For me weed is not really something that actively aids in problem-solving or brainstorming, but rather acts as more of a motivation booster. When it's 11pm and I have a handful of less-demanding tasks to slog through, that's where I've found weed to be a lot of help. It helps make otherwise routine tasks more engaging. It even gives me sufficient motivation to actively refactor and improve parts of codebase that I might've otherwise ignored or ticketed away in the backlog.
Sorry if you have heard this before but you may have ADHD or something similar. I found myself in a similar pattern of using cannabis to motivate myself to do the more boring tasks that inevitably come up being a full time software engineer and after several months of therapy was diagnosed with ADHD.
FWIW, I find that if I have a boring task and attempt to use cannabis to power through it, half of the time I complete the task with vigor and then other half of the time I do literally anything else. So my story is as similar to yours as those saying that cannabis leads them to be anything but productive.
I tried getting help for ADHD years ago but found it very difficult to get help for an adult that is high functioning. I'm pretty sure I have it but all the diagnostics focus on young children. The office where I had evaluations was loaded with whacked out kids. They just don't see it as a problem compared to those kids and the diagnosis is heavily focused on childhood behavior and excludes adults. The doctor, who I struggled to find, was really disorganized and lost my case file and forgot about me after several visits. Total joke.
Talk to your primary care physician. Let them know you're struggling to focus and it's impacting your ability to function at work. Get a referral to a counselor and do a telemed appointment. Answer the handful of questions (truthfully). It's not like there's a series of tests for ADHD. It's just behaviors that are common to people with it.
Telemedicine is great for avoiding those whacked out kids. I was able to find a great therapist (who I have never met in real life) through a mental health startup made available to me by my employer.
Wow, thanks for this viewpoint. It's cool how weed can have such opposite effects for different users. For me (and apparently for tons of other weed smokers given the "And then I got high" song), it is 180 the opposite - weed makes me completely useless.
11 pm - 2/3 am is the best time for me to get work done. Most people are asleep. News, slack/discord and emails aren't coming in. Hopefully the small tasks were already done earlier in the day, and the only thing left to do is focus. My only worry with this is that its just a cover for my procrastination.
I am so glad to read this because I am just the same. Day time seems like there’s just too much other things to do, night time it’s quiet and dark and it feels cozy to sit at my desk, uninterrupted by slack messages or meetings and get long stretches of focus time.
I am double glad to read this. I am pretty much the same. I just cannot work when other people are around. I tend to end up helping them on some of their tasks and do my work when they all have left. The problem is that doing so gets work done , but you get a bit burny and your, if any, social life suffers.
I have since then, done the following, found a special zone/cabin and started to make a list when I go to this cabin. This has helped on tasks that I like to do (like designing and programming) but I still have to slog through other tasks (making presentations and writing pointless documents) in the late evenings.
Wow, I'm the exact same way. I basically never get anything done before 12 but I'm perfectly happy working until 10pm. I wish I could work earlier because it really disrupts my family life.
Why not block out a couple hours during the day where people can't interrupt? This was brought up many times in my last workplace and we found that we could cancel lots of meetings and magically the days became much more free.
I also never put slack on my phone, and use the snooze functionality.
Usually you can make the time if you really want to.
More free time? I mean is it understood that you're not working much during the day? Otherwise it sounds like you'd have to be "on" pretty much all the time.
I read it as accusational for working at an odd hour / after hour, so I was asking to see if that accusational tone was implied or just read into it by the reader. Why do you care why I care?
