In this episode, we interview Chris Ferdinandi about learning how to thrive as a developer with ADHD, from his backstory and how he got into coding, to tactics he’s learned along the way to become a highly skilled and effective developer.
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Mentioned in This Episode
- Blood Orange Tangerine Spindrift
- ADHD Jesse
- ADHD ftw
- How to ADHD
- Getting Things Done by David Allen
- Obsidian
Transcript
Chris H.: Welcome to the Accessibility Craft podcast, where we explore the art of creating accessible websites while trying out interesting craft beverages. This podcast is brought to you by the team at Equalize Digital, a WordPress accessibility company, and the proud creators of the Accessibility Checker plugin. And now, on to the show.
Hey everybody, it’s Chris, and we’re here for episode 76 of the Accessibility Craft podcast. Our normal host Amber is on assignment this week in Ottawa, Canada and I am here today with Steve.
Steve: Hello everyone, how’s it going?
Chris H.: And we also have a special guest today, Chris Ferdinandi. Chris, do you want to introduce yourself to our audience?
Chris F.: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me on. So, hi, I’m Chris, I am a web developer I have ADHD, and I’ve been focusing lately on helping other developers with ADHD thrive and Not feel like they’re struggling as much in their careers. Cause sometimes ADHD can create some fun challenges to getting stuff done.
Chris H.: That’s amazing. And we are looking forward to talking all about that and getting your perspective and your insights. But before we do that, we actually have a beverage to taste today. So I’m excited to introduce our, yep. Yep. Chris is modeling that there. So we’ve got Spindrift Sparkling Blood Orange & Tangerine.
So this is a non alcoholic. Fruity Soda. And my understanding is it is a carbonated water combined with real fruit juice and no artificial flavors. And I’ve been familiar with Spindrift as a brand for years. I think they actually got their start on the East coast in the Massachusetts area, which is one of the reasons I chose this.
Chris F.: I appreciate that.
Chris H.: Yeah, absolutely. So, let’s go ahead and crack these open and feel free to get the can crack on your mic. That’s always fun.
Steve: There we go.
Chris H.: But yeah we’re not super formal about this Chris. So let’s just dive in. Let’s see what we think.
Chris F.: Pinky out is the only appropriate way to drink seltzers.
Steve: That’s right.
Chris H.: All right. Yep, that’s blood orange and a little bit of tangerine in there. It’s nice and citrusy, not too sweet. What do y’all think?
Chris F.: I’m not overly familiar with what a blood orange tastes like, but I definitely taste the tangerine and it, it does what it says on the label. The disclosure is I am very much into seltzers.
And I haven’t encountered one I wouldn’t drink, so I’m really difficult to please in this regard.
Chris H.: So what is your what is your impression, Steve? What do you think of it?
Steve: I mean, it’s orange, right? Let me dumb it down a little bit. It tastes orange to me. Not very, it’s not very sweet because it’s unsweetened. I don’t mean it’s easy.
Chris H.: Yeah. It reminds me like when I was when I was a kid my, my parents were always trying to save money cause there were, three of us and they would buy orange juice and they would tell us to cut the orange juice with water to stretch it along a little further.
And so we’d always do 50, 50 water and orange juice. And this kind of reminds me of that, but with bubbles, but A pleasant flavor. Like it’s nice and refreshing.
Chris F.: Yeah. I I would easily drink a whole case of this and in a week or so.
Steve: Yeah. Well, you got a whole case, right?
Chris F.: I did get a whole case.
I’m very, thank you. I’m very excited about that.
Chris H.: That’s the fun behind the seeds of this. When we send beverages out to people as it’s often. Cheaper to ship everybody a case of something off of Amazon than it is to get one case to me and then split it up and then mail it out through FedEx or UPS.
It ends up being like the same. So I’m like, everybody just gets a bunch. And
Chris F.: I don’t know why I was expecting like a box with some of the like, The shredded cardboard and just a single can in there.
Steve: Yeah.
Chris F.: So when the whole case showed up, I was like, man, this is awesome. I drink like a
king this week.
Steve: Yeah, that’s right. And then the family, my family immediately dives into it. And I was like, I have to wait. I have, I can’t spoil the.
Chris H.: Yeah. Steve gets all the previews from his family. They tell him about the drink for days or weeks, depending on how early he gets it. Is it good? Is it gross? What does everybody think?
So, so what’s the impression from the family on this one, Steve? Is everybody like it?
Steve: Yeah. My wife likes it a lot. Yeah, it’s pretty good.
Chris H.: What I will say about this too is they’re hitting the mark on price point. We’ve tried some more expensive things, but this was, I think Maybe 14 bucks for a 28 pack.
It was super reasonable actually. Yeah. So if you’re looking for something that doesn’t have a bunch of garbage additives in it and tastes good shout out to Spindrift. I am going to be like, really, on point with the promotions and I’m gonna put mine in our, oh yeah.
In our A11y the alligator Accessibility Craft koozy.
Steve: See if I can get it in there.
Chris H.: And keep that cool while we chat. So I know that we’re going to be chatting about being a developer with ADHD and some advice around that and how people can thrive as a developer and And just in case I haven’t shouted it out already people can get the show notes at accessibilitycraft.com/076. And I would love to shift us into the discussion and we’ve prepared some questions and Chris, you’ve. Prepared some remarks of your own and some things you want to talk about. I would love to give the people listening to this, some perspective and some background, and if you don’t mind sharing, how did you get into being a developer?
Chris F.: Yeah very in a very roundabout fashion. So, I often describe myself as a little bit of a Winnie the Pooh. So I don’t do five year plans. I just go where the honey takes me that day. So, yeah, I and this is not particularly uncommon with folks with ADHD. You’re just, you’re drawn to things you find interesting.
So I had either five or six majors in college. I eventually settled on anthropology because it was the only thing that was interesting enough to get me to reliably show up.
to
class. And then my first senior year, I realized that I didn’t want to do do anthropology professionally. I found it interesting, but I didn’t want to go like study in the field or anything like that.
So I fell into an internship in human resources, which I liked well enough to keep doing for a little while. And so I ended up just working in HR for, Maybe eight, ten years. And I had really strong opinions on what I did and didn’t like about HR. So I started blogging. And I had a WordPress blog and I wanted to have more control over what it looked and felt like.
So I started teaching myself code through the lens of WordPress. And I eventually found myself in the training and development wing of HR where I was. Teaching career stuff to software engineers. And my manager had this kind of thing he wanted to play around with where rather than like we get everybody in a classroom for eight hours a day and talk to them, they could just.
YouTube, watch little snippets of stuff when they needed it, which does not sound like a big deal now, but at the time was a novel idea. So we went to our IT department and they’re like, “Oh yeah, we can build that. Probably won’t be exactly what you want, but we can build it. It’ll take a year and it’ll cost a hundred thousand dollars.”
My manager’s no, we just want like a proof of concept. So we went to an agency and they’re like, Oh yeah no, we can do that. We can do that in six weeks. It’ll only cost 500, 000. And he almost choked on his drink and he’s he choked on his Spindrift and he’s we don’t have, we don’t, we don’t have the budget for a proof of concept for that.
So he looks at me and he goes, code. Can you build it? And I looked him right in the eyes and I very confidently told him, absolutely not. I have no idea where I would even start with this. And and then he’s well, can you learn? And this was the question that changed the entire course of my career.
So I said, probably not, but I’ll try. And I spent two or three weeks, just, I literally didn’t talk to anybody. I didn’t go into the office. I just, I was head down in Stack Overflow, trying to figure out how to hack WordPress into an app platform. Cause it was the only thing I really knew. And it’s the worst code I’ve ever written in my life, but I got something working that we were able to do like a vaporware ish proof of concept on and show some people.
And that was literally, that was a moment for me. I was like, I forget HR. I’m done. This is my future. This is what I want to do. I’d found my like thing. And that was it. I just, I spent the next couple of years learning more, failing a bunch of job interviews building lots of stuff, and eventually got my first job and that was it.
I never looked back. Had a hell of a time learning though which is what got me down the whole in addition to the ADHD stuff, most of what I do is teaching other people front end code. And I had a really tough time learning. So a lot of what got me into the education side of things was wanting other folks to not have as tough a time learning as I did.
So yeah, that’s my journey.
Steve: Very cool. So just to take a little bit of a step back so you mentioned the ADHD, I’m sure most people, are aware of ADHD or at least the word being thrown around, but could you give your definition of ADHD and a little bit of how that affects your day to day working?
Chris F.: Yeah, absolutely. So ADHD is it stands for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. It is very badly named because ADHD folks do not have a deficit of attention. It looks that way. Sometimes we have attention in surplus. We have a really tough time regulating it. So ADHD is an executive functioning disorder.
Our brains don’t make as much dopamine as a neurotypical brain might. And that affects us in a whole bunch of really fun and interesting ways. Sometimes we have that like squirrel kind of thing going on, right? The highly, what most people think of. Other times though, if it’s something you’re really interested in, say web development you can go into a hyper focus mode where you’re tunnel visioned and you won’t eat.
You won’t go to the bathroom. You’ll ignore everything around you. You’ll miss meetings and you’ll just focus on this one thing. In an ideal world, that’s something that’s productive and useful. I can remember once I had a week where I just could not stop researching campers and RVs and didn’t get anything important done.
So that’s one aspect of it. Another aspect is folks with ADHD often have bad impulse control. So, that can lead to a whole bunch of things like just saying what’s on your mind without any thought to, oh, the person I’m, or the thing I’m talking badly about or expressing my frustration with is in the room right here and I’m insulting their work or there’s a flip side of that, which means like I’m the person people can come to when they want an honest opinion, but you gotta be careful with that, right?
So impulse control is one aspect. Related to that people with ADHD often have a tendency to be more emotionally variable than people without ADHD or neurotypical folks. So, we will take things like slight rejections or minor kind of minor comments and make them into a much bigger thing than maybe the situation actually calls for.
Which can make things like performance reviews and stuff particularly challenging depending on the person. And one other, I think, really important thing to mention with ADHD that I found out recently is related to dopamine is dopamine affects your ability to perceive time. And so ADHD folks often experience time blindness.
Where it is impossible for us to perceive time accurately, not just in the whole like time flies when you’re having a good time kind of way. Like we never experience time as it normally happens. Things either happen painfully slow or really fast. There is no like normal time. So, these all create some really interesting challenges in a working environment, but they also create some unique opportunities if you know how to
harness them and focus them in the right direction. And so a lot of what I’ve been talking to folks about lately is how to work with your ADHD instead of against it because you’re not neurotypical. You never will be. And trying to fight all that and make yourself behave neurotypically is both a path to mediocrity and burnout in my opinion.
Steve: Yeah, very good. Very thorough explanation of that. Chris? Yeah.
Chris F.: Other Chris.
Other Chris. Other Chris. Other
Steve: Chris Hinds?
Chris F.: Call me Other Chris if you want, or Ferdinandi, that way we avoid the confusion.
Chris H.: Yeah, absolutely. So that’s really interesting. So you alluded to structuring your environment to, to, Turn these things that maybe present difficulties at times into superpowers instead.
Can you speak a little bit to that and what you’re doing or what advice you give to help people work with their ADHD instead of fighting against it and trying to behave like a neurotypical person might?
Chris F.: Absolutely. So, So there’s a whole handful of things. A lot of it is context specific to the person, because a little bit like autism, ADHD is a bit of a spectrum in that there’s a whole range of symptoms.
Everybody who has ADHD experiences them to different degrees, or in some cases, not at all. So my ADHD experiences can be very different from some of my friends who also have But knowing things like Hyper focus, just as an example, it’s the hallmark ADHD thing where if it’s a thing you’re interested in, you can get just a phenomenal amount of work done.
Like I can be far more productive than my peers when I am hyper focused on a thing. I can remember there was one, one stretch a couple of years ago where I did about six weeks worth of work in a month. I just got so much done. It was absolutely, I’m sorry. It’s six months worth of work done in a month, just so much work.
It was ridiculous. But then there was like the month and a half after that, where I got almost nothing done. So, finding work that is. Varied enough and interesting enough that it triggers that kind of hyper focus y dopamine chasing thing in you can be really beneficial. If you’re in a job where you’re doing a lot of the same kind of stuff over and over again, and you don’t find it interesting, there is no amount of just willing yourself to do it.
The way like a neurotypical person might be like, Oh, I’ve got this thing to do. It’s boring, but it’s really important. So I’m just going to do it like that. That doesn’t often work for folks with ADHD. So if you know that they can really color the types of jobs that you pursue. Also knowing that ADHD folks often experience time blindness and Our output can sometimes be a little bit more variable.
Roles that require really tight estimates and really specific deadlines are far worse for us than things that are a little bit more open ended and problem solving. So, I in particular think that agency based jobs work particularly bad for ADHD folks, especially when you think about the kind of junior role, like you’re just grinding out work 40 hours a week.
Tell me to the 15 minute mark, how long this is going to take so we can build a client for it. Those kinds of things are just really challenging for folks. With ADHD. So that’s one aspect of it. The other piece beyond just like picking the kinds of jobs comes from your work environment.
So, noisy work environments especially if you have to go into an office and you have an open office plan, those are absolute performance killers, workplaces where you have lots of, Middle of the day meetings can completely ruin your ability to, cause it takes us a while to get into a topic and focused.
And once we do a little bit like the juggernaut from the X Men where it’s like really tough to stop you. If I get interrupted for like a midday meeting and I was in the middle of something, I’m either going to miss the meeting because I’m so focused on what I’m doing or the whole time I’m in the meeting, I’m going to be thinking about the thing I was just working on.
And so. All of this is to say, if you can do things like block out chunks of your calendar. Work from home, get yourself a private or quiet office if you have to go into the office. These are the kinds of things that you can either just do for yourself and ask for forgiveness rather than permission.
Or if you’re in a place where you feel comfortable doing so, you can tell your manager, you can ask for accommodations. In America specifically, ADHD is a Disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act, so you can ask for workplace accommodations and they have to give them to you. I’ve also talked to a lot of folks who feel like either because of their gender or their skin color or their sexual orientation, they feel uncomfortable doing that because they feel like they’re already under more scrutiny and don’t want like another, hey, pay attention to my work kind of thing.
So I fully recognize it’s a privilege to be able to do that. But I have done that in many, Work environments. And it’s always been a very net positive thing for me. I also have not worked at many toxic places. So, your your mileage may vary.
Steve: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the more I hear you talk about it and, just a little insights, I do have a little bit of, history with ADHD
I have a childhood diagnosis, completely untreated and unmedicated, but I have a childhood diagnosis of this, and I was a very active child and and I’ve what you’re saying is I’ve as an adult. And I’ve morphed it somewhat into a superpower, like you described.
And I want to turn this a little bit to your choice to go into coding, like you said, you started working with WordPress and stuff. And for me, like a lot of the things you’re describing sound I’m very, I squirrel, I’m going to go work on this. I know we have a roadmap of things we’re developing for our product, but I want to work on this internal report thing for four hours that nobody asked for, right?
Like
Chris F.: it’s because it’s more interesting.
Steve: Yeah, right. Yeah, totally. But so for people with ADHD, what is develop, being a developer or coding, does that lead, does that work better for.
Chris F.: I have found that. ADHDers are disproportionately represented in the developer community. And I think a big part of that has to do, cause I’ve given this a lot of thought.
I think a big part of it has to do with the way the tight feedback loops you get on a programming project, create those like dopamine hits. And it’s almost like a video game, right? So I’m, whether it’s CSS or more of a backend programming thing, you make a thing, you can immediately see or check if it worked.
If it does, yay, happy feelings. If not, Ooh, I’ve got to pull up this thread till I can figure out why it becomes a challenge. Either way-
Steve: An obsession at times.
Chris F.: Yes, absolutely. There’s this whole meme about someone seems really distant and vague and their partner is like, Oh, what’s going on?
Are they having an affair? Blah, blah, blah. And the person the partner is just my code is broken and I don’t know why it’s become this running gag in our house where my wife will say that to me all the time when I seem not where my feet are. And yeah, absolutely.
So, that can become a detriment if you let it overtake all the other things in your life. But I also do think that programming lends itself really well to the ADHD brain. It can be an area where in the right environment, you can excel at it. Really well. I’ve certainly, I’ve had great success with it.
A lot of my students are ADHDers as well. And they’ve all shared similar types of experiences. In the right environment. I get, there’s like certain workplaces really will just completely crush that if you’re locked into, I have to do this thing that just does not excite me.
But if you have a little bit more flexibility, it can work out really well.
Chris H.: And I want to get to talking about that like that environment, like creating that environment for yourself to whether it’s self being a self taught dev, or it’s teaching yourself something else that maybe fits with this type of personality.
I really want to get into that, but before we do that, we’re going to take a short commercial break. So we will be right back.
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Chris H.: Welcome back. All right. So let’s dive back into our conversation here. I would love to hear about creating that environment where you can where you can learn and where you can excel and maybe some of the things that you do, Chris.
Chris F.: Yeah, absolutely. So it’s a whole mix of stuff. Part of it is part of it is my
to do process. I can remember like one of the, ironically, the thing that kicked off my whole HR blogging thing was when I was in HR, I, my first job, I literally thought I was going to get fired cause I would get assigned four or five things to do and I’d forget three, three or four of them. And so I started
googling how to get things done, which led me to David Allen’s Getting Things Done, which worked for a hot minute until it didn’t because it’s really overly complex. Sorry, it’s really complex and for an ADHD brain it’s really exciting to set up the whole system at first and then it gets like too complicated to manage.
So, have over time honed this much more simplified Getting Things Done process which I can talk through. So that’s one piece of it. The other is setting up your physical environment. And then the third leg of this stool is respecting your ADHD flow which is this thing I talk about where at different times of the day, different days of the week, et cetera.
You’re going to, you’re going to be, your brain is going to be in a particular place that may or may not be conducive to your work. And if your brain is just in a place where it’s not. able to get going on some stuff, trying to fight that. You’re not going to get your thing done, but you will have wasted eight hours just staring at a screen.
And so, we can unpack any and all of these. Is there an area you’d like to start?
Chris H.: I think the to do list piece you mentioned, I mean, it may not take the form of a to do list, but the getting things done part might be an interesting place to start. Maybe we can segue to that.
Chris F.: Yeah, absolutely.
Chris H.: Some of the other areas from there.
Chris F.: Yeah, absolutely. Great. So, it’s for me, it’s three pieces. Some of these, if you’re familiar with getting things done or some other productivity systems will sound familiar and I put a bit of an ADHD slant on them. So one of the big things we, I didn’t mention earlier as a symptom of ADHD ADHD folks often have very large hard drives in their head and very limited amounts of RAM or memory.
So, we can keep one or two things in our head, but not more than that. And if you don’t write that thing down to, to disk space, it’s just, it’s gone forever. So, the first piece for me is writing literally everything that I can’t afford to forget down. Every idea. Every task, every important detail.
Because I just, no matter how in locked in on it in the moment I am, I can’t trust that five minutes from now I will remember it. So for a long time, that was a paper notebook for me. Like I used to carry around a little fields, field notes, notebook, and a pen. And then I’d find that I would not have it when I needed it most.
So then I’d pull out my phone and send an email. And then I’d end up with Multiple ideas in multiple places. So, these days, I tend to use a digital tool. For years, that was Microsoft To Do. It was a free To Do app. Now I’m on Obsidian, but the tool really doesn’t matter. The most important thing is that it is you’re not fiddling with it.
It’s just a thing that you quickly grab, open, and can write down what you need. Usually, it’s like a bulleted list. Just because if you try to do any more than that, the formatting or the structure becomes the thing you fixate on instead of just getting the ideas out. The second piece of this is processing that what I call like defragging your notebook or your capture device.
So, if you’re just throwing a bunch of stuff in over time, it’s going to get messy. So every now and then you want to go through and organize some stuff, clean some stuff up. There will be stuff in there that you’re like, Oh, I already did this. Or that’s not really important. I can I can delete that.
I don’t need that anymore. Or you can move it into a more structured place or Oh, this is a thing I actually need to do. Let’s like put a little check box next to it. Now this is a to do item at some point I need to get done. And then the last piece is the actual doing. So every morning I open up my second brain, my like digital notebook thing, and I go through it and I flag a few things that I need to do that day.
I have mine set up so that I can view everything on the list and just quickly go through and like tag, tag the thing. So what I recommend to folks is one to three big tasks and a handful of smaller ones. Or up to 12 smaller tasks. There will be days where you don’t have anything big to do, but you’ve got a bunch of little things.
And in my system, I literally throw a unicorn emoji next to them and my system like pulls them into the separate list and I use a unicorn cause they’re cute and I love them and they’re awesome. It brings me, it’s whimsical and it brings me joy. And then this is the important part.
Most productivity systems. Say start with your biggest tasks first so that you can get them out of the way.
Steve: Eat the frog.
Chris F.: But big thing, yeah, eat the big frog first. But one of the biggest challenges for an ADHD brain is getting started and big things cause overwhelm and just getting over that like inertia of I’m not doing anything can be really tough.
So what I’ve started doing and what I tell other folks, They might want to try is doing the little things first. So pick something small that will get you moving that will trigger that. Oh, I checked something off my list. Yes, I feel good. Let’s keep going. Is a much more viable strategy for an ADHD brain than the eat the big frog first.
Recommendation you’ll often see in other systems. And so for me, that’s the linchpin of this whole thing. And then I have a bunch of other little things I do that kind of tie into environment and tools you might use and stuff that I refer to as hacking your brain’s operating system.
Cause our brains are strange and we can do things to, to trick them into doing what we want. But those get more into like how you set up your environment and how you work with where your brain’s at the moment.
Steve: Very cool. You mentioned before about the, I don’t know if cycle is the right word, but like the cycle of our investment into how much effort we give into work.
And I mean, that’s definitely something I noticed more on a it’s on a larger scale. For me, like there’s, there, there will be like weeks where it’s just I can work insane, like insane hours and like insane productivity. And then there’s weeks I can’t do anything. And it’s sometimes, you sit at your desk and you do stare there, a stare at the screen.
You’re like, I know I’m supposed to be sitting here doing something. And, but like the more I’ve learned that as I’ve gotten older and of course, owning a company, you have more control of your time. Sometimes it’s better to turn it off and walk away and come back at another time.
What are some tips that you have to help when that inspiration comes? And not everybody has the choice to walk away, right? So how do we deal with it then?
Chris F.: Yeah. Excellent question. So, so my big thing. Is when that hyper focus beast shows up. I like to ride that as much as I can because you don’t, you can’t always like trigger it.
So like the thing you mentioned where you’ll have these like weeks where you’re like just super like I like to tap into that as much as I can for as long as I can when it happens. Because it’s just, it’s a fantastic thing to be able to exploit if you can.
Steve: Yeah.
Chris F.: But there are absolutely days where I am just not feeling it.
I describe this sometimes for me, it comes in two forms. There are days where I don’t have a lot of I can’t mentally focus. But I have physical energy. I’m just I’m not tired or anything. I don’t feeling burnt. I just, my brain just isn’t where it needs to be. And I have a whole bunch of strategies for those.
There are other times where I feel completely burnt out. Like mentally, I’m not there. Physically, I’m not there. Burnout is obviously not exclusive to ADHD, but we are prone to it because we will sometimes hyper focus ourselves into exhaustion. And so on burnout days, I. I just completely let it go. I will go do as much as I can, like non work things, walk my dog.
I don’t try to do anything like physically taxing, but I will try to get outside. So, just did a very ADHD thing and kind of bounced all over the place and I apologize about that. But so on the let’s take a step back. So on the days where you’re just, you’re not quite there.
I find you have one of two options. So if you have some flexibility in your schedule, Walking away, not touching work, and coming back to it later in the day is a very viable strategy. A lot of ADHD folks report feeling peak performance happen for them either later in the day or at night because it’s quieter, there’s fewer distractions.
Sometimes you’re tired, so your brain slows down enough that you can actually just focus on the one thing without the lottery ball machine of ideas bouncing around in your head. So that can be a thing you could do. If that is not an option trying to do one of two things, which is pick some little things.
You don’t mind just peter, like big busy work, I guess would be like the best way to describe it in a professional context can at least get you in the, you’re moving towards work so that you can hopefully like your brain will then shift gears into. Another option if you have the ability, if you can step away for a little bit, but not a long time doing things that will trigger dopamine production in your brain.
So, if you’re someone who has ADHD medication and you periodically take that. You’re not like, I take it every day. You just take it as needed. That would be a time to take it. If you’re unmedicated, which a lot of us are myself included things like drinking coffee or soda or caffeine, something that’s gonna get your brain moving.
I also find that either exercise or being outside in the sun because the sun triggers dopamine production can be really helpful. I have decided my midlife crisis is going to be gardening. So it actually gets me both. I get to move heavy stuff around in the yard and be outside in the sun. So I will often go do that if I’m having like a, my brain is fuzzy moment.
And it doesn’t take much. It can be as little as 15 minutes, sometimes even just going for a walk. And coming back can get you in a better headspace to start doing the work. Not like a bulletproof strategy, but it can also it can often get you 50 percent of the way there.
And then you can start picking at some of the smaller things to get yourself moving in the right direction. But those are the days where I don’t try to do like really big, deep, meaningful strategy work. If I have some piece of, just to make a coding example here if I had a brand new like JavaScript thing I had to write, and I hadn’t planned out how it was going to work or design the architecture, I would stay away from that
on a day like that. But if I had some other thing I needed to work on where all that was already in place and I needed to add a new feature or fix a bug, that’s a great place to start when you’re having like a just not there kind of day because it’s a little bit more rote. It’s a little bit less like high level thinking.
And once you do a little bit of that you’re, it’s almost like kickstarting a car, right? You can. Yeah, once your brain
starts moving, it’s Oh yeah, this is what we’re supposed to be doing. I’m into it now.
Steve: It’s like the on ramp, it’s you have to get on and off the highway and there’s always a ramp to get on and off.
And once you’re down the ramp and you’re up to speed, you’re moving with everybody else.
Chris F.: Yeah, exactly.
Steve: It’s a great way to explain it. And, if you’re working like a, in a job where, you have to at least move the needle, you’re still moving the needle, like from, maybe from a developer’s perspective, like you said, it’s like that backend.
Framework that you’re trying to figure out, takes a ton of brain power, but maybe I could just work on this front end UI stuff because it’s a little less taxing on the brain, but it still moves the needle forward. So, yeah,
Chris F.: this is another kind of instance where if you’re in a position where you feel comfortable disclosing your ADHD at work, and you have the right kind of manager or an environment that is non discriminatory, which I understand is not all of them, right?
There can be some benefits to being upfront about the fact that you will have some days where you get a lot done, and you will have some days where you get less done, and that it averages out on time. Not all roles, not all work environments lend themselves to that, but the ones that do, In the ones that do, being more open about it can really benefit you.
Chris H.: So putting ourselves in the shoes of maybe a more junior or entry level developer, or even a person with ADHD who is considering development as a career, do you have particular recommendations around the types of development jobs that you see people being most successful in? I know you had mentioned agencies, typically not a good fit, but are there ones where you think
that lend themselves well.
Chris F.: Yeah. So that’s it. And I shouldn’t even say all agencies, there are types of agencies. So I see two different types of agencies. You have the, like the grind and burnout type agencies that are very focused on like lots of billable hours. And cookie cutter projects isn’t the right word, but like they’re doing a lot of the same type of work for a lot of the same type of clients.
Then there are agencies where they are doing really weird novel work in cutting edge spaces. So for example, I can remember about a decade ago when mobile was still relatively novel. Big medium web agency they were exploring best ways to build interaction patterns on phones and what would it look like if you threw a website on a TV, right?
And they were doing this for clients, not just for themselves. And that’s the kind of work where someone with an ADHD brain can potentially really shine because it’s a novel problem that has a bit of a fuzzy definition around it that you can just really sink your teeth into if you find that interesting and just really dive into.
I even think honestly the, like the burn and grind agencies can be. Okay for someone with ADHD for a short term early in their career because you’re going to get thrown a wide variety of projects at a lot of different clients. And there’s going to be, I guess the pressure of a tight deadline will create a bit of a, like an urgency effect in you that feels gamey almost.
You can’t do that for long, but you will burn out if you do that for too long. But but yeah, I generally think it’s not even specific technologies. It’s more the type of company and the nature of the work, but places where you’re being presented with novel problems that you have some flexibility and freedom around exploring tend to lend themselves a little bit more
to, to someone with ADHD in my experience, again, everybody’s different. So what works for me might work a little bit different for someone else.
Chris H.: That makes sense though. And the other thing that you had mentioned before were I think you had referenced the word triggers for particular aspects of ADHD, like maybe triggering that deep focus state.
Can you get into that a little bit? And are there like particular triggers you’re aware of that can create that hyper focus?
Chris F.: Yeah. Yeah. So I am not going to do this justice. There is actually like a ADHD Jesse. on YouTube and Twitter and that he’s talked about this a whole handful of times.
And I am I’m going to poorly paraphrase some of what he’s talked about, but if something is interesting, urgent, And there’s a third one that is completely escaping me right now because I have hit my two item in RAM limit at the moment. But yeah, there’s a third one that is just completely escaping me.
But yeah, they’re the three things that really get an ADHD person. And so if there’s a topic you’re interested in Steve, this is similar to what you were describing where like that, the thing you wanted to build that wasn’t on the roadmap, but you were just like really excited, right? Like that, if you have a thing you’re fixated on, it’s really tough to stop you.
So interest you’re off to the races. But barring that, having some sense of urgency around it will also create, the hyper focus. So a lot of ADHD folks will tell you that they have a tendency to put things off because they literally just can’t get themselves started. And then the day before a thing is due, they’ll do 12 hours worth of work and four hours and just get it done because they hyper focus on it.
Cause now there’s that urgency and you’re like, Oh, Crap. I’ve got to get this done. Similar thing in college where you’ll wait until the day before test to study or or something like that. So it’s a bit of a roller coaster. I don’t necessarily recommend that as an all the time trick, but
Steve: I’m not sure.
I’m not sure if this is your third one, but for me, a lot of times it’s a challenge. Like when I’m present with a challenge.
Chris F.: That actually might be it. Where it’s not not, it doesn’t have to be something you’re interested in, but if it’s like difficult or novel or challenging in some way,
Like it’s, it nerd snipes you into
Steve: yeah.
Chris F.: That might actually be, I gotta make sure I write these down. So next time I do one of these but yeah, that’s That’s a very good one as well. Yeah. If it’s interesting or challenging something that like. Like you have a coworker. It couldn’t be, it could be a thing. I wasn’t necessarily thinking about it, but a coworker comes over.
I was like, I can’t figure out how to do X. Can you?
Steve: I love that. Yeah. I love that.
Chris F.: Yup. I have no idea, but I’m going to file. Take me 12 hours, but I’ll find out. Clear my schedule. Yeah that’ll do it too, for sure. Yeah.
Steve: So
You’ve spoken a lot about what, people that have ADHD can do to find the work environments that best suits them and gives them the freedom to work the way that they need to work that’s best for their health.
And Is there anything that like agencies or, can do to make the work environment more accessible to people like that?
Chris F.: Yeah, absolutely. So, a few things. And these are also things like the flip side of this is if you were someone talking about your ADHD to your employer, you could ask for, but if you’re a manager or a company and you want to be good and proactive, these are things you can also Offer or support.
As I’m sure has come up on this show before, often things that benefit people with specific types of disabilities often benefit everyone. So if you’re listening to some of these and you’re like, Oh, I would love that too. You probably would. Yeah. So, not forcing people to come into an office, especially if you have an open office environment.
So offices are extremely distracting, even. Even in the best of situations, there’s just a lot of auditory noise, a lot of visual noise. Allowing folks to work from the place, not necessarily everybody has to be remote all the time, but letting people work from the places where they work best.
Either having meeting free days or scheduling meetings at the beginning or end of working hours so that you’re not interrupting someone mid flow in the middle of the day. Or even better, a lot of meetings, frankly, could have been an email. So like asynchronous meetings, asynchronous stand ups, if you’re a company that does stand ups allow folks to get that same type of information, but in a way that doesn’t interrupt folks mid hyper focus.
Or even if you’re not a developer with ADHD, just mid focus. Web development in general is all about finding your flow. And getting interrupted mid flow is, it’s not good. Non traditional hours. So if you, if, unless there’s a compelling reason why everybody needs to be working between the hours of nine to five, Monday through Friday, allowing folks to work at the times of day or days of the week where they work better can also be a really good thing for a lot of folks.
A lot of ADHDers will tell you. Steve, we were just talking about this. You have days or weeks where you’re really on and days or weeks where you’re off. I have times of day where I am better than others. So for me, it’s usually 10 to two and then six to 10 are my like windows of optimum performance.
And if given the ability to just work those times and not the others, take those other times to go on walks and spend time with family, awesome. If you have folks on your team with ADHD, giving them flexibility to pick the tickets or the tasks that they find most interesting instead of just, Kind of forcing things on them.
I understand obviously there’s stuff in every job you have to do that you might not love, but
as
much as you can provide flexibility to developers to pick the things they want to work on for folks with ADHD, it will make it much easier for them to not just do that work, but do it quickly and do it well shorter meetings, fewer meetings, fully async meetings.
And then the last one, just because of like the RAM, if you’re in a meeting with someone. Who has ADHD and you’re telling them some things they need to know or some things you need them to do. I have two options. I can either write them down or listen to you. I can’t do them both at the same time. So understanding that I’ll need pauses to write things down or even better, If you could just send me an email after the fact that tells me these are the specific things we talked about, I need you to do.
It doesn’t even need to be the details, just the the bullet points. That’s enough for me to okay, I have them now. I’m not going to lose them or forget them. I can move them over into my like digital notebook thing and convert them into to do items. Can be really helpful. I’m sure there’s more.
Those are the ones that immediately come to mind. Yeah.
Chris H.: That’s fantastic. And so our audience as you, that listens to this, as you might imagine cares a lot about web accessibility or they’re exploring web accessibility and accessibility of websites. So I would be remiss if I didn’t ask you, since we have this opportunity, are websites that just drive you bananas or become barriers for you?
And can you share some of the biggest ones so that our listeners can So that our own team, maybe we’ll learn something, but also so our audience can know what to avoid.
Chris F.: Yeah, for sure. And some of these things I’m going to share are not, again, it’s, there’s so much overlap between different disabilities and different needs.
And then there’s also so much, everybody is different, but. Some of the big ones include, and because ADHD is an executive functioning disorder, a lot of these will overlap with other cognitive disabilities as well. But long sentences, long paragraphs in particular, like big blocks of text, really difficult to get through.
If you have a couple of points you’re trying to drive home, individual sentences or bulleted lists work really well. Much better than like long form prose. I know there’s this running joke about how like kids can’t read anything these days because of TikTok and Twitter. But it’s more than that.
It’s just, it’s difficult. It’s always been difficult for me to focus on big blocks of text. So that’s one piece of it. Movement and noise on websites is particularly distracting. So, I know this is on a lot of accessibility checklists anyways, but like autoplay video is bad. Autoplay audio is bad.
Parallax scrolling and animations are really annoying if they don’t need to be there. I know you can turn them off in OS settings. I also know a lot of times.
Steve: Websites aren’t respected to respect that. Yeah.
Chris F.: But yeah, so, and some animations are good. If it’s an animation that draws your attention to a thing you would miss, that’s important.
Don’t forget to click this button. That can be a way to tap into animations that are distracting in a good way. Hey, you missed this thing. You really need to pay attention to it. Right? A little, like a button that jiggles or whatever. But there is a like there’s a website of a relatively well known developer where one of the links on their nav bar that they really want you to click every couple of seconds, it jiggles and bounces.
And I understand why, because they want folks to dig into that section of their website, but when I’m trying to read one of their like really thoughtful articles on topic, my eye just keeps getting pulled up to that link and I can’t read, like I can’t focus. So those are the kinds of things where if you don’t have ADHD, you might not realize it.
Those are the big two that really come to mind is noise, movement, and length of paragraphs are particularly important for ADHD folks. On the topic of websites though, I just want to just as an aside, right? So, Steve, we talked about the whole cause I was diagnosed as a kid also unmedicated.
Chris F.: I have had look into getting ADHD medicine on my to do list for three years. I’ve never done it because making a phone call is a really difficult thing for me because it’s not just picking up the phone and dialing. It’s Oh, now I need to deal with the randomness of the phone call itself. I finally scheduled an appointment because I found a psychiatrist whose website has a, “give us your information,
we’ll call you” form right on the homepage. Like first thing and that’s what did it for me. I filled in my information. They called me. We were good. And so that’s, I think a really good example of a website understanding the audience of the people who are going to be going there and building around their weird and unique needs.
And then I got like a bunch of follow up emails on make sure you fill out these forms and here’s this form and here’s a text again to remind you. So like multiple different like reminders and stuff. So yeah I just wanted to highlight that because I thought it was a really good example of web design done well with a specific disability and audience in mind.
Steve: Very cool. I think most of us don’t want to call anybody anymore.
Chris F.: Well it’s 2024. Yeah. It’s Might as
well fax, right?
Steve: Yeah. Cool. Well, this has been a great discussion and obviously, you’re thriving as a developer with ADHD and
Chris F.: sometimes
Steve: and I think it’s a great thing that you’re taking the time to give back and to help others with ADHD do the same where can people go to learn more about you or to connect with you?
Yeah, thank you so much for asking. So if if you want to learn more about this, you think you might have ADHD, you want to ask questions head over to adhdforthewin.com/accessibilitycraft. You can spell that one of a dozen ways and it’ll all get you to the same place. I’ve put together a bunch of like links and resources around all the stuff we’ve talked about today as well as my contact info.
So literally if you’re like, I think I have ADHD or I have it, and please get in touch. I’d love to chat.
Chris H.: Amazing. Well, thank you so much, Chris, for being here and Steve too. And we will see all of you on the next episode of Accessibility Craft. See y’all later. Bye.
Steve: See y’all.
Chris H.: Thanks for listening to Accessibility Craft. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe in your podcast app to get notified when future episodes release. You can find Accessibility Craft on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and more. And if building accessibility awareness is important to you, please consider rating Accessibility Craft five stars on Apple Podcasts.
Accessibility Craft is produced by Equalize Digital and hosted by Amber Hinds, Chris Hinds, and Steve Jones. Steve Jones composed our theme music. Learn how we help make thousands of WordPress websites more accessible at equalizedigital.com.