I'm wondering how you are managing a DevOps / SRE / infrastructure position with ADD/ADHD.
In my experience, it has been quite difficult because a lot of the time, the work makes us wait on pipelines to finish, machines to start, script to complete, cluster to respond... Without talking about the distractions of On-Call, slack messages, and questions from the rest of engineering.
During this wait, I can get distracted, and have a really hard time coming back to the task at hand, even sometimes forgetting what I was actually doing.
Do you have any good strategies for dealing with that ?
Thanks !
Write down what you are doing and put it somewhere within your field of view. I use notepad in the corner of my large monitor. When you forget what you are doing, look at this.
Set a timer for each task you do. Keep it short and make sure it has an audible alert when it's done. When you hear the alert, double check if you’ve gone off task. Look at your note to remind yourself of what you are doing and then get back on task.
If you know what the task is, hear the reminder to get back on task and still don't get back on task, you need emotional tools. This is beyond a single post, but look for a therapist who can help you with the emotional side of ADHD.
Instead of thinking of that as the "problem" -- maybe it's an "opportunity".
> During this wait, I can get distracted
Well, great! Fix the wait. Ask the questions during the wait. Why does it take so long? Can you optimize it? Can you fix it? Can you run it in parallel etc...
I don't think there has to or should be a long wait. Most infrastructure builds, CI/CD etc are bloated, unoptimized and take too long for no reason.