I do not know if I have undiagnosed ADD. Occasionally I wonder, especially those times when I go to put on my shoes to leave the house and discover that 30 minu

I do not know if I have undiagnosed ADD. Occasionally I wonder, especially those times when I go to put on my shoes to leave the house and discover that 30 minutes have passed and I've only managed to put one of them on because somehow I've started doing something else. Either way, I've used Adderall while programming (for which I do not have a prescription), and even small amounts make a significant difference in number of levels of abstraction and detail I can hold in my head at once, and how quickly I can both initially reach and drop back into 'flow' when interrupted. The best analogy I've come up with is that increases your mental RAM - so I'm not having to write anything to swap. Got a really nasty pile of code you need to refactor, or even completely rearchitect? Adderall lets you fit a whole lot more of the problem space in your head at once. Sometimes on very rare occasions, I can somehow hit that sweet spot with caffeine and get the same effect as Adderall. But it happens very rarely - too easy to under or overshoot the caffeine dose, and even when I do manage to pull it off, the perfect mental RAM increase only seems to last about 45 mins. With Adderall, it happens every time, and I can can stay in that state for 12 hours or more. I don't use Adderall frequently. It's kinda a pain in the ass to get, and a little pricey. But when you're just stuck on something, it can really help you break through that mental wall.