Matt Waldron

####TLDR; I have ADHD and it took me three years to finally get a diagnosis. ADHD has a lot of severe symptoms that aren’t typically associated or recognised as part of the disorder, but they can be unknowingly debilitating.

In the early days things were OK. My personal life was very loosely managed with an intentional lack of responsibility, my professional life as a software engineer had a lot of inherent structure and guided process. In an odd way, I always thought I was different, but with no real insight into why or how.

For my entire school life, and about 10 years of my professional career, I have taken a lot of qualities at face value and assumed they were either flaws or that everyone had these attributes and just managed them slightly better than I did.

Then a few things changed, in my personal life I had a kid, in my professional life I became a software architect.

As my kid grew up, I began noticing similarities in their behaviour and mine and how other kids didn’t necessarily behave the same way.

Reading more and more I began relating all the qualities of ADHD to myself. At this point the move into software architecture also presented some issues.

In all the successful software engineering roles I’ve worked in, there have been structured processes in place that help mask the issues with ADHD. Clear story definition, breaking work into their smallest components, sprint boards, frequent iteration with quick feedback cycles, even having time-bound investigations are all extremely useful strategies for managing ADHD.

With this in mind, I became very aware of the non-software engineering roles I had before University. Retrospectively, these roles did not engage me and my attention often drifted onto other things.

Software architecture as a role really consists of multiple hats. it’s a space filler for many roles in a team. We look to the future, but are capable of also looking at the now and making decisions. Different companies will manage architecture interaction differently. With the lack of structure and well-defined process, software architecture presented similar issues for my ADHD.

Software architecture is a lot less structured than software engineering.

For me this meant trying a lot of different solutions for problems like time management and hyperfocussing, none of which really worked. Pomodoros, story boards, bullet journalling, proactive diary management and alarms, they all helped a little but didn’t really result in productivity.

So I decided to explore an official diagnosis, anyone reading who hasn’t done this I highly recommend. An official diagnosis meant I knew I was definitely managing ADHD and importantly how strong a case it was. As it turns out, it’s quite a severe case being off the chart for DSM inattentive and symptoms total measures, and a strong measure for DSM hyperactive-impulsive. Ultimately this resulted in quite a strong emotional response for me, which makes sense with emotional dysregulation being a common symptom of ADHD, but it left me with huge sweeping lows. Importantly, it meant I could explore medication options. Ritalin was a game-changer for me. I’m still only on 20mg/day about to go up a dosage, but can already feel positive effects with getting tasks started, not forgetting things, and generally being able to be present in a conversation.

Things are looking positive.

For anyone that might suspect ADHD as the root of a lot of their behaviours, here’s a good video by Thomas E. Brown highlighting the difference in frequency and strength of qualities vs typical brains.

I also highly recommend the audiobook Taking Charge of Adult ADHD by Russell A. Barkley.