I was diagnosed at 33, and it changed my life infinitely for the better. YMMV, and you may not have ADHD, but if you do, it is nothing to feel guilty about - it, in fact, gives you some insanely useful abilities that others simply don't have, as evidenced by the number of comments on this post explaining you have no guilt to feel, and your positive performance reviews.

But being able to understand why we do these things, and being able to understand how to adjust for them (whether through medication or coping mechanisms) is, alone, insanely relieving.

Consider picking up 'Driven to Distraction,' or 'Delivered From Distraction,' or check out these posts by Mark Suster which was what led me to get started on the path:

* https://bothsidesofthetable.com/how-to-know-if-you-have-add-...

* https://bothsidesofthetable.com/why-add-might-actually-benef...

* https://bothsidesofthetable.com/developing-an-action-plan-fo...

Imagine that almost everything in your life, is the equivalent of starting on a test/exam 2 hours before the deadline, even though you've had a week or two to finish it.

ADHD does affect everything in my life, but I don't relate to this part. For me, it primarily manifests as there being an immense amount of inertia required to do things I don't want to do. I have no issue doing things I intrinsically want to do.

If it's a TV show, hobby, or fun-having activity that I really like, then I'm perfectly able to do them. If I don't like them, then, yeah, they're probably never getting done, or only getting done in a very pathological way. Procrastinating 3 months of work until the day before the deadline, procrastinating cleaning something for a year until someone has to come over to visit, procrastinating taxes until an hour before midnight on tax day. It's the same story every time.

If it's a hobby or TV show I don't like, then I have no reason to continue it. My ADHD and motivation signal to me what what I actually do and don't want to do during my fleeting period of existence. I feel no guilt about dropping something like that if it can't hold my attention. I only feel guilt when it's something I really should be doing, like work, paperwork, etc., and especially things where I know I'm losing lots of money by not doing it.

There are plenty of things I want to want to do, and those things will never get done. But if I actually want to do something, with no meta-layers, then there's no issue for me.

Personally I think the reason is that the cognitive dissonance gets in the way... I know that I absolutely should urgently do X (important thing I'm putting off) and all the time I don't, I cannot reconcile a deliberate decision to do Y (trivial thing I'd really enjoy). So with the inability to do either X or Y, I just end up being fully stuck and in total deadlock.

Most of the time this situation is preceded by many days, weeks or months of me DOING all those things I enjoy while blissfully neglecting the things I should be doing. It's the end result of this behaviour that eventually leads to the deadlock.

But you’re right that the “neglect phase” accounts for the vast majority of time. And when I’m in that, I forget all about the existence of the “deadlock phase” even though I’ll be hurtling towards another one.

Good to know that this self-destructive behaviour is common at least :)

I’m so happy to see this discussion happening on HN

It was a massive paradigm shift for me which I'm only still coming to terms with. The various discussions that pop up on HN about this topic have been hugely helpful. More so than many other places on the internet.

Isn't it more likely that a constant stream of never ending notifications and interruptions decrease our attention span to seconds? You can't read a book because you can't read an article, and you can't read and article because you read 6 line long hackernews or reddit comment that "might" contain some knowledge. Your brain evolved to adapt and it adapted to a world where everything might take your attention elsewhere. You can work to fix this.

And even if it is "ordinary laziness", that doesn't mean that seeking confirmation of it something is ADHD or not is a bad exercise, if you can afford it. The lack of motivation also is a very good sign that the OP is heavily disconnected from their work, and needs to find another job or lifestyle, especially if it's this bad and they don't have ADHD.

If it is ADHD, then you have confirmation of a very helpful community and set of medical and psychological tools that you can apply, and you can ignore vast amounts of advice that just doesn't work for people with ADHD.

> Do we really need to go to a doctor so that we hear that we have a problem, and we might need medicine, to focus?

Modern society can be very inflexible if you're in the wrong spot, and don't have the ability to explain why the fit is so bad.

Lastly, many people who do have ADHD have been told that they are lazy or haven't lived to their potential their entire lives. They know they don't fit in. They pick over their brains, looking for ways to do better, trying ways to do better. They are, as a population, far more self-examined than the norm. They don't need your doubt, they have plenty of their own.

Consider how people like to say they have OCD because they think it’s just “liking to be clean”. Most people like things to be clean, right? So anyone could be diagnosed with OCD on a bad day, couldn’t they? No, because OCD is caused by underlying physical problems with the brain that cause very specific symptoms that interfere greatly with your life. When you see a person who is actually diagnosed with OCD, it becomes really clear that none of these other jokers have it.

The problem with ADHD is that instead of hand washing or checking doors or other very unusual rituals, it mostly just looks like laziness to a casual observer.

OCD is merely a label for a cluster of symptoms. It says nothing about the cause. The same can be said for the majority of psychiatric diagnoses afaik.

E.g. “Doctors aren’t sure why some people have OCD.” - https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/obsessive-compulsive-dis...

E.g. 2: OCD can be a symptom of a strep infection and nothing to do with brain chemistry. https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/pandas/

For OCD: Research suggests that OCD involves problems in communication between the front part of the brain and deeper structures of the brain. These brain structures use a neurotransmitter (basically, a chemical messenger) called serotonin. Pictures of the brain at work also show that, in some people, the brain circuits involved in OCD become more normal with either medications that affect serotonin levels (serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SRIs) or cognitive behavior therapy (CBT).

Just because we don’t know the precise cause doesn’t mean we cannot, in the meantime, help alleviate the symptoms for someone suffering from the syndrome (since we don’t know the precise cause).

Please don’t get in the way of this by implying people are “making it up,” because, simply, they are not. Both of these are extremely well studied syndromes, but really only in the last few decades.

I didn’t imply anything contrary to that.

> Please don’t get in the way of this by implying people are “making it up,” because, simply, they are not. Both of these are extremely well studied syndromes, but really only in the last few decades.

I didn’t imply people are making it up.

HN guidelines are “Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.”.

I understand that you find it natural to jump to conclusions about what others think, but it really damages good discussion.

> correlations

Exactly - for many psychiatric symptoms the causes are not actually known -instead we just measure a bunch of complicated things and try to read the tea leaves.

There is a hell of a lot of bullshit in psychology and psychiatry, sometimes to the point of abusing those they are supposed to help.

I do think that the beliefs like "my brain is wired wrong" or "it's a brain chemistry problem" are usually wrong for some conditions, and that those beliefs can be harmful because they discourage seeking less obvious solutions or solutions particular to the person.

Also you do not want unrealistic expectations of a "cure", or to encourage seeking of dangerous interventions.

The friends I have with mental health issues usually have another layer of strange personal beliefs, which doesn't help either!

It is a difficult topic to comment on, because people tend to be sensitive about it, for valid reasons.

> It is a difficult topic to comment on, because people tend to be sensitive about it, for valid reasons.

It definitely is.

Having been recently diagnosed (via medical professionals) with ADHD, I've suddenly encountered for the first time what it's like to be on the other side of this.

I previously had a very misinformed idea of what ADHD (and related things like OCD) actually were. I wouldn't have trivialised them necessarily in words or conversation, but I definitely had a completely wrong understanding of the seriousness of these conditions. I didn't know what I didn't know.

The misconceptions about some of these conditions are so widespread that in my case, I've found it actively unhelpful in some cases to talk to many people in my life about it. Having done the research, I now understand much more about how my brain works and why some things are much harder for me than others, but trying to bridge the gap in this knowledge with others is really hard. Even those closest to me either view the diagnosis with suspicion (and I don't blame them for that if they have the same misconcieved idea about the condition that I did). Others just listen to me describing the problems I have and dismiss them (not intentionally) by saying things like "everyone has those problems"!

I've heard (perhaps even read on HN) that after being diagnosed with ADHD in adulthood you go through a bit of a grieving phase, in denial, then angry at medical professionals who didn't it spot it before, and then sadness at how your life might have been had you realised you had this condition much earlier. I'm in that phase now, and so the lack of understanding from others (which again, I don't blame them for) makes this all the more harder. I'm trying to reincorporate this new understanding into the "model" of myself that I've constructed over many years (without this important information) - it's tough and rather isolating.

So all of that said. I guess I'm likely to view a lot of discussion on this topic through my own specific lens, which is likely to make me overly sensitive to perceived "trivialisation".

It's interesting to recognise that I wouldn't have had this sensitivity at all only just a matter of weeks ago. It's funny how your outlook on things can change so significantly in a short space of time.

> You can work to fix this.

Going to a doctor is "working to fix it", and it's a lot of work to keep the prescriptions filled since nobody will give you more than 30 days supply of the useful medicines. There is plenty of other stuff you can do. It's just none of it works unless you do the medication first.

If you don't have the physical causes of ADHD, the medication won't help much, but other things like therapy or going on vacation will. With ADHD it's the opposite.

https://humanparts.medium.com/laziness-does-not-exist-3af27e...

It's not that I can't read a book, I just forget that I wanted to read it. Then by the time I remember I already have my phone out and hn pulled up. Call it laziness, call it ADHD. I don't care, and I don't expect sympathy just like someone who can't do calculus doesn't need sympathy. Some things just seem harder for me than they are for some people.

Seriously though, is there a dx for not having any common sense?

I feel like a lot of us here would be terminal cases

WTF does that even mean

There are similar phenomena of people doing that with all sorts of maladies or abstract identities, from chronic fatigue syndrome to being an introvert. I find ADHD to be an odd choice though, relatively. It seems like it's been at least a decade or two where over-diagnosis of ADD/ADHD was highly criticized, albeit when it comes to diagnosing children (mostly boys) and giving them Ritalin and not adults.

Also, ADHD is in fact under-diagnosed, particularly in adults and especially in women.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4195639/

Some children are overmedicated, but there's evidence it's also underdiagnosed in children.

Funnily enough, I chanced upon a random YouTube video yesterday and the very top comment was someone mentioning ADHD and others chiming in, while skeptics criticizing the self-diagnosing and likening it to those who self-diagnose other conditions such as depression:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ph3ZCriWAw&lc=Ugw0IXd-rBjzj...

Whether right or wrong, it definitely is a known internet social phenomenon. That's what the ancestral post in this current subthread was referring to by referring to ADHD as the new Asperger's.

I don't discount this completely, but I think the argument could be equally strong that we have gained a lot of additional understanding over the last 20 years. There are plenty of conditions that used to be rarely diagnosed (or didn't even exist in medical science) but now are. Just because something didn't used to have a label or definition, but now does, doesn't make it any less valid.

For example we can see differences in ADHD brains with fMRI - something only _relatively_ recently possible. And as medical science gets better at defining and describing these things, more information gets shared, more people talk about their experiences, and the net effect is that unsurprisingly more people identify with that new information. Some self-diagnose rightly or wrongly and leave it at that, others (plenty others I think) use this recognition as a cue to go and speak to a medical expert, which often precedes a formal, valid diagnosis.

Even the ADHD prescribed amphetamine medication is dextroamphetamine, not the scary methamphetamine.

There are also several medications that are not stimulants. While I do believe that children should be prescribed the minimum medications during their formative years, I've talked to several teachers whose students now have a prescription because the children were doing school at home and finally followed the teacher's recommendation.

Yeah, and? There are literally no long term side effects of taking them (except for maybe some positive ones.)

I’m not sure this is true

My point being is that there is absolutely no reason to be a video game completionist.

But we don’t have the parent’s full context - they may have had a dozen other symptoms that they have finally been made aware of, and in that context this may be a symptom.

I don’t play video games enough for it to be one for me, but if I did, I would almost certainly have trouble being a “completionist.” That doesn’t mean I have ADHD, but coupled with about two dozen other personality traits and symptoms, and tons of self-reflection and medical help, it could be a part of that.

The struggle is more than the simplistic description of "this is not interesting. It bores me", it's really "my brain is uncomfortably overwhelmed with coordinating my thoughts with the tasks at hand to the point of feeling angry/anxious/down/<fill in negative emotion>, but oooo I could just cook a familiar recipe which won't require much thinking and can relieve me of, and potentially help with, this mental situation". It's complicated and requires a lot of "tricks" to deal with it. This is the case whether there are tasks to do, if one is just reflecting in thought, thinking up ideas, conversing, reading, etc... even writing this has taken me 10-15 minutes tbh...

this video does a good job of explaining the motivation problem when you have ADHD. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OM0Xv0eVGtY

I also do this. Even worse: the easier and hence duller the task seems, the more difficult it is to get started on it. Once I do start on it and finish 5 minutes later, I need a 20 minute break (WFH doesn't help).

I also often zone out during meetings to the point I haven't got a clue what people are talking about. But to be honest the information content of most meetings is really low.

I've found that having a pen and some notepaper for doodling and writing whatever a speaker is saying is helpful to stay engaged

It’s a vicious cycle leading you on a one way ticket straight to hell and losing everything you care about in life or rotting in prison as an adult that looks invisible to the naked neurotypical eye and dismissed as being lazy when a kid by ignorant parents.

I’ve been this way my entire adult life and I did not realize those were dopamine hits. Wow.

What has helped me is something that the video mentions too, and that's working with a coworker. Not so much pairing (as in, looking at each other's screen), but just saying "I'm working on X now" and feeling like someone else is working on their thing alongside you/simultaneously. That has produced great results for me.

I consider that a hallmark of the syndrome - you are REALLY interested in something, got a project fully prepared around it, and then it sits there waiting for you to do it. All that time you might research it, but it's a problem of getting started even though it is something you are wildly interested in.

Dozens of really interesting things left undone and probably never will get done.

Most of the people who don't understand ADHD and say it is similar to what they go through should be taught about this aspect of it as well.

While I don't dispute the seriousness of ADHD, having never read about it, I can't help but think that the thing you described as the hallmark of the syndrome is just a really common thing among any functioning human being.

A hallmark can't just be considered without the existence of other symptoms. It literally means "If you see this symptom, look for these others to see if it's ADHD." An indicator isn't a solitary rule.

People really like to minimize it because online ADHD conversations don't typically describe the entire diagnosis and its variations. To do so would be far too verbose and extensive for regular discussion.

Isn't that basically how everyone behaves?

For example, I know many people who just don't show up for work. They just can't get up and do it and they get fired. That isn't typical for how "everyone behaves."

ADHD makes even things you love and are wildly interest in, hard to follow through on.

People with ADHD are notorious for starting projects and then leaving them, regardless of how fun or cool said project was.

Procrastinators don't start new projects consecutively. One is a delay tactic. The other is outright avoidance.

The concept of hyperfocus in ADHD was introduced in certain literature to explain a reduced ability of certain ADHD patients to control their attention, such as having difficulty stopping playing a video game to do the dishes. However, that's ambiguously close to normal human behavior of preferring to do fun tasks more than un-fun tasks, so the distinction is best left to professionals.

Regardless, it wouldn't really apply to the OP's description anyway, as accomplishing necessary work tasks before deadlines when necessary isn't the same as someone drawn to fun activities like video games or TV.

As always, it's best to consult professionals. Internet medical advice, especially about ADHD, is increasingly wrong online. It's also worth noting that the concept of "hyperfocus" doesn't even appear in most accepted definitions of ADHD, and isn't considered in diagnostic tests. The idea of "hyperfocus" in ADHD is relatively limited to a few authors and one recent blurb in some European clinical definitions from 2019.

I was referring to official, medical definitions of ADHD and official diagnostic criteria.

Years ago I had a different doctor and she gave me a prescription for Lexapro. My god what an experience that was. I suddenly lost all random thoughts and boredom. Its like I became a robot, got my work done on time, without any distraction and a kind of concentration I had never had before. I wasn't sad or happy for that matter, I just felt neutral all the time. It was such an interesting feeling.

However Lexapro had severe side effects. Outside of a few hours of relative alertness, I was extremely exhausted and sleepy. I tried sleeping for 24 hours and was still extremely exhausted. It also made me feel extremely nauseous, like I felt like I was being poisoned. Finally there were other side effects of an ahem...sexual nature.

All in all I threw the pills away after a week and never perused the issue again until I saw the video above. Man I'll never forget that week though. The productivity was life changing.

[1]:https://old.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/newcvd/what_adhd_fe...

I've had fantastic experiences with donefirst.com, but also chadd.org is a great website with tons of resources.

Don't give up on the medication; finding the right one and right dosage is extremely helpful for many people with ADHD, myself included.

The most important part is: find an expert. Child psychologists/psychiatrists often have a ton of experience with ADHD, and also often treat adults. Someone without experience treating ADHD is almost worse than leaving it untreated, because some of the 'solutions' proposed by folks who don't understand the syndrome serve to only make life worse for ADHD people (negative reinforcement, talk therapy, etc.). Talk therapy, or CBT, for example, can be helpful, but coaching is much more useful.

I was fortunate to have a local medical school with a psychiatry department that has an Adult ADHD clinic where I could seek a diagnosis at the age of 42. Unlike many adults who suspect they have ADHD, I was taken seriously and did not encounter any skepticism on the part of my healthcare providers. I even expressed concern that my problem could be anxiety or depression instead, and my psychiatrist said "If you have undiagnosed ADHD, of course you're going to be anxious and depressed." Find the most expert ADHD person you can for diagnosis and prescribing medication, I really think this is key.

I also agree on not giving up on medication, I had to try three before I found one that worked without also having negative side effects. There's at least one other one I'd like to try, mostly out of curiosity.

I've worked with both a therapist with ADHD expertise and an ADHD coach. My therapist helps me accept my ADHD brain, my coach helps me figure out how to work with it instead of against it. I agree coaching is more helpful but it works best if you can accept the way your brain works instead of trying to fight or change it, so seeing a therapist first to work through that might be a good idea.

I've been listening to a lot of ADHD audiobooks lately. The one I've liked best so far is Nancy Ratey's _The Disorganized Mind_ -- she has ADHD herself and she's the wife of John Ratey, co-author of Driven to Distraction. She kind of invented ADHD coaching and the book is about how to coach yourself.

Also, this post is spot-on. 100.

After the first two weeks or so, things evened out and I felt much more normal but all of the good things Lexapro brought to me remained. This, from my understanding, is normal and you simply did not give your body/mind enough time to adjust to the dosage.

I was also told that the effects only trigger after 2-3 weeks, so to not stop during the first.

Neither helped with attention and focus though. I still get distracted by the next thing easily. Although I've never had a diagnosis of ADD or ADHD, I've suspected it for a while now, as it had been suggested off-handedly by a former therapist back in college. This article might be the push I need to get some confirmation.

It hasn't impacted my professional life, but my hobbies have certainly fallen by the wayside because of my difficulties with attention.

What they really meant is that their business is optimized for prescribing certain medications with the same diagnosis and same spiel given to every patent conversation.

  There are several types of professionals who typically diagnose ADHD. These include: physicians (especially psychiatrists, pediatricians, neurologists), psychologists, social workers, nurse practitioners, and other licensed counselors or therapists (e.g. professional counselors, marriage and family therapists, etc.). [1]

  Some examples of professionals who are capable of diagnosing ADHD include: pediatricians, psychiatrists, family physicians, nurse practitioners, psychologists, psychotherapists. [2]

[2] https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/adhd-doctor

Also, diagnoses for disability accommodations (e.g., in education) are a whole different and complicated thing.

I guess that's why they'll all eventually send you to a "specialist," which is another way of saying "someone authorized to medicate you for this."

I'm not sure though - physicians can prescribe Ritalin, but at least here, they always send you off to be checked out by a psychiatrist first.

What seems at least somewhat true, is that if you're a person who can be employed arbitrarily and can connect your income directly to things that bring you value, you'll have an easier time in a capitalistic society than someone who needs to derive their motivation from the things they do all the time; with the exception of someone who is exceptionally talented and just falls into success as a consequence of the output of what they've been fixating on.

I'm a software developer I guess, which gives me a hypothetically high earning potential. But over the last 10 years, someone working a menial job for 30-40k would come out on top financially. I've had a hell of a lot more free-time than that person, which is very personally valuable, but it doesn't scale maybe even over more than one decade with such a tattered work history.

I don't mean to dismiss the GPs comment about their own ADD. No doubt, it's going to be life changing, hopefully for the better. I'm just sick of startup founders saying that actually all I need is to cut carbs and be a CEO.

I was able to accept that I wasn't an incompetent fool, incapable of being useful - I had ADHD.[1] That was OK. That meant I could accept what I was bad at, focus on the things I was good at, and use techniques to adjust for the things I've now accepted I'm bad at, instead of incessantly trying to do the same thing over and over that works for other people but ... just doesn't work for me.

Medication has also helped, and I use it on an as-needed basis, but it is not, alone, a cure for anything - it is a tool, often an incredibly helpful one, but still just that. The education and understanding about what ADHD is has been far more helpful, though I'm glad I have the medication as a tool, too.

[1] Incidentally, not understanding your own effect on other people, and devaluing your own contributions and successes? Also a symptom of ADHD. Think about it: most people choose, simply, to try to do the things they are likely to be successful at; they choose carefully. ADHD people do not choose; they can't. They do all of the things they might be excited about, meaning they fail, frankly, at most of them. But in those that they succeed, they are often wildly successful; to everyone else, this is objectively obvious. To the ADHD person, they know they've failed 98 times for every 2 successes, and often fall into a depression (though not as deep as someone who has clinical depression or BPD, unless that's a separate symptom) after nearly every success.

Echoing this point. I struggled with depression for much of my life. Being diagnosed with ADHD at 25 and taking medication for it on a regular basis (5-6d/week) has done more for my depression than any depression medication I've tried.

- Awareness. Sometimes, I notice, "oh, I'm feeling distracted right now." Or, "I'm feeling bored right now." Once I notice, I can avoid doing the unhelpful next thing I was going to do.

- Medication. It does help with focus and context-switching, especially on days I have to do a number of medium-size boring tasks. I probably take it every other day.

- Being present. More present with kids when I'm on medication. My wife says I'm less impatient.

- Self-acceptance. That's why I love Mark Suster's posts. He's open that his ADHD makes him a talented entrepreneur and a terrible employee. I have a different temperament than Mark but feel similarly. I used to feel ashamed of a couple of character traits. I don't anymore. This is who I am.

- My tribe. When I look around at close friends and acquaintances, other founders I know including some you've probably heard of -- a ton of them have ADHD too. An employee at our startup has expressed that he's going to start his own startup fairly soon. I was talking to his manager about it and said, effectively: "of course he is. He's brilliant and a bit ADHD. He's got founder genes."

The only way my life changed when I was diagnosed was that I got paid for the study I had signed up for, which required I have a diagnosis

Still, for about 20% of people, medication simply doesn't help. For them, coaching and therapy (and education about ADHD) is far more useful.

Check out https://chadd.org/ for lots of fantastic resources

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/know-your-amphetamines

If you're not familiar with the author, he's an incredibly talented blogger whose day job is as a psychiatrist.

Unfortunately modafinil is almost 10x the price of dex in Australia if you don't have narcolepsy, and the drug that I suspect would benefit me the most (adderall, a mix of dex and meth) is simply illegal.

Vyvanse is the form that works best for me, but the crash can ruin any of my evening plans since I lose all motivation or sometimes just need a nap.

Strattera also works very well for some people and is easy to get.

When I was undermedicated I was literally falling asleep at random, and had basically no emotional response to almost anything. Getting closer to where I should be over the last few months has made a world of difference.

Not to put aside the medication… it’s made me feel more like a normal functioning human capable of existing in a world. I don’t want to overemphasize this though because, while it saved my life, the other part made my life feel worth saving.

I’ve learned in the last couple years that almost all of the things I struggle with trace back to ADHD. My inability to take care of myself and my surroundings without fooling myself with rewards; my cognitive impairments around sensory issues; my endless stream of damaged friendships because I can’t respond to texts or emails or whatever; my whole upbringing of incompatible disappointments because my whole family probably has the same brain. So many things have an explanation even if it’s too late to correct a lot of it. And having an explanation has been immeasurably valuable.

Why is this ADHD and not just being human? This sounds so basic I have a hard time believing this is because of a condition.

Someone neurotypical can usually convince themselves to at least do it, and "will" themselves into it.

But you're somewhat right, and this is why getting a real diagnosis from a professional is so important: lots of people have some of these symptoms. What distinguishes the ADHD brain from the neurotypical brain is the duration and frequency of these symptoms, and an inability to adjust for them even with disciplined effort.

And it's not about medication, necessarily, though for 80% of people with ADHD, medication is extremely helpful; often, just learning about the syndrome and finding a therapist/coach to help build tools and stop blaming yourself for the things you cannot change is extremely helpful on its own too.

I personally think that we've taken something completely normal and turned it into a "disorder" simply because it goes against the societal norm of sitting quietly at a desk for 8 hours a day.

It is a syndrome rooted in physical causes, but one we don't yet fully understand.

The research is very clear though: our brains are simply different.

Hyperfocus gets them started, and they go REALLY far with the project, and then it wears out, and the project is neglected thereafter. Even if the person still adores the project and hopes to finish it. Without the hyperfocus, nothing gets done.

> the project is neglected thereafter. Even if the person still adores the project and hopes to finish it.

I am also curious why this is labeled ADHD. To me this seems to just be “the human condition”.

I guess from what I’ve read in this thread, using the term “ADHD” seems to allow people the ability to forgive themselves for the very human condition of procrastination and/or “not achieving perfect completion”.

For anyone reading this, you can also choose to forgive yourself for not being perfect without the professional diagnosis. At least I definitely do.

I recently got diagnosed and it may just be that I'm naturally very distractible and bad at paying attention. But if the diagnosis and meds make my life significantly better at minimal risk/cost then what's the harm?

Meanwhile, I was just trying to provide extra data, i.e. it’s possible and acceptable to forgive yourself for not being perfect without any diagnosis.

Hopefully it just provides any one who reads this, one extra strategy to help themselves.

If you have certain types of ADHD and you aren't excited about something, you just have a huge resistance to doing it and you likely won't do it. Many don't even do the work with a deadline.

On the flip side, when you're intensely interested, you often times are completely absorbed into it, at the expense of other human needs.

Also, when that hyperfocus runs out, that absorption is lost, possibly forever. Onto the next fleeting thing.

Because most people can work effectively on a project that they don't want to do by, for example, focusing on the positive benefits of doing the project or the negative consequences of not doing it. Someone with ADHD can go through the same reasoning and still not be able to pay attention and effectively work on the project.

Procrastinating is something everyone does.

Being completely unable to sit still for more than a few minutes is an experience neurotypicals don't share.

ADHD is really one of those disorders that's both under and over diagnosed

Also is there any tangible benefits? I don't understand how just knowing provides enough benefit to bother going to a doctor.

Driven to Distraction or Delivered From Distraction. But not both, they're effectively the same book.

I did find value in reading both, but mostly because it gave me a sense of history, and how much our understanding of what ADHD is had progressed from the past, and how my (incorrect) assumptions about what it was came to be.

YMMV :)

There’s tradeoffs to everything.

Medication saves lives.

Of course every medication has risks. You should evaluate them for yourself, with a physician.

However, generalizing that to “medication is dangerous and can cause psychosis, or death, and thus you shouldn’t take it because it can have side effects, even if it could otherwise help you” is garbage advice.

Also, the dosages at which stimulants and such are used for ADHD as a therapy (as opposed to abused) are generally quite small, fwiw.

Which type? I have ADHD-PI diag at 38, but it maybe a direct consequence of low testosterone.

It's interesting that the major parts of my body are very masculine while others aren't as much as they were. And, it's not Klinefelter's or a karyotype issue. Attractive members of my preferred gender for adult activities are frequently "shouting" overt interest nonverbally that doesn't register to me as anything other than a potential threat. My instincts should be of curiosity, delight, and novelty.

Starting on clomid tomorrow because the memory, concentration, alertness, and fluid/crystalized intelligences became disabled to the point where I cannot work. I may also have to take hCG too. An endocrinologist has to research the primary cause because it could be an HPG tumor or something else, because the low T issue is absurd.

I’m always reading all of the time [zizek.gif]. I’m reading code, documentation, release notes, emails and texts… from the moment I wake til I sleep.

Put an interesting book in front of me and, well, I’m interested but getting my brain into a place where it can take in new reading sources is like getting my body in a place to take up running right after walking my dog. Not gonna happen.

And I’m not ashamed of it.

Plus, those other things you're doing sound like they overall, in the long-term, probably give you a wider range of knowledge, improving your usefulness.

Just wanted to add a voice against that sort of Taylorism perspective on work.

What this means is that often when crunch time hits, I've got excess capacity I can use to help "row the boat" (or maybe bail out water from leaks?). Excess capacity is extremely valuable as lots of folks are really bad at time estimation, so having some more senior "floaters" around can really help get projects completed.

Excess capacity is also useful for longer-term efforts. You need at least a few folks who can get out of the low-level crunch mindset and figure out what needs to be done for sustainability of efforts, or else you just end up in mega-crunch forever.

People ended up doing most work towards end of sprint and Friday would usually be really busy - basically he always had to be present and management would offload priority stuff to him since he was done. So he'd end up busting his ass all week. Eventually he got tired and reverted to standard schedule - but this meant his relative performance dropped - I saw him get singled out in a review for performance drop (and not a lot of people noticed when he was going above the norm).

Working in a retail store/break-fix repair/MSP environment, for a small business in a small city, this is absolutely the case. There is nothing more frustrating than having three customer projects on your plate, all of which are important (think "the email server is down"), and then the doorbell or phone rings and you end up spending half an hour walking an old lady through resetting her facebook password. It's an absolutely massive productivity killer, as well as making the day feel longer.

More employees would be the normal solution, but that's not possible here (we've had more in the past, it wasn't financially viable, apparently). Unless of course they started paying commission based on what people actually got done instead of a regular wage, which I'm not a fan of. (Though to be fair, if we did switch to that, the one employee who barely does anything would either get his ass in gear, or leave, so win/win maybe?)

I feel like I am in a similar boat to OP. Often feeling like my regular work doesn't take up a full week and not trying to fill up every bit of that 40 hours. I also spend a lot of my time "poking around" and not doing my own work. Seeing what others are working on, learning random things that may or may not be applicable to my job. But performance reviews come around with words like "very responsive!" and "always knows what's going on in the program and can jump in to any project"

So while day to day there might not be immediate obvious work, much like a fire fighter or life guard; if the servers go down or coworkers leave there needs to be some ballast that can steer the ship.

That said, if you don't actually know much of the companies code base other than stuff you've directly written, you could very much be providing only perceived insurance versus actual insurance.

This was expected for the reasons you noted. When there was an emergency someone needed to be idle in the first place so they could immediately respond fully focused.

I played a lot of Civilization 3 and Quake 3 on company time.

I don't think its better for the company as you suggest. It is possible to use good sense of prioritization and still have 'extra capacity'.

I think that it's really difficult for a lot of people to see the value they're providing outside of the proper business tasks they're assigned, and once there are tasks assigned to fill up all the time, everything breaks down. It doesn't matter if your task is something as irrelevant as "provide documentation regarding this vendor relationship," once it's on the board it can't be dropped and so you're no longer available to try the new tool people are looking for feedback on, or whatever.

The other thing doesn't even have to be high-priority, but if you're at a large enough organization, there are lots of things you'll realize can't be done well because too many people need to be involved, even if it's just a little bit of time. My org can't make any movement on, for example, API clients or API documentation because there are lots of different needs, but by the time you've gotten through the initial conversations it's a six months later, because people weren't available. There are many efforts we can't get done because that effort isn't priority for the team's involved, but requires time from people on those teams.

Ideally, of course, we try to minimize those things. But I've yet to hear of a sizeable org that has none of those kinds of things.

When I'm working on a personal project I'm really passionate about, my productivity is literally orders of magnitude higher than at any day job I've had. Months or years are compressed into days.

For any ambitious personal project that I'm intrinsically motivated by, I'm working on it and designing it pretty much every free moment I have. It's actually crazy to me how much I can get done if there's absolutely zero "ugh field" [1] inhibiting me. It doesn't feel like work at all. I'd happily take 20% of my current salary if it meant I could do that all day instead.

Even if it's stressful and even if I might fail miserably, I think life should be lived. If there's even the tiniest sliver of a chance that I could support myself just doing something like that, I know I'd be much happier. And if turning such a thing into a job or organization sucks the fun out of it, then I'll just keep trying again and again until I can find a project with a sufficiently viable enjoyment:financial stability ratio.

[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EFQ3F6kmt4WHXRqik/ugh-fields (Regarding the author's username: yes, it's that one.)

Interesting. It also didn't really occur to me that being an employee might just not be for me, until I read this comment on HN over a year ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22520709. Although the reasoning is a somewhat different from yours. Excerpt:

> The reality is that if you care about your craft a tiny bit more than average, you will most likely end up feeling that you are overpaid for trivial work, that you could do so much more for the company, that your coworkers and hierarchy are apathetic to things that do not directly affect them (and will seek to avoid any change as much as possible). The more you stay in this situation, the likelier you are to burn out.

> If you are that kind of person, then you need to GTFO and start your own thing - have your own skin in the game

If you currently work for a big company (or really any company with >50 employees if I recall) you can qualify to take COBRA when you leave. Doing so is expensive, sure, but it's really usually about the same price as private insurance but much better (because it's a group plan). You can elect COBRA for up to 18 months, or 24 in some cases.

When COBRA runs out and you aren't yet in a position where you can have the organization you've founded pay for it, you can either look at joining a PEO or you can simply buy private insurance. Yep, it's definitely not great, but it is coverage. Additionally, if you are doing your own thing, look into setting up an HRA for yourself/your company--it lets the company pay for your medical costs without even when you're buying private insurance.

Not sure how to pay for it out of the gate when you might be pre-revenue for a while? You still have a couple of options. First, saving specifically for this use case makes a lot of sense. Even better, if you are currently in an HSA-compatible plan at work, max out the account for the year because you can use HSA savings to pay for premiums. Or if you have a spouse or SO and can hop on their plan for a while, good call too.

In general, and speaking from the position of someone who has spent far more time than I wish to admit building models and forecasting health expenses for when I was on private insurance and doing my own thing, it can be done. The freedom was definitely worth the price.

- COBRA and private health insurance are comparable in cost (I always assumed it was way more expensive)

- HSAs can be used to pay premiums

These are important pieces of information for figuring this out for me. I don't have four dependents, but I have two and don't have the option of jumping to a spouse's plan, so thanks for the additional context.

This is not true, as far as I know. I'd consult a CPA for an authoritative answer, but from https://www.healthcare.gov/glossary/health-savings-account-h...

> HSA funds generally may not be used to pay premiums.

HRAs on the other hand are a good vehicle for this.

EDIT: Ah, there is indeed an exception for continuation of coverage under COBRA which makes it acceptable to do so: https://dpath.com/hsa-and-cobra/

I tried doing my own thing but couldn’t keep at it after about 8 months.

I think the key is to at least have your expenses covered by your business. I couldn’t stand seeing my savings and retirement-fodder continue to dwindle even though I had plenty left in the bank.

Found a part-time job and now my days are less fun but also less stressed

Curious to know who the author is or what he is famous for? I searched his posts, it looks like there were no post for a decade before last year.

He himself isn't really famous, but due to the infamous reaction his post on the subject received, his username will probably be etched into the history books for centuries. (Or at least a few fiction and non-fiction books here and there.)

I'm not suddenly working 40+ hours always in the zone. What has happened is that I've been better able to enjoy/engage with coworkers around helping them. Instead of feeling stuck and anxious, it's been easier to feel at ease at work and less fixated on metrics or usefulness. That engagement with my coworkers coupled with lowering how much effort was needed to do work that was previously seen as "busy" work has done wonders for my outlook about work.

In my case the benefit/problem of hyperfixation due to ADHD meant that when I had an interesting bit of work in front of me I could knock it out the park and it didn't feel like any effort. Those infrequent home runs were enough to make up for the times where I just couldn't be bothered to do other less interesting things. Didn't want to do them and because no one was asking me to do them it was ok that I didn't. Deep down I knew I was overcompensating in my strong areas to avoid the uninteresting items. This may not be you but if it is you may want to think on it. It's helped me outside of work as well. Parenting and dating.

Figured I'd also comment it here since it has some useful resources that led me to get diagnosed and improve my life :)

Being competent (top 20%) and working 3hrs / day is way more productive than a middle performer working 12 hrs / day.

In my personal experience:

I work with people that, in 5 minutes, I can accomplish more than they can in a day. And those people are not stupid / unmotivated.

I also work with people that, in 5 minutes, can accomplish more than I can in a day. I'm not stupid, or unmotivated.

Some people are just more experienced, have better judgement, are smarter etc.

Output is what counts, not time.

What sort of toxic exceptionalism led you to think that only 20% of workers are suitable for their jobs....

Essentially 80% of all corporate output is performed by 20% of the workforce, and continues down each chain (of the 20% doing 80% of the work, 20% of them are doing 80% and etc…)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution

https://www.americanexpress.com/en-us/business/trends-and-in...

I like this essay on the topic:

http://www.norvig.com/21-days.html

[0] https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/in-an-8-hour-day-the-aver...

https://imgur.com/qdSltlM

The left axis is years of seniority.

When you are a developer, and you only count the minutes that you are at your computer coding, I highly doubt many would reach 3 hours per day.

This isn't a great study in general, because, realistically, there isn't a large range for the work hours. And the majority of them were grouped into one bucket => 4-8 hours.

That's the biggest problem.

The second biggest is that - presumably - not all of the respondents work 5 days per week.

The third is that - without a large sample size - your margin of error is going to cover a pretty big chunk. If your finding is 6 hours +/- 1 hour, 95% CI - that's pretty unsurprising.

You need a large sample size because there are ~115M workers in the US. What are the odds these 104 people are a decent representation of all ~115M voters??

If there's only 10,000 people this applies to that read HackerNews, then - if you fixed everything else - your CI wouldn't be super low.

I was the best performing engineer at that company, handling a contract that was worth >20% of their revenue by myself. They loved me at that company, and I wish I had been honest with the feedback I gave during my exit interview, but I just couldn’t tell the guy my issues were with him.

Looking back at it, I understand why I quit, but back then I couldn’t even put it in words. Thankfully, I managed to keep all the friendships I made, including my ex boss.

You probably get a few weeks of “real 8 hours” before your best employees find somewhere less oppressive to work and leave your micromanaged company.

Your bad employees will stay because they don’t have better options.

I simply can't sit and focus working for 8 hours a day. Especially if its hard. I'm not a robot.

If I thought you were sitting there just to watch me to try and force me to work more, I'd leave.

I think for me doing dev, 4 hours is about the max before the quality of work drops off significantly.

If you're my boss, and I'm reading your question, will the average boss communicate clearly?