Nerd Journey: Career Advice for the Technology Professional
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Dial in Your Dopamine: Motivation, Focus, and the ADHD Brain at Work with Skye Waterson (1/2)
Are push notifications directing your day? While useful in some ways, push notifications can also become a huge distraction, especially for the ADHD brain. This week in episode 313 we’re joined by Skye Waterson, a former academic turned business owner and ADHD coach, to discuss practical strategies for staying focused in your work. Since dopamine levels affect our motivation, we might need to make adjustments to our dopamine levels to help increase our focus whether we work in an office or from home. Skye will explore some of the unique challenges of working from home with ADHD, thoughts on the ADHD brain’s struggle with procrastination, and the importance of clarifying our daily priorities. We also discuss the purpose of developing daily routines that will decrease stress and support working memory. Original Recording Date: 12-29-2024 Topics – A Different Perspective on ADHD in Our Careers, Baselining ADHD and Work Environments, Motivation and Dopamine at Work, Working from Home and Managing Distractions, Developing Purposeful Routines, Communication Preferences and Managing Push Notifications, Procrastination and Prioritization 2:11 – A Different Perspective on ADHD in Our Careers Skye Waterson is a former academic who found out she had ADHD at the beginning of pursuing a PhD. As a result, Skye decided to focus on ADHD research. After doing a bunch of research on ADHD, Skye posted her findings on the internet. Once the pandemic hit, Skye began coaching and loved it. She has grown her coaching practice into a 6-figure business and recently transitioned to working with business owners who have ADHD. We’ve discussed ADHD on the show previously with guests Jon Towles and Kristen Carder, but this time we’re going to approach it from a different angle. Here are the links if you would like to go back and hear those discussions: Episode 129 – The Challenges of a Superpower with Jon Towles (1/2) Episode 130 – The Excellent Advocate with Jon Towles (2/2) Episode 216 – Experiencing a Neurodivergent Diagnosis with Kristen Carder (1/2) Episode 217 – The Vulnerable Parts of ADHD with Kristen Carder (2/2) 3:15 – Baselining ADHD and Work Environments How would Skye define what ADHD is and is not? ADHD is a persistent and pervasive struggle with executive functioning (an area where Skye is heavily focused), impulsivity, and emotional dysregulation. This comes from shifts in the brain as seen in the neuroscience. Skye tells us the DSM-5 is most commonly used for diagnosing ADHD. The DSM-5 is a set of criteria and questions one would get asked by a professional (usually as psychiatrist but could be other professionals depending on your country) to diagnose ADHD. There are slightly different criteria to diagnose ADHD depending on whether you’re a child or an adult. When diagnosing adults, professionals are looking for whether your struggles have been pervasive over time. There are two primary types of ADHD: Primarily Inattentive – it may not show up, but this usually means you are distracted Primarily Hyperactive – driven by a motor internally / difficulty sitting still There is also a combined type (which happens to be Skye’s diagnosis type). These types are going to play out in our careers. What might ADHD look like for someone who works in technology? Skye says this can look like many different things. Work environments can look like Google, a place where there is a lot of flexibility and freedom. Environments like this also force you to manage your own time. Doing technology work for the government, for example, may not allow flexibility in the applications you get to use. In some cases, Skye has worked with clients who were employed by a government and were not allowed to use their phones at work. Overall, it depends on the level of flexibility your work environment will allow. “Mostly we’re thinking about how do you focus on the work you have to do? How do you prioritize that work when new things are coming in all the time? And how do you stay motivated to keep doing it consistently?” – Skye Waterson 6:17 – Motivation and Dopamine at Work Motivation is something we all need. What are some of the motivation challenges for the ADHD brain when hit with something that is not very exciting? Skye tells us neuroscience and ADHD are areas of current active research. The neurotypical individual, when starting a task, usually has some type of spike in the brain’s reward center for starting a task (i.e. a spike in dopamine). In the ADHD brain, however, this spike doesn’t really happen and might need some help. Skye says people with ADHD will say they feel lazy as a result of this. In reality it is the brain doing different things in different ways. People with ADHD need to add some dopamine to get to the same place. Skye equates this scenario to being underpaid in rewards. Adding dopamine certainly can help the ADHD brain with motivation, but it can be helpful on a wider scale as well. But how? Skye worked with the New Zealand Intelligence Services and the District Health Board. After providing some strategies to help personnel with ADHD, these organizations recognized the strategies could be helpful on a much wider scale internally. “Everyone has a down day like you said, but we struggle with it the most.” – Skye Waterson, on the ADHD brain and motivation Skye took all of the research she’s studied and turned it into a program called Focused Balanced Days. The intent is to help people move from inconsistent to consistent. Skye says at a high level we can add sensory things and stack them. It’s not about just rewarding ourselves with something to eat because taste is 1 of the 5 senses. We can often be understimulated across the 5 senses rather than overstimulated as many might think. “If you’re talking about a workplace, for example, you might say, ‘ok, what can I bring to work that I can touch, that I can taste, that I can smell, that I can see that’s going to help…raise the level of stimulation to help me stay focused at work?” – Skye Waterson If we take working in an office as an example, does strategically planning to get coffee from the break room help? This is a start, but Skye would encourage us to think about what we can have at our desk in an office. This can be a little tricky. Could you bring a fidget that looks like a key ring or even a Rubik’s cube? Note taking can allow fidgeting also because it allows switching between doodling and taking notes. If there’s a blank wall around you at the office, can anything be added to the wall? Likely we cannot do much about smell in an office. Can you use / wear headphones at the office? They can be used for noise reduction, adding in some type of different noise / sound, or for listening to something. You could also consider using earbuds and putting in only one of them. This works well when the earbud is Bluetooth connected to your phone. It allows one tap to turn on / off so you can have a conversation with anyone who walks up to your desk. Skye mentions she has leveraged the single earbud strategy at times to provide a distraction from unpleasant things like going to the doctor. She will listen to music or a podcast. What about asking to sit in a different area because the area where you are now is too distracting? Skye says this is definitely worth asking about but can get political at times. It will depend on how willing your management are to accommodate this kind of request. This is something to think about when seeking the right type of work environment for you. Skye would encourage us to align what we want with the goals of the company in order to improve the chances of getting what we want. Sitting somewhere else would help you contribute to the company goals / mission better or faster, etc. because you are less distracted. “You could be in a busy traffic area and just chat to everybody all day and get super distracted. It’s not going to be great for the workplace, so that’s kind of the key.” – Skye Waterson, on moving your desk to prevent distractions 13:48 – Working from Home and Managing Distractions How can we minimize distractions while working from home but also increase dopamine levels / number of sensations available? “This is a tricky one because when you’re talking about the workplace, often you’re talking about external distractions. When you’re talking about the home, we can still be talking about external distractions, but we’re more talking about internal motivation…because everything can feel more important than the work.” – Skye Waterson Skye hears people talk about various tasks that keep them from accomplishing anything when working from home. Examples we discuss are cleaning a room, doing the dishes, etc. At home, we are more susceptible to procrastivity, which is doing something that feels productive to procrastinate on doing something we don’t want to do. Send Skye a message on Instagram with the words “Nerd Journey Focus” in the message body to get a document explaining some of the things we are about to discuss. We have to step into focus at home. Part of this is working through the resistance we feel. At work, there are opportunities for “body doubling,” which can be very helpful to the ADHD brain. But at home, you likely will work by yourself and might have people in other rooms of the house doing other things. Skye recommends having a dedicated space for work. You want to prevent the pull of needing to organize something. You don’t want too much clutter. Skye is not saying you need to organize a bunch of things before you can get work accomplished. Just keep it out of your sight and away from distracting you. Stepping into focus means you’re moving yourself from being distracted and unmotivated to working and focused. Especially when you’re at home, reward yourself for starting (some kind o
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