It’s a slow afternoon, rainy outside and warm inside. Your brain feels fuzzy and everything seems to take twice as long as it should. What helps you buckle down and focus? I’m interested in learning some new tactics, but I’m also just curious about other people’s work habits.
Two things that help me a lot are background noise and a hot beverage. I used to drink regular coffee, but the caffeine does funny things to my stomach. I also started taking medication for my ADD, and the extra stimulation from coffee would sometimes make me jittery. Now I drink decaf coffee or tea. I know there is still some caffeine left, but I haven’t noticed any ill effects from it, and it seems to help me just as much. I guess I conditioned myself to think “I have coffee, now it’s time to work.”
My other big thing is background noise. I can’t explain the science behind it, but from what I understand, a lot of ADD/ADHD sufferers focus better with a little background noise. It can’t be anything that has easily discernible words, so no TV or radio. The best is being in a coffee shop. I even listen to a website that plays coffee shop background sounds.
Heh! You gave my answers already! Hot tea, and music. (For me, it’s baroque music. Give me Vivaldi, and I’m on the job!)
Also, frequent stretch breaks. Not a full five minutes, or even one minute. Just a few seconds to stand up, crackle my spine, breathe deeply, and then back at work. When the butt gets sore, the brain is probably sore also.
I used to think I was weird about the occasional need to just get out. Walk very briskly around the block a few times. Come back and start typing furiously. I mean, there’s this expression about “going to get some air”, but most of my coworkers didn’t seem to do it…
Then I worked in an engineering company where you needed to clock out to get out of your building. There were “rest areas” but you had to clock out. There was a garden, but you had to clock out. Have lunch? Clock out. The central stairwell of every building would have a combination of people loaded with notebooks and/or laptops going wherever and others walking quickly up and down, up and down, up and down and then zooming out in the same floor from whence they’d come, to sit down and start typing or drawing furiously…
You know those comics about how to tell what your programmers are doing based on mouse clicks, typing and what kind of music you can semi-hear from their headphones? I usually keep my music too low to hear from outside the headphones: if you can tell what I’m listening to and you value your life, Do Not Interrupt.
Black tea with milk and either Bach’s cello suites (played by Yo-Yo Ma because YO-YO IS THE GREATEST sorry, sorry, I get I little worked up about cellists) or ocean white noise. However, I’m probably not the best person to consult on this - I’ve actually considered gluing the seat of my pants to my chair so I wouldn’t get up and start pacing and daydreaming.
As an ADHD person, the first thing I was going to say is no distractions. When I walk into my office, the first thing I do is shut off the radio on my boss’s (dad’s) computer. Sometimes he’ll do it when he sees me coming. If that’s playing, I can’t think, period.
Even now, if I’m going to read something on the internet or type a post I have to pause the TV, I just can’t have both going at the same time.
My next thing was going to be caffeine, I’m (legitimately) allergic to coffee, so I never got to fall in love with it the way everyone else did. In college I took plenty of ADD meds, which work wonders. But, recently, I started talking caffeine pills to help knock out some of my nasty headaches and the have a nice side effect of giving me the ability to get about twice as much work done. Now I know what everyone else is talking about and it really makes me wish I liked coffee*. You’re on ADHD meds, so I wouldn’t take amphetamines AND caffeine, but if it wasn’t for that, I would suggest you try caffeine pills instead of coffee to see if it’s really the caffeine upsetting your stomach and not just the acid on the coffee, which would be my guess.
But, seriously, if I need to concentrate, I can’t have any distractions. No music, no TV, no people talking to me or near me (because I’ll listen to them) etc. I latch on to distractions very easily.
*I’ve been doing allergy shots for a while, maybe I should try coffee again.
As in, the app called Freedom, which blocks your internet connection for however long you want it to (from ten minutes to eight hours IIRC).
That, combined with tea, often helps.
Plus, making a “to-do list” the day before. Preferably a rather ambitious one, making you doubt that you’ll make it through just in one day. That’ll force you to really fight for it, struggle, apply yourself.
And also, I… Well… Don’t know if I should share this… Ah fuck it, it’s the internet, here goes: I have tried a few times, sort of as a game I play to myself, to imagine that the previous evening’s “to-do list” wasn’t actually written by me, but by… Odin. Yeah. That Odin. The Norse god.
So the next day, after I turn on Freedom, start sipping on my tea and fire up my laptop, much to my (play-acted) surprise I discover that - lo and behold! - sometime during the night, Odin himself has apparently descended from Hliðskjálf to open up To_Do_List.docx, type away like a fury, and fill it to the brim with runic commands of majesty and glory! Can’t ignore that shit, right? Better get to it! And so, the work gets done…
I get how bugfuck crazy this must sound, but hey, whatever works, right? :o
Hey man, what’s works for you works for you amirite? Besides if it’s not Odin then it’s going to be Tom Brady (or Giselle for that matter), The President, Shiva…anyone. I’m willing to bet we all play games like that to keep us going
This for me. I get distracted WAY easily, but if I know when I have to get something done, then I can work around my distractions and impliment them into my routine.
Other than that: Silence is the devil so in school I would always go to the loud floors of my library and work there for the background noise. During the Summer I would go to a local restaurant order hot wings and a pitcher of beer and sit outside to write my thesis because of the music/cars/other people. Working from home would NOT work for me.
I so agree with several of the previous answers. I, too, need a deadline to completely focus my energy on a single project. Once I know it has to get done, it gets done.
I’m also unable to concentrate if it’s silent. Total silence makes me incredibly nervous. I work my best with mathematical, measured, classical music in the background, something like Bach, Telemann, some Hayden, nothing later than Mozart. It’s the mathematical quality of Baroque music that really works for me.
I find it toxic to take breaks once I really get rolling. It takes me a while to get centered, but when I do, it’s balls-to-the-wall until I get finished. I’ve been known to completely space out people talking to me when I’m in the zone. I don’t even realize they are standing there, much less hear them speaking.
To-do lists are vital. On paper. Next to the laptop. Even when I know what I need to do, I like to actually see it.
Plus, anyone else feel like pay checks are a little too virtual these days? It’s direct deposit, and every two weeks I get an email telling me it’s been deposited. I rarely open the email, since I can tell what it is from the subject line. So when times are bad, once every few months, I like to view my virtual paystub. Look at the nice numbers. Look at the nice numbers that will cease to continue to exist in the future if I don’t GET SOMETHING DONE RIGHT NOW.