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Honestly, this app feels like it was built by people that aren't by ADHD themselves, so they are targeting the wrong customer audience. I don't want to be rude,
by cookiengineer 3y ago
Honestly, this app feels like it was built by people that aren't by ADHD themselves, so they are targeting the wrong customer audience. I don't want to be rude, but it looks like it doesn't understand at all what stresses out ADHD people (at least from my perspective).
As a primer: What stresses me out during the day:
- reminders are useless, they lead to hyperfocus state and I cannot get shit done or focus on anything else before
- calendar events are useless, in work life I try to have external dependent events as early in the morning as possible and hope the best to have enough energy afterwards
- social events, even scrum video sync calls are draining energy, because rasterizing people's emotions is very hard. Especially in open office spaces, which is the reason why I am never in those.
- if I am in an emotional state that does not allow me to work (mad/sad/bored/angry/overwhelmed), I need to find motivation to work with little and easy to fulfill tasks that have a low complexity in the scrum sense. Quick bug fixes, documentation tasks, writing tests etc.
- if I am in an emotional state where I can focus (happy/excited/motivated/calm/focussed/hyperfocussed), I don't want to be distracted by anything else. I am usually listening to music without vocals because of that, because vocals, alerts and notifications are distracting. This app/extension does not respect that, and adds more to the sea of noise.
The reason I use VIM as an editor for more than 20 years, and around 10 years together with i3 is mostly because of notifications. GNOME 3 got better for that, but blinking windows and notification bubbles on systray icons are still notifications, and are still distracting, so I made my choice to move away from GNOME to i3 because of that.
With my current setup, I have zero notifications - for better or worse. The only app I allow in the systray is OpenSnitch (my firewall), anything else is not allowed to have a systray or background-running process. I avoid electron apps like the plague because of that, and I wrote helper scripts that automatically kill those apps when I close their windows. I even tried to submit a PR to upstream electron because of it, but nobody seems to care about this issue and they deleted it.
A lot of electron apps enforce their UI decisions upon to you, which means that the UI frameworks, if not allowed to run in systray, render shitty toasts on the active screen - even when they are on another virtual screen. So yeah, the UX of "modern apps" is horrible from my point of view, because they keep ignoring my decisions to not want notifications. This includes Thunderbird, Slack, Mattermost, Discord and especially everything from Microsoft, like Outlook, Office or Teams.
I cannot use Windows or MacOS because there's literally hundreds of notifications, popups and dialogs that interrupt my workflow. In every single UI, from IDEs to even the goddamn GPU drivers that offer me promos, now even in the Start Menu. WTF.
At some point I tried to build a task planning app for myself to overcome mentioned issues with hyperfocus and external dependencies. I got it into a somewhat working state, but am out of ideas on how to make it more usable across multiple devices without having to have to host a web service that could add pitfalls. Would love to hear feedback if others like the idea, too. [1]
[1] https://github.com/cookiengineer/agenda https://github.com/cookiengineer/agenda