&gt; I don&#x27;t have ADHD in real life, but when I&#x27;m hacking, I can&#x27;t wait that long, so I&#x27;ll alt-tab and look at HN or whatever for &quot;5-10secs&quot;<p>You have created a problem for yourself that should not exist: do not task switch to Hacker News, task switch back to your text editor to re-read the code you just added or to work on the next part of the problem; or you could be working on two parts of the project at once and keep rapidly flipping back and forth between them. Your issue is not that you don&#x27;t have the patience to wait for five seconds: it is that during those five seconds you are doing something useless instead of something else important.<p>In all seriousness, once you stop thinking of &quot;patience&quot; as &quot;I need to be able to sit on my hands and wait&quot; and instead think of it as &quot;I now have the opportunity to do something else for the next period of time that I should try to make as productive as I can&quot;, I don&#x27;t think ADHD is the problem anymore: the issue is making sure you always have a fun productive side task. You might find yourself accidentally doing things you realize later had low value for the time, but at least you got something done, right?<p>Put another way, you should embrace ADHD, not fight it: once you get into the habit of distracting yourself with just another task, the 5-10 seconds of compile time no longer matters, as you routinely switch to another task for five minutes every time you compile and it doesn&#x27;t matter how long the compile took. You can do this with everything: I deal with delays in my web page e-mail client by having two or more clients open at the same time where I am working on two different search and reply tasks.