I have ADHD, diagnosed in my 40s. 2 sons, a struggling business. Your experience seems familiar, so get diagnosed. If you do have ADHD then I don't think you should expect of yourself to be "fixed" to match the "average" norm. You will still be thinking about random stuff ("be creative"), it just will be a bit less of an issue in doing what is important.
What seems to work for me:
* meds
* writing everything down. This is not ADHD specific advice, I got it from GTD and it decreased anxiety. Just get used to the feeling that you will pull it out when you need it. I keep looking around for better solutions, but I no longer expect to have one that is perfect. Currently peeking back into Obsidian, for how flexible it is, but not abandoning OmniFocus and other tools I use.
* I prioritize regular sleep, but I allow myself digging deep in a subject that interests me from time to time
* physical work is surprisingly relaxing
* AI is becoming very important to me in completing tasks which are complex enough for me to get bored/tired/overwhelmed before reaching the finish line. A micro idea is great if you can tell Claude to implement it and come back to you. Even better when it succeeds :) The shorter time from starting to reward of completing is great for delivering.
* schedule some time for learning new stuff, otherwise you will become tired that it's all work and no fun
* delegate taking into account where you struggle the most. You might feel bad since you are delegating the most difficult work, but it might actually by trivial to people with brains with no such issues.
* not everything needs to be done, prioritize and don't worry about the less important stuff your brain throws at you
* it's more about setting time blocks to focus on something than reaching a specific goal. An hour scheduled in the calendar for support emails, for development, for reading...
* cheer up, we're entering the best period so far for people having ideas and you will have plenty
For the last 20 years in web development you've adapted to plenty of technology changes. Double the 20 years timeframe and you'll find developers working in assembler on daily basis - just think about how far you are from there. AI is a very significant change (maybe even the most significant one in the 40 years timeframe) and a serious risk if your plan was to stop adapting, but it is essentially a tool to bring programming to a higher level of abstraction. Less work on form validations, but more on building value.
We are still early adopters in using AI to increase productivity. The society as a whole is not yet aware of what is coming and the results are essentially unpredictable. Your attachment to the top 5% salary band might be irrelevant in 10 or 20 years because we might live in some kind of eco-utopia by then. Or all wealth might move to AI-controlling entities, in which your current standing is irrelevant and beyond your control.
Stop worrying. Focus on figuring out ways to increase your output with the help of the new tool or invest in AI to ride the wave you expect to drown in. You're way ahead of the 7.5b other people.
I don’t think GPT4 beats an expert yet. That’s why expectations to ask it to build a complex commercial project from scratch are not realistic.
Where it shines is up-levelling the developer in areas he is not an expert. Need to jump out of Java development and process some data in Python with a special library? It will likely be more than 10x speed up for you to ask GPT4 for help. Learning a functional language? It will send tons of best practices your way. It’s also great in translating ideas between domains, one example are your requirements to code, but also code to tests, data to SQL etc.
I’m happy with how helpful it is in exploring implementation concepts - you can discuss problems you imagine and it will improve the suggestions. A bit like a brainstom guide for you. And sometimes it will surprise you with a much simpler idea which you’ve been overthinking.
It’s really great when you don’t expect it to be perfect. It fails very often do to unclear commands (limited prompt „memory” is counter intuitively for humans limiting what can be understood - how can it not remember what you can see a bit to the top?). It will always try to do what you ask for, but if you assume it will know what you know you will be disappointed.
99% of all content I find interesting is added to Pocket for future reading. This gives me a relative peace of mind that I can return to all that when I feel like it, without actually doing it now. From time to time I browse Pocket to choose something to read. Once every few months I go into consumption mode for a day or two when I go through hundreds of articles (in some cases by just archiving). The time a piece of content stays in Pocket limbo helps me to distance myself from the joy of stumbling upon the content, which in effect allows me to focus on reading just the more interesting pieces.
In regards to local evacuation it's unlikely that anybody outside of Kharkiv area will be able to help. If she manages to get through the border to any neighbouring western country she will be taken care of. There is no need to set anything up in advance in current chaotic situation as she would be potentially blocking accommodation for multiple other people.
I'm hosting 6 refugees from Ukraine in Gdansk, northern Poland and the situation is that help is organized on social media and volunteers find accommodation for refugees within minutes, up to several hours after a request is raised. During that time they will have a warm place to stay and food to eat, there are absolutely no people left without help. Just an hour ago I've seen an offer from a person able to provide roof for 500(!) people. It is likely that the situation is already more problematic closer to Ukrainian border, so flexibility to travel further west (including Germany, which started organizing similar help recently) is going to help. Transport from the UKR-POL border is also a non-issue - Ukrainians can use trains for free, there are also private buses and cars picking up groups of people and moving them to various destinations. For free.
To Ukrainians in need - just get through the border and we'll handle it for you from there.
I have engineer's background and very much still feel like an engineer, but for over 10 years I have been managing a team of up to 50 developers within an organization with several hundreds of staff. Let me try to explain the "whys" below. Once you see the wider picture you might look at all this with less negativity, but it's also fine if you find it unacceptable - there are valid reasons why people leave corporations to work on something in smaller scale and what you describe fits a lot of these reasons.
Larger companies focus much more on avoiding the risk of breaking something than on the speed of implementing new features. The painful process you are going through is probably a result of earlier experiences of having requirements dropped into the backlog by random people. In your relatively small startup team you did not experience it, but in large corporations just by pure chance you can get hundreds of requests from all over the place. Each of them has costs associated with it: implementation, testing, change management (in order to keep track of stuff for a chance of a team resigning en masse) and the virtual cost of the risk of breaking stuff in production. Especially in a project which seems to be widely used by other teams.
The 4 pages long form is there to make sure that you really need the stuff done - otherwise you would not waste your time to write all that.
The two managers approving the change are there to prevent stupid stuff from being worked on just because somebody sits next to the developers and has various "ideas" and "needs". They are not there to discuss your idea with you, but rather to make sure it does not go against the project's priorities, which are unknown to you.
The lack of R/W access to the repo is to keep control over what happens in the project. It's not that they don't trust you, it's that you have no idea what they need outside of your small feature. After few months they need to be able to know (more or less) why something is present in the code, regardless of you being there or not.
You are not allowed to speak to the engineers, because they will be working on your feature around the end of Q1 2020, so you'd be wasting their time now. They have a backlog of other stuff to do and won't remember your input after few months anyway.
What can you do? Notify your manager about there being a blocker for your task and find something else useful to be busy with in case your blocker will land below a hundred of other blockers from other people. Remember that your personal efficiency is not equivalent to organization's efficiency and learn to handle several tasks at the same time while waiting for blockers for most of them to be resolved. Do not mistake it with multitasking (actually working on multiple things simultaneously), it's just an efficient scheduling of available resource - yourself - in the context of an organization working in unison.
PS. For most of the my time managing developers I've been working really hard to make sure people from across the organization do not interrupt them in their work. Once you put yourself in the skin of the engineers you are not allowed to talk to you will understand that at least some of the stupid mechanisms you've encountered are there for exacly that reason. You should respect that as an engineer.
The website looks nice and all, but I see you want to charge a $5/mo subscription for access to 200 puzzles (initially). Considering that there are websites like https://www.puzzlefactory.com or https://www.jigsawplanet.com that are free and have literally hundreds of thousands of jigsaw puzzles available I wonder what do you consider to be your added value in order to justify the subscription. Could you share some of your thoughts behind that?
Work remotely and advocate for it. I can't understand how moving around a third of population of the planet every day, sometimes with 1-2h commute, is acceptable in terms of wasted resources and time.
We've done it due to Covid and it mostly worked OK. Now it has to be improved and expanded.
What seems to work for me:
* meds
* writing everything down. This is not ADHD specific advice, I got it from GTD and it decreased anxiety. Just get used to the feeling that you will pull it out when you need it. I keep looking around for better solutions, but I no longer expect to have one that is perfect. Currently peeking back into Obsidian, for how flexible it is, but not abandoning OmniFocus and other tools I use.
* I prioritize regular sleep, but I allow myself digging deep in a subject that interests me from time to time
* physical work is surprisingly relaxing
* AI is becoming very important to me in completing tasks which are complex enough for me to get bored/tired/overwhelmed before reaching the finish line. A micro idea is great if you can tell Claude to implement it and come back to you. Even better when it succeeds :) The shorter time from starting to reward of completing is great for delivering.
* schedule some time for learning new stuff, otherwise you will become tired that it's all work and no fun
* delegate taking into account where you struggle the most. You might feel bad since you are delegating the most difficult work, but it might actually by trivial to people with brains with no such issues.
* not everything needs to be done, prioritize and don't worry about the less important stuff your brain throws at you
* it's more about setting time blocks to focus on something than reaching a specific goal. An hour scheduled in the calendar for support emails, for development, for reading...
* cheer up, we're entering the best period so far for people having ideas and you will have plenty
* [BONUS EDIT] noise-cancelling headphones :)