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 We're only a bit over a century and a few repealed regulations from another Triangle Shirtwaist Factory after all.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
CNoise noise => LPF lpf => dac;
noise.mode("flip");
lpf.freq(120);
while(true) {
1::second => now;
}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
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
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.
Does the writer believe that, or are they pandering?
Many people with ADHD also suffer from complex PTSD (see comorbidity studies), and unless treated, this has effects like social anxiety and emotional dysregulation.
Emotional neglect in early childhood for example can be a ‘silent‘, non-obvious factor at play here (even caring parents can be emotionally unavailable for longer periods of time due to environmental or personal reasons!), which for the later adult means they have not (yet) learned the skill to regulate their nervous system on their own and can make use of a replacement ‘caretaker‘.
As such, it's extremely irritating.
Archive version[0] does not have such problem.
As libraries reinvent themselves for an era where all the world’s knowledge is available on my cell phone, I wish more emphasis was placed on meeting booths.
Because then I’d work from them all day and never consider coworking spaces.
I have this same brain. Working in public at a coffee shop is a great baseline, but it's even better if I can feel the social pressure to not fuck off even if it's made up by my own neurotic head. It's a crazy double-edged sword to wield. Really useful, but I think it heightens burnout and I can't stand to stay in the same place for long due to the palpable buildup of pressure to Go Home.
And on the flip side, it seems there is no remote way of getting the same feeling. Even having my business partner on Discord doesn’t really do it. He doesn’t feel like he is parallel working as much as TOO close in that case.
Google search results is full of this stuff, but first time seeing it at the top of HN
Good episode. Recommend. Be aware that most folks who think they have ADHD really don't. Just like "OCD" and "migraines", people just like to throw labels on themselves.
> Originally published in 1996, this article was republished on February 20th, 2025.
But my idea was a bit more. A lot of people are leaving religions for many reasons. One of the interesting parts of religion, from my perspective, is a community of people meeting at some cadence (e.g. once per week). At that time, they all make a public commitment to some set of values. It's like a shared affirmation.
This led me to wonder if this ritualistic activity is important in a psychological way that is effective outside of theistic or other dogmatic beliefs.
I was thinking of a service exactly like the ones mentioned, except it would also include some kind of intention setting. The word "prayer" is a little loaded and often brings to mind asking a God for some kind of favor. And "intention" is more like a stated goal.
It is interesting that in the modern world we feel comfortable stating/sharing intentions that are productivity related. But we don't share intentions that are more broadly ethical/moral in the same way that religions promoted.
If anyone has examples of services that do what Focusmate/Flow Club/etc. are doing but on a broader scale, let me know.
I suggested the idea of a responsiblabuddy website today to my wife – if we're both in the same town I'd commit to coming to your house on Saturday and you'd commit to coming to mine on Sunday and I'd finally tidy my shed / weld those batteries / list those items on fb marketplace etc. Then I realised I'd need a responsabilabuddy to get me to start and finish the website!
There was a guy running a co-working space in Dublin (Ireland) who would open it up on the occasional Sunday for "Sideproject Sundays" which I found great for focus.
Edit: there are no search results for "responsiblabuddy", I know I didn't come up with that term
As a child, I noticed that my brain worked differently when someone was in my room. I begged my mom to stay in my room so I could clean my room, but she didn't understand what the point was.
To me it was less his mere presence and more the ability to immediately share any thoughts that would occur to me. Also air conditioning.
Same goes with chores - I would much rather have someone be in the same room while I e.g. do the dishes or cook.
I also noticed that if I don't have anyone close, I start talking to myself.
That sounds like a strong argument for working from the office and it is, but to me it doesn't outweigh the disadvantages. For one I could pull this off only because my commute was short thanks to it being vacation season, so traffic was way smaller than normal.
The other critical factor was sharing a space with somebody who wanted to work in a similar way. If you shared that space with somebody who was significantly more or less social, the impedance mismatch could have been very negative.
Personally, I would like to vicariously YouTube double with a “friend” on our private jet. For about four hours, then another hour looking out the window, listening to said friend continuing to work, while I enjoy a well earned inflight (I.e. home made) cocktail before we land on a tropical island.
Someone would like to host videos like that for a living.
But whenever I visit he makes huge breakthroughs and I notice that he really wants me to come visit, and he asks me more and more questions on IM and shares his thoughts and progress.
He has a hard time coming out and saying what he feels but I'm observing that he works better with me present.
What's funny though is that I'm the absolute opposite. When someone is present and only slightly focused on what I'm doing, I act as if I have ADD.
I wonder if a plushie can act as substitute.
Keep it on the corner of the desk when on task. Maybe have different plushies for different tasks.
I’ve not heard anyone mention this aspect of paired programming for people with ADHD, although as a colleague once mentioned I jump from one thing to another, but in the end I’ve done the loop.
I get it. XP, and Agile in general, is all about relying less on individual programmers' focus on the task and more on external checks (a shoulder surfer and automated tests). The revolution of software development in the 21st century is building more effective teams rather than relying on super-productive individuals (the fabled 10x engineers). But I don't have to like working that way, and I don't.
Then, it slowly creeped up at work, and I noticed that initially, most people seemed uncomfortable with it. But, if we were able to build trust and get to a place where we weren't judging each other, just trying to make progress with the task, then things would magically flow and we could solve things that each person individually had been stuck on
We then mostly kept it to a weekly activity, in which we could tackle either specific tickets from a certain list that no-one was actively working on, or on specific things that someone would bring up and needed help with
I believe it's probably not the way to work every single moment, but it is definitely a very powerful and useful tool
Try background noise of any sort, until you find a fit.
I can't pay attention to anything anymore without noise. A little rumble in thy ears does wonders.
I severely question anecdotes that pair programming does anything other than motivate you to not look like a moron wasting time in front of someone else (in the context of ADHD -- there are other uses for it).
That isn't a viable strategy for growth, imo.
Also, if you are new to taking stimulants, you might be surprised how much worse it gets later in life, especially if you have been taking them since youth. There is a non-zero cost (I would say a sacrifice) to treating ADHD with amphetamines or other dopamine reuptake inhibitors / dopamingenics.
If you doubt this, there is very little mention of body doubling in literature outside of blogs:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=%20%22Body%20Doubling%...
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=%22Body%20Double%22%20...
So... you're basically saying it works? Because that's what it does in practice. The other person is the external motivator for keeping attention on the task.
> you might be surprised how much worse it gets later in life, especially if you have been taking them since youth
Got any support for that? (Not being dismissive; never heard of that beyond the usual "effectiveness goes down over time")
> If you doubt this, there is very little mention of body doubling in literature outside of blogs:
Yup, there's still little in terms of specific research, but if you look at the papers about externalising motivation/triggers... it's close to a specific implementation of those ideas rather than a separate thing.
> If you doubt this, there is very little mention of body doubling in literature outside of blogs
Wow, I sure better stop doing everything in my life that there isn't literature on.
Meds. They never quite worked for me, others have noticed a change, but not me; and the side effects became too intrusive.
Working under pressure, I guess this is an issue for me. As mentioned it can be a load on the person you’re pairing with, but so often I can unlock skills pairing with someone that neither of us can ordinarily access.
What I find actually useful is a short, focused meeting with the relevant people before coding. That way, we align on what’s being built, resolve confusion, and then I can just go write the code.
Once I'm typing, I don’t see how having someone else there helps. It mostly just gets in the way — we keep having to stop and explain what we're thinking, which slows things down. And usually the other person gets confused at some point, so I have to stop and explain things again to get them back on track.
* You get unstuck faster.
* When the passenger does background research/slacking stakeholders meaning that the driver doesnt have to context switch. Sometimes they even just know the answer to something you would have to spend 30 minutes researching.
* When the passenger spots something you didnt (antipattern, bug, problem) and they spot it quickly before you dug yourself a hole with it.
* When it makes it easier to take bigger decisions and bigger risks as a pair - risks/decisions most people wouldnt feel confident about taking solo.
* When those decisions are better - fewer rabbit holes are jumped into, more landmines are averted.
* When your respective coding philosophies developed over decades hit one another and you try to synthesize something that accomodates the best of both (this is next level pairing).
Mostly I find the productivity gains come from the quality of decisions being higher, which is invisible short term but overwhelming long term.
It doesnt help much if the person is very junior and needs to have everything explained but if theyre junior pairing is the best way to train and mold them into something better, which is probably what you want, right?
Also, I'm reading lots of comments that are pointing out that they don't like doing pair programming because they do it wrongly.
In the past I wrote an article about it: https://domenicoluciani.com/2022/07/22/misleading-pair-progr..., I hope it helps to clarify some concepts behind this way of working
I've also found it helps sometimes to have the TV on in the other room, on some mindless sports pundit show that I can half-listen to.
When I have some task I don't want to do, especially if it's something no one is expecting me to do right away but I still need to get it done, I go to Starbucks and don't leave until it's finished.
For the most comprehensive and effective solution, medication is still the go-to. Disregard any stigma and misguided fears around it and just get medicated.
...A popup slides into view in the lower right-hand corner.
That's when I closed the tab. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I used this during the early pandemic and found it very useful
Okay. Maybe I can apply this metaphorical technique
> You’re gonna need a literal body
I’m out.