (and the second effect of making the place nicer to exist in, for me and my guest).
Kind of reminds me of another social self-soothing thing, where if I'm not entirely comfortable with a guest (a newer friends or romantic partner) I subconsciously place something in between us, like standing on opposite sides of the kitchen island.
>Having someone in the room helps me relax that self-demand. I don't "should" I just "do".
I feel this in my bones. I've been living alone for a few years and I'm actually going to move in with a roommate soon to see if it can keep me "online" more often without draining me. I totally think it's a good idea to try hang or work in the living room with your laptop.
I wfh pretty much 100%, and have inattentive adhd. I’ll occasionally go spend a day at a WeWork, either with other workmates, or by myself.
On days that I’m with workmates, I get nothing done. On days I’m by myself, sitting by strangers, I’m really productive. I can just lock in and chug through my work. It never made sense to me until I learned about body-doubling, kind of feels like what I was inadvertently doing on those solo days.
I have a similar phenomenon - I wfh and if my wife is home while I try to work I find it more difficult to get in the zone than if I’m home alone. But if I go to a coworking space with others around I find it easier.
Last week I finally rented a small private office. The difficulty finding coworking spaces that offered external monitors, 24/7 access, and direct sunlight in a part of NYC that was convenient led me to just get the private office.
Renting was a no brainer after I tried it for a day. The little room outside home for me just to work felt shockingly great. But now I wonder if in time I’ll regret not going with a dedicated shared desk where I’m around others.
The last time I had a sort-of externally imposed schedule was at school. At university, attendance wasn’t required, nobody cared as long as I passed the tests. Since then, which is over 20 years ago, I have exclusively worked jobs that are WFH, with teams on various time zones and frequent travel (for others, not me), so everybody is used to scheduling calls via doodle etc.
Readit News
They line people up in rows, put headphones on their heads and wire them up to Teams and Jira to spend the whole day in isolation. Because taking a walk to another floor of building to talk to someone like a normal human being is too wasteful, but somehow forcing everyone to spend hours commuting isn’t.
It’s the worst of both worlds.
Sure, this is pretty much exactly what I'd expect from companies; wasting the employee's time doesn't matter, but wasting the _company's_ time is anathema. In the absence of something to push back against it, companies will always make decisions like this. We're only a bit over a century and a few repealed regulations from another Triangle Shirtwaist Factory after all.
But they actually put their money where their mouth is. Ad-hoc conversations in the hallway, going to chat in person, etc were all encouraged. Holding a meeting over Teams when everyone was in office became almost a taboo. Even team building activities and events saw an increase in frequency.
In grad school we did this. Everyone was heads down, except when they were stumped they'd go to the whiteboard, which was open invitation to discuss a problem, if you had time.
That kind of "opt in" / volunteering help was way more trust building and low pressure than pulling someone from their flow to ask for help. And otherwise being around a bunch of hard workers helped build motivation.
It just doesn't translate though. No work environment I've experienced recreated that spirit of autonomy and esprit de corps. Instead you get open offices and a ton of "calls" and meetings subdividing time. Add in some boss standing over your shoulder and you bet I'll take my basement office over that any time.
Cause that's just... the worst.
Ive worked in:
1) collaborative in office
2) uncollaborative in office
3) collaborative wfh
4) uncollaborative wfh
Personally i found 4 to be the most tortuous (because of ADHD), but 2 isnt much better.
1 and 3 i think are roughly equally good while you're there but wfh has so many ancillary benefits like not commuting that it wins overall.
After experiencing 4 and before I experienced 3 I actually desperately wanted to RTO.
I think a collaborative environment is only quite tangentially related to inhabiting the same space, though. It's more about culture, trust and shared goals.
Also, the kind of relationships I had in office as a 25 year old grinding it out on a sales floor aren’t going to be the ones I’d find as a 35 year old in revenue operations.
The CEO to his credit went on a campaign to improve the culture, but middle management obstinately refused to change a single thing. I recently heard he got fired by the board too, go figure.
When I visited the Big Tech office (as a remote employee), it was an entire floor with rows of unrelated people all together. My team was together but it felt much different, more distracting, and hard to have a conversation without feeling like you are bothering other people.
And while some of those aspects are important and we sucked at it, we are also stripping away any relation we had with each other. Insight into what we really struggle with, releasing tension...
Twist is that it's driven by youngest team members and they love it, because that's what they did in past jobs. So we cut some meetings time, but now we have no idea what we are doing and need more meetings ;) Incentive to actually be on the same page dropped, we are becoming strangers.
I still struggle if I should keep trying to fix that or if it's just "going upstream" and will make me seen as problem maker.
I see this myself. I get a teams call with a manager and a few others, get something sorted and then end the call. Boom. done. The same in a physical meeting would have been a huge time suck.
Having said that. I like being in the office because there are tons of coffee room and hallway conversations that would not have happened if WFH, but were actually really beneficial to keeping everyone informed about whats happening.
The article is specifically about those with ADD/ADHD, not a generalization.
Charging station for my phone just inside the room, good sitting/standing desk and chair, good laptop, with a dock, 3 displays. A desktop with a vertical monitor I use for teams chat, technical documents, and work management only. Second laptop used for secure prod access tucked under a monitor riser until needed. Whiteboard. Couch with a small station for engineering journaling. I also take video calls from the couch often. Treadmill and elliptical, TV for watching YouTube tech videos while I'm taking a fitness break, bookshelves for my collected engineering journals and useful books. Roughly 275 sqft. Virtual body doubling helps sometimes but is hardly needed.
Only after that I started coming into offices again because my local freelance customers demanded it.
Spent most days looking at a bunch of nerds with headphones, being ignored until lunch. I had to drag people out of their cocoons to have conversations. Nobody had any collaboration lined up the days I came in.
I mean I see the collaboration thing, but most teams are more autistic working in-office than I was working remote. Apparently I was the only person reaching to other people all the time?
Once you've got a few regular partners Focusmate blossoms.
It’s not perfect for keeping me on task, but does at least keep me at my desk.
This is a completely free discord server that has pomodoro channels, screen share, cam share etc and also tracks your progress. Hope it helps people like it has helped me.
I also had some success with wearing a snug fitting balaclava. It's odd, but it worked.
Nicotine helped, but I now have NAFLD and nicotine might be a factor in it so I quit.
Modafinil really worked, despite leaving my body feeling drained and sore. I didn't want to keep taking it though.
The word “beyond” is doing some heavy lifting in that sentence (I say as someone with the same diagnosis)
You end up with symptoms of a lot of different mental disorders that have a different underlying cause than normal for those disorders.
For example, I have a rather severe impairment of executive function. I have a diagnosis of ADHD, but my internal experience doesn’t seem to match what I’ve read about other people with ADHD and none of the first or second line treatments for ADHD work on me.
I also have a significant overlap in the symptoms of autism, but I do not have the internal experience of someone who is autistic.
sox --no-show-progress -c 2 --null synth 3600 brownnoise band -n 1500 499 tremolo 0.05 43 reverb 19 bass -11 treble -1 vol 14dB fade q .01 repeat 9999
To help me with my ADHD (diagnosed at 42) I put on some Jungle[A], listen to the repetitive Mountain[B] or even a modern classic like Phillip Glass or Terry Riley[C]. I know it sounds mad, but it gets some body part whipping and just overwhelms any distracting thought I could possibly have.
[A] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7boqBRRiQw [B] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGyVgm6uiSk [C] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRaa34E8tXQ
If my current mitigations don’t help, i’ll be forced to file for a wfh exception, but those tend to be denied where i work (fang). I’m already on medications to manage my stressors (of which there are many), so i feel like i’m almost out of options in an RTO world…
This issue is compounded by presenting as neurotypical, as i’m forced to mask when sharing physical space with neurotypicals. this is exhausting on its own, and i’ve found to be largely unavoidable in a large setting via trial and error spanning 20+ years in industry.
AuDHD is almost a full contradictions of needs. I excel with body doubles, but they can’t regularly interact with me without me loosing the current “thread”. I crave novelty, but require structure. It’s a difficult thing to understand, let alone live with…
Whenever I'm switching between tasks (thinking vs reading vs writing) I'd either turn the sound off or on, given I needed more or less attention at the moment. Minor problem with that was that sometimes unexpectedly I'd stick with the new task longer than expected, start to get bored, but w/e background sound I had on didn't match the task, so I'd look for something else... Overall a bit annoying for some groups of tasks.
I'm experimenting with mixing music with podcasts with extra noise and turning it on and off, but I also made https://stimulantnoi.se/ (with extra reading on psychological basis of the design and link to open source standalone desktop app on https://incentiveassemblage.substack.com/p/why-is-nobody-ser...). It allows for mixing (including uploading additional) sounds into sets and binds switching between those whole sets to media keys for quick access.
I also like the white/brown/pink noise a lot. I think sometimes I crave a bit more texture and feature in the noise and so I’ll pull up endel, but I get by really well without it a lot of the time too.
Open offices save employers more money (they hope) in space than they lose in lowered productivity. There's no reason to think your average Joe or Jane can just carry on working in one as efficiently as in a private office.
Perhaps a predictable sound that drowns all others allows my brain to “shut down” the little part of it that is on edge waiting for noises and distractions.
Seems like something that could lead to permanent hearing damage
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32998960
Simplest version is to have agreed upon avenues of escalation, which can be ”if someone doesn’t respond in the timeframe you need, pick up the phone and call them, and if they still don’t respond, pick up the phone and call their boss”.
Then from your end, you just need to make sure your boss is set as a favorite contact or whatever is required for them to be allowed through your do-not-disturb settings.
You can also set other routines like weekly check in meetings with certain groups. Often times people don’t need you right now, but they think blowing you up on slack is the only way to get what they need. By setting aside a couple hours one morning and having several “office hours” style meetings, you give people the comfort of knowing they have a time they can get your attention, and that often cuts down on 50-80% of the ad-hoc interruptions.
Async doesn't mean "rarely", it means you must set the pace. Notifications contradict this paradigm, so they are completely off.
I switch to these tabs/apps manually, at my own pace, which is sometimes relaxed, but at times can be super-dense.
On my own I can work about 2 hours on and 10 mins off, sometimes for 10+ hours total. If I have a 2 hour collab coding call, that’s about all I’ll do that’s productive that day. I’l literally have to spend the rest of that day mentally recovering from the stress of the call.
I find that the fact that I rarely get stuck for long and the mistakes I make tend to get caught more quickly makes pairing vastly more productive in practice.
The productivity isnt directly in the speed of code output but the compounded effect over time of it being higher quality - meaning vastly less time doing post hoc debugging, bugfixing, reworking code, etc. It is invisible over the space of one or two tickets, visible over weeks and overwhelming over months.
At one company my pairing team routinely (and quietly) worked 9-3:30pm or 4pm while the surrounding nonpairing teams worked overtime and still delivered way less. If you can nail it it really is almost unreasonably effective.
Funny enough, the two guys who pushed for it never did any pairing.
The CEO put the kibosh on it when he noticed the staff was not only unproductive but also massively unhappy.
It does a massive disservice to everybody involved, especially juniors who are never given the chance to prove themselves.
I found myself having to allocate mental bandwidth to my environment to allow for the possibility of being interrupted by others, so I ended up both less productive and more tired.
I struggled a lot with impulse control but that’s managed well with meds. I often “zone out” when doing.. well pretty much anything that I’m not very interested in
https://imgur.com/a/T6tY7dc
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I used to do a lot more socially and my computer was in the living room with the roomie, but I'm just in my room most of the time, and this is making me think - maybe I should go back to the living room with my computer (since she's out there too most days), maybe that will help me be more productive in programming/projects, etc...
The moment a guest enters my apartment, my body immediately begins cleaning my kitchen and putting away dishes and cleaning up messes or tidying my living room.
I never thought of this in the body doubling context, but as a self-soothing thing for social pressure. Or maybe genuine guilt for the state of my apartment. It gives me something to do instead of just standing around maintaining eye contact (and the second effect of making the place nicer to exist in, for me and my guest).
Kind of reminds me of another social self-soothing thing, where if I'm not entirely comfortable with a guest (a newer friends or romantic partner) I subconsciously place something in between us, like standing on opposite sides of the kitchen island.
>Having someone in the room helps me relax that self-demand. I don't "should" I just "do".
I feel this in my bones. I've been living alone for a few years and I'm actually going to move in with a roommate soon to see if it can keep me "online" more often without draining me. I totally think it's a good idea to try hang or work in the living room with your laptop.
On days that I’m with workmates, I get nothing done. On days I’m by myself, sitting by strangers, I’m really productive. I can just lock in and chug through my work. It never made sense to me until I learned about body-doubling, kind of feels like what I was inadvertently doing on those solo days.
Last week I finally rented a small private office. The difficulty finding coworking spaces that offered external monitors, 24/7 access, and direct sunlight in a part of NYC that was convenient led me to just get the private office.
Renting was a no brainer after I tried it for a day. The little room outside home for me just to work felt shockingly great. But now I wonder if in time I’ll regret not going with a dedicated shared desk where I’m around others.
Too bad this is incompatible with the society. So we got to pay the context switching tax.