ADHD and Scrum
Last week I wrote about how I wanted to try out agile blog posting. Being inspired by Jeff Gothelf’s interview on the Mastering Agility Podcast. So today is week two of my experiment. In this experiment I will timebox one hour a week, to write on and share my knowledge on Agile, and hopefully helping people along the way!
“Write about what is on you mind this week..”
this was the part of the interview that resonated with me the most. And this week something extremely personal was on my mind. In 2022 I was listening to a podcast explaining what ADHD is, and it changed my world.
Every symptom, challenges and oddities discussed in this podcast ticked of everything I was personally struggling with as well. Prompting me to eventually seek diagnosis and finding my answer to all the struggles I had all my life.
Diving into ADHD and finding out how they relate to Scrum.
Most people that know me, will tell you how I am able to, at seemingly random, to bring up obscure deep knowledge on certain subject. For example one of my friends hurt his knee, and was discussing how it might impact his snowboarding, this resulted in me giving him a 15 minute lecture about all the different ways he could adjust his bindings, stance or snowboard itself to lessen his injury’s impact on his ability to snowboard.
Stunning multiple people in the room in the process.
This was the result of one of the known symptoms of ADHD called Hyperfocus. Whenever I get into a hyperfocus, I will be able to see, feel, learn and experience every detail of a subject. Getting so absorbed I actually might forget to eat, drink or sleep.
When I found out I have ADHD, I got so into finding out what it meant, what the symptoms are, how my brain differs from others… It led to multiple days of hyperfocus, and the more I tried to understand these subjects the more I found myself comparing it to Scrum and Agile software development. And as a response I started implementing parts of Scrum in my daily life, and found out it truly helped me manage my symptoms.
So in the interest of helping others with my blog, let’s talk about at least one symptom today and how Scrum helped me manage it!
(Timebox of 1 hour is way shorter then you might think!)
Time blindness
One of my biggest symptoms I had to manage was my time blindness. Quick quote to explain what it is:
Time blindness is a common experience among individuals with ADHD. It refers to a difficulty in accurately perceiving and managing time, often leading to challenges in estimating the passage of time, planning, organizing, and adhering to schedules or deadlines.
People with ADHD may struggle to gauge how long tasks take to complete, frequently underestimating or overestimating time. This can result in chronic lateness, missed appointments, and difficulties in prioritizing tasks effectively. Time blindness can also impact one’s ability to engage in long-term planning or foresee the consequences of time-related actions.
This condition isn’t merely a lack of awareness of time passing but is rooted in neurocognitive differences that affect an individual’s perception, attention, and executive functions.
Sounds familiar? It should!
Anyone ever working in a Scrum team, should be able to relate to this description. For it is exactly this challenges we face when trying to estimate and plan our sprints! It is why we have our 5 events in scrum to continuously inspect and adept our plans.
So what helped me manage my time blindness?
- Base my personal planning on empiricism, and expect extra time when something is unknown.
- Use a daily standup, where I inspect and adept my personal plan.
- Make sure that any task I have, is cut up into smaller pieces, which can be done within max 2 hours.
- Use weekly goals to make sure I make progress in small significant ways.
- Be able to cancel my weekly goal or re-plan, if any task cost more time then expected.
- Timebox my tasks to create focus.
- … and more but sadly my timebox for this week is coming to an end.
Time box is up.. now what?
Reflecting on this article I found that while I only wanted to focus on time blindness today.. I have a lot more to share on the subject of ADHD and Scrum. So I think I will continue next week. Thanks for reading and hopefully see you back next week!
Extra Resources
During the week I will add some resources I found extremely helpful on ADHD and time blindness. But for now sticking to my timebox!
As promised some great videos and articles on ADHD and time blindness:
Russell Barkley, PhD — Dedicated to ADHD Science+ has great youtube videos explaining it:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmV8HQUuPEk&ab_channel=AdhdVideos
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHgbNGPZphc&ab_channel=RussellBarkley%2CPhD-DedicatedtoADHDScience%2B
How to ADHD is a great YouTube channel which give tips on how to handle symptoms and also makes sure their videos work for people with ADHD (seriously look at their animations with that in mind!):
There are also great articles out there, simply search for ADHD and time blindness :) but make sure to check your source!
