Reading this thread, so many things apply to me, too. When I am deep in the zone, I am thinking in... pictures? not really, more like structures and graphs; th

Reading this thread, so many things apply to me, too. When I am deep in the zone, I am thinking in... pictures? not really, more like structures and graphs; they don't have colors, but they are connected. And then at a random moment my manager interrupts me to ask for a short summary of current status of the other project I was working on yesterday. For a few seconds I am like when Windows is swapping, because my mind is full of this nonverbal content that has to be thrown away, which means losing many minutes of work, but unless I do it I am unable to provide a coherent verbal answer. I gradually return to the real world, try to remember what was yesterday, find the right words... meanwhile my manager is getting impatient about why it takes me so long to answer such simple question. Trying to answer before my brain fully reboots leads to imcomplete responses like "uhm, I was fixing this bug with that thing that went wrong" -- "which bug? which thing? can't you speak normally?" -- "uhm, the... what made the problem on the... front end... when the button... when the guy who wanted the report pressed the button... and it didn't return a correct result because it was asynchronously called, and..." -- "okay, why don't you simply say 'I was fixing the bug with asynchronous report generation'?" -- "uhm, yes, that's exactly what I wanted to say" -- "then speak more clearly". Yeah, like it's so easy. Well, maybe it is for a normie, I don't know. Working in open space is already full of distractions. Someone is talking, someone has a phone call, someone is walking around... The schedule: there will be a meeting, daily stand-up, regular one-on-one meeting, lunch, some report from higher management, and this lesson on safety or compliance I need to complete before the end of the week, I need to update JIRA and also my daily attendance. The knowledge that "within one hour I will have to abandon my work and do something else" is already distracting long before the moment actually comes. Plus an avalanche of e-mails, most of them unimportant to me, but I have to read them all to find out whether I can just safely delete them. An instant messaging application, which in theory is for urgent work, but in practice people keep posting all kinds of stuff. (Why do you need to post dozen updates about the upcoming Christmas party? Why do I get dozen notification about all the "thanks the party was great" responses?) Then it's five o'clock, people go home, the large room becomes empty and quiet... well, in the past this would be my peak productivity time, but these days I have kids so I get up and return home, too. (No, I can't simply come later and leave later, because we have the daily standups in the early morning.) So, now that I have kids, my total productivity has dropped visibly. I try to keep written log of my thoughts while working, and yes it helps a lot. Still not the same as having a day in a silent room without interruptions. I was never officially diagnosed with anything, because when I was a kid we didn't get tested for these things. People like me were simply "not paying attention" or "not trying hard enough". Which is kinda true; I am quite lazy when unmotivated, and I find it almost impossible to pay attention to boring things. (It's just so easier to get motivated when I am not distracted by endless communication.) Anyway, my kids are diagnosed on the spectrum, so it seems quite likely to me that I would have been too.