I feel like the medications can make my "doom loops" even harder to avoid. The stimulants make it easier to hyper focus on one task, and feel even less guilt for ignoring the rest of the world. Executive Dysfunction is killing me
The pills help but motivation is not some emergent property of normality. You first need to care about, and genuinely want to do, the task required to accomplish your goals.
I’m a fan of this quote from Steve Jobs – (paraphrasing) “every day you wake up and look in the mirror, do you like what you’re doing that day? If not, it’s time to do something else.”
The other quote I like is Jeff Bezos and his “picturing myself on a rocking chair when I’m 80, do I regret not doing this?”
If you can solve these problems then the pills become just a tool to help you execute on the solutions.
Source: Diagnosed with ADHD (because I asked for it - duh, this is the only way), never had a real job but fairly happy with my direction so far. YMMV of course. Be happy with yourself first and foremost and everything else will follow.
In your experience does the medication get more effective if you can find ways to work with it? I've been trying to make it work for a while now and it seems like it either does nothing or makes me lock on to some random tangential (usually useless) task I'm near when it kicks in. Really not getting a quieting like with caffeine, which has been disappointing.
Have a plan before the start of each day, drink lots of water, exercise, eat, get plenty of rest. Maybe take a day or two off meds over the weekend, if it's burning you out. It's tough to get into a groove and don't last long enough but if your force yourself to do these things you can find a rhythm for a time and that's the best I've found.
Its a tool. You need to be self aware enough to take the meds, and then consciously engage with tasks that you want to get done - this wont be a skill you have developed, as its likely never been possible/effective previously. You can, when medicated, actually consider what you need to get done, and then decide to act on those tasks.
You can also set timers/alarms to timebox tasks, and reign in hyper focus - it should be relatively easy to change tasks with the alarm interruption (vs. unmediated, where I find it practically impossible to move to any new task).
I’ve gone multiple years on medication, followed by years off it and then back on again. In aggregate I’d say it’s a wash, but the benefits of each phase are different.
In terms of raw productivity, it can definitely make things worse (like the comment I replied to). Or at least, it can replace one problem with another – suddenly your creativity is gone and your hyperfocus is completely misdirected.
Personally I’ve sought out the (re-)diagnosis at times when I felt creativity was less of a priority than execution. If you know exactly what you need to do and can commit to it, the pills can help keep you on track. But they are not the original source of the commitment.
I’m honestly not sure whether it’s worth it, but the dopamine it releases sure does its best to convince me that it is.
When I first started working with my psychiatrist, she had me try several different stimulants and I found that the effect was surprisingly different for different formulations. My experience with a generic for Ritalin was a lot like what you described, but my experience with dextroamphetamine was totally different: it does quiet my mind down and I don't get pulled into hyperfocus nearly as much. The subjective feeling was different too; I'm not sure how to describe it, but the dextroamphetamine just felt softer.
I've found that the effects change massively with sleep quality. When I'm short on sleep for a few nights, it almost feels like the medication stops working. It still has an effect—I am noticeably more clumsy and forgetful without it—but it feels different and the higher-order effect on focus or executive function is less pronounced.
Another thing I've heard is that protein in the morning helps. I've tried drinking a protein shake for breakfast and it seems to make the day better in general, but with a much smaller effect than sleep quality. For all I know, it might just have been the case that I only remembered to have breakfast on days when I had slept well...
This sounds like the meds dont work (for you). Try different ones, if they do not help much then depending on how clearcut the diagnosis was, consider that it might have been misdiagnosed.
ADHD is not a motivation thing. Generally speaking. You might struggle with motivation and that's okay, but framing it as a ADHD trait might harm others. Be cautious about that.
I was burned out and got into depression because I was going hard on myself for years. Blaming my motivation and asking myself if I even "genuinely want to do the task required to accomplish your[my] goals". Getting my diagnosis was a huge relief. Looking back, I have been motivated beyond everything. I put in at least double the time and effort of everyone else and got not a half out of it than others. Motivation was not the problem and it took me years to realize that. Finally: Actually, I am good enough.
I completely agree, I think that’s the point I’m making - motivation is separate from execution. No pill is going to make you want to do something or to accomplish some goal. You need to decide that for yourself, and only then can execution even make a difference in the first place.
In fact I’d say the clearest indicator of ADHD is a surplus of motivation coupled with a dearth of execution. You know you want it, but you can’t do it, despite being acutely aware of your day-to-day actions fucking it up. This is what medication helps with in my experience.
Why would I ever want to contribute to this roiling cesspit of a society? Why would I ever be happy working to increase the share value of some faceless company? What value does the human species have when life is mostly pain? Why would I care to try in a world full of selfish ignorant entitled morons? While I work to be an honest decent human being others around me lie and cheat and have so little self awareness that it's like competing with a swarm of locusts. I cannot fathom how decent, intelligent people ever have motivation in this place. Let alone for something as utterly unproductive as programming for a corporate.
And these ludicrous notions of needing to provide because you are male and that's your job. Get lost. So the world wants me to perform in a certain way because I was born into it and will judge me harshly if I don't. Take a hike world. But my mind exists in a cage of hardwired pleasure responses and no matter which way you twist and turn you cannot escape the pain of not confirming to them. Get lost world you are too cruel and too stupid to be worth my effort and as a side note, I will not be dictated to by some mindless watchmaker.
I might be off in my comprehension, but I sense a tone of disappointment or cynicism.
In broad terms, taking humanity's current state as a starting point, what would the nearest (aesthetically? existentially?) acceptable point in the human-cultural phase space look like for you?
No intent to antagonize, but I am curious since I have passed through similar worldviews here and there.
Well, the society isn't just cheating locusts. It's also people like you. And like me.
Find your people, and you'll see a world worth contributing to.
I subscribe to the view that the notion of a dream job — as opposed to a dream vocation — was created by those you call mindless watchmakers.
That said, they are not necessarily mutually exclusive. There's a lot of middle ground. Is there place for you there? Not all work is corporate work, after all.
And if not, what would your vocation be?
Is there something you'd see yourself doing if the constraints of the world were not a concern?
If you struggle to answer this, the only thing I can recommend is taking a break from the rat race to heal and find your bearings. Therapy is something that helped me in this process, as therapists are like Stack Overflow for human problems (and, like with SO, it's quite rare to have a problem that nobody has already experienced and found a solution for).
Professional coaches are another resource that can help avoid stepping on the same rake again. It sounds like corporate isn't a good environment for you, and if you are still trying to find what is one, they can help to home in on the next step that would feel fulfilling (and, hopefully, provide income you can live on).
Best of luck, and if you feel isolated, reach out; you can find my info in the profile. Things really don't have to be this way.
That advice does not resonate with me; I can definitely see the point, but the how of getting myself to do "something else" (whatever that could be) consistently escapes me.
Thinking about how I might regret things I haven't done just gives me worse anxiety, not motivation to start doing stuff.
I'm also not sure how you're supposed to "be happy" if you already aren't. Controlling emotional states is not something you can actually directly do rather than trying to affect them indirectly through behaviour and exercises.
> this makes me think that it's not something that can be solved by a pill.
2 years after my diagnosis (and medication since then), I'm still stuck. I've never had anyone professional to show me how to deal with this other than "here're the pills". I'm currently looking for a therapist.
Most likely, especially that if it's exactly like described in the article it's more like a anxiety and/or long-term-miss-conditioning problem then one caused by a short attention span.
I've only tried xanax once but if anyone thinks that will solve this.. it probably won't, because once on xanax you lose the anxiety but also you won't care about the thing that's causing anxiety, in my case I didn't care about anything, said "stupid" (things I wouldn't normally say so casually that hurt them) shit to people I knew because I didn't care about the consequences. This likely stems from me usually just doing stuff that feels or doesn't feel right instead of actually thinking about things rationally so if you think you're a rational person this might not apply to you. All I'm saying is be careful.
> xanax you lose the anxiety but also you won't care about the thing that's causing anxiety
but I didn't as I was missing the expertise/experience with that.
Just from my understanding anxiety is (often?, sometimes?(1)) a unhealthy over reaction of the same "thing"/"system" which makes you care about thing. I heard about it before that for some people with anxiety disorder and depression, the time they where least anxious was the time they where most depressed, because they simply didn't care about anything anymore.
(1): Anxiety and especially depression are not a very clear cut defined (i.e. not like a broken bone) and can have noticeable different effects on different people, I do not
have the expertise to guess in which range this effects can
lie for it to still count as depression and/or anxiety.
I had a very similar experience with Selank, minus the saying dumb things. Intended to "chill out" a bit about some tasks to get them done, suddenly did not give a single whit about the tasks or anything else surrounding them. Not a productivity tool!
That's me too; and I've also been diagnosed with ADHD last year.
Medication[2] does help me quite a bit, but it's not a silver bullet.
Have you tried Body Doubling[1]? It works wonders for me. The idea is working alongside others, when everyone is doing their own thing. There are online Zoom and Discord groups that facilitate it (look up Discord Study sessions; and also more at [1]).
That's true. It's important to remember that you need also to "rewire" your brain It's often accustomed to many years of your life without meds. And many of this years were probably hard, full of anxiety and depression. It will take time to change how you think and you subconscious.
Anyone have coping mechanisms they can suggest? This is really getting out of hand.
So far the best I've been able to do is intake massive portions of caffeine and use the resultant high/numbing of emotion to allow myself to push through. Not the healthiest or most sustainable option.
(1) learn why your habits are bad and how to fix them through hit and miss self help and therapy until, after a lot of trial and error you find something that works for you.
(2) just stop caring at all about the emotions. They aren’t real. It is made up guilt. Not giving a fuck is a super power. Embrace your inner distraction and become a being of pure Internet.
I’m sort of kidding, but, sort of not. Maybe check out the new book that’s popular called Atomic Habits, it’s a cool book. I’ve been dealing with ADHD and it’s effects for over two decades, I’ve been there and done that. Ultimately, it requires a lot of difficult fixing of your life loops. There are really specific reasons and habits you probably have that lead to NGTD (Not Getting Things Done). You have to decide if you are going to address them or not. At some high level concept it is choices we are making that fail to steer the ship right. But be kind to yourself, the underlying mechanisms making you do this are deep and not obvious things… you don’t have complete control over them. You must guide your thinking you to a place that makes your not thinking you get it’s shit
together.
I found that understanding the physiology behind the problem helped me best. Refer to this excellent podcast episode from Dr. Huberman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wcs2PFz5q6g
I find that the biggest hurdle to getting things done is the context switch. Just getting started is so hard, but after I get started I can keep going until the task is done.
So I trick myself and say “I’m not going to do the whole thing tonight, I’m just going to do a single trivial thing.” So I do it. It takes a second. Then I do another. Then something more substantial. And before I know it I’m working in earnest.
For instance, if I have to do a sink full of dishes and clean up a whole dinner, I will say “just one dish”. But after one dish the water is hot, the gloves are on, so why not a second dish? Then a third. Before I know it the dishes are done!
I have to commit to something within the context of an interpersonal relationship of intense, nigh existential importance to me, fight to get it done, and to admit with as much dispassion as possible when I can't do it for some reason or another. That's what seems to work.
We tend to be attached but uncommitted, when we need to committed but detached. Otherwise the emotional angst of failure eats away at efforts we know to be weak.
I've noticed myself doing things like this, and I think the root cause more than anything is an inability to say no.
If you're getting other things done but not some particular task you've agreed to, then that's probably a good indication that the various subconscious processes in your mind have come together and deemed it unviable. These processes evolved for a reason and shouldn't necessarily be ignored (at least, not usually!).
Rather than tyrannising yourself into completing every single task asked of you, I think a much healthier way to approach this is to simply stop and ask yourself whether or not it actually makes sense for you to do something before you agree to do it.
I relate 100%. On work commitments I can usually get it done, or when the stakes are high enough that failing would burn me hard in some way or another.
Awful, maybe one way to deal with this is to just admit that's how it is with commitments and just don't do them. I often fear that leads to a life of dullness and regret tho. The alternative is a struggle until the end of our days.
I don't think it's bad to admit that you are "not a burning furnace of ambition" as Norm Macdonald would say, if you really aren't. Most people just go to work and consume entertainment in their spare time. As long as you're not burdening anyone else, who cares?
Yea, it's just hard to come to terms with that. Ambition and success are drilled into us on a daily basis. It's hard to come to terms with maybe not fitting in and how that is okay.
Not GP and hopefully GP might come back too and answer but I think the book is useful to different people in different ways - even if it is a very short book.
One idea that stuck with me both for myself and in a team setting:
Fear of failure and how it is overcome: at one point the book tells the reader to imagine walking across a 2x4 beam or something laying on the ground, then walking across the same beam between two highrise towers. The first is really simple, the second is something most of us would never do if we could avoid it even if we knew the beam is perfectly safe. Now the author ask the reader to imagine being stuck at the top of the high rise with a fire raging below and coming closer. Most can probably now imagine themselves crossing the beam in some way, if nothing else by sitting on their butts inching themselves across. This is a someone who has a pathological fear of failure when a deadline is looming. Last the author asks the reader to imagine walking the same beam between the same two highrises but now there is no fire and there is a perfect safety net directly below it. Most people could probably do this, many would even enjoy it. This is a challenging job with a "safety net" where failing is safe.
Procrastination is usually caused by anxiety and the way we speak to ourselves, and this book is all about addressing that. You can have all sorts of rules and systems, but if you don't treat yourself with positivity and respect none of those will matter. My biggest takeaways are that you should not let work bleed into your leisure time, and you shouldn't base your self worth on your work.
The trick I've used to get things done that are extremely hard for me to do because of a mental block of some kind is to somehow involve another person, even if they're just mostly watching. Sounds dumb, but for some reason it works.
Because we are relational creatures. To even accomplish a task in a totally isolated state requires it be intrinsically motivated to an outrageous level. Things like a matter of basic survival qualify. I think anything outside of that sphere that we are so motivated to work on beyond a state of half-minded play are rare, obsessive fascinations.
EDIT: also after looking at your profile I want to say, I hope your authorship goes well. I hope the reply I've written could even be of help in that endeavor.
Reminds me of the tale in this podcast [1] where the guy's desire to avoid a difficult conversation spiraled into totally ghosting his employer for two weeks.
It's a really tough tendency to fight. One thing I think is helpful is to acknowledge failure as early as possible. If meeting the deadline would require me to work faster than normal or make some heroic last-minute effort, I've already failed, even if that deadline is still a long way out. Admitting that to myself and others now, so that expectations about the future can be adjusted, is a much smaller blow than admitting it weeks or months down the line. And it means I only have to feel a little flaky and underperformant, rather than super flaky and underperformant and also dishonest.
in my experience, if you tell your boss you're not going to make a deadline, their reaction is not "dont worry" but "yes you will"
of course ymmv. had only 5/6 such bosses.
the only one that wasnt like that, was not in software but a little shop selling custom built computers and i was a teenager back then, so that might have made it a little easier on me too
YMMV indeed, I have not encountered that yet, and have definitely missed initial deadlines.
But some things help - when giving estimates or timelines, I go through my usual charade of "they are guestimates, usually you should double or triple them, the further out they go the less likely they are accurate etc".
Also, I promise I will monitor progress, keep them up to date, and let them know as soon as possible when plans deviate. I also discuss backup plans early (cutting features or pushing back, starting with pilots and tests, etc..)
It has worked pretty well for me so far. Not to say it's _just_ about how you handle the situation, you can have a shitty manager, that part is out of your control unfortunately.. :)
In my experience the only way to get these things done is to find a bigger thing to procrastinate about.
This hopefully gets you a bit of mileage until there's one thing you really don't want to do; which you can either hand off to someone else to do (possibly at great dollar or favour cost), or fail at.
When I first heard the term "doom scrolling," I thought it was something along these lines. Scrolling some feed or another, past the point when you should have moved on, to avoid confronting these types of tasks for just a bit longer.
That to me feels like a much deeper and more terrifying doom than simply reading bad news.
It seems to me that doom scrolling is the web equivalent of old TV's zapping phenomenon, where people just keep cycling through the stations in the hope that on some channel something interesting will pop up, sooner or later.
It feels the same, talking with my therapist she summarised it to me with a question: "is that a feeling like wanting to eat something that doesn't exist?" and since then I kept that in my mind. I doom-scroll/TV-zap usually without even knowing what I want, I just want something that will satisfy this "food that doesn't exist" appetite.
I spent about a third of 2021 more or less consumed by this phenomenon. In my case it was triggered by job searching: I quit my existing position, intending to do a leisurely search over a few months... and then avoided nearly everything related to the job search for over four months. (While still experiencing a ton of stress as a result of constant anxiety and guilt about it.) Once I actually started, I landed an amazing new position within two months.
The thing that made the difference for me was directly and consistently involving my girlfriend. All she did most of the time was sit in the same room as me, working on her own stuff, but some combination of being unable to completely avoid working while she was there, having her there to vent anxiety to, and being able to make commitments to her rather than myself made an enormous amount of difference.
I'm not thrilled with myself for the procrastination I did in the first place, but I'm taking it as a hard-won lesson: doing difficult things can be vastly easier if you have someone you trust as support and confidant.
A lot of my guilt around my job search is failing the trad "male provider" role and seemingly inherent status anxiety around being a man.
I would feel fine working at 711 and coming home to grind on code. I'm not an atom though. My wife can't pay the rent alone forever and my dog needs to seemingly eat every day. I've gone through this cycle previously before pursuing coding professionally, and this time I at least have the consolation of knowing my next salary will more than make up for my many strings of resigned couch tending.
I'm also now thoroughly convinced that our behavior can be chemically diverted. I don't feel like a piece of shit when I feel sad or unmotivated anymore, just more like a puzzle that's temporarily missing some neuromolecular pieces.
If you landed a good job afterwards, I’d say those four months were necessary and even beneficial. Sometimes your body/mind will simply force you to stop, and procrastination can be one of their tricks to convince you to do it.
I'm quite sure that they were not: anxiety-driven avoidance is far more stressful and exhausting for me than any fruitful work. And having a constant feeling that you ought to be making up for lost time is a serious bar to genuine relaxation.
I did need a break after my last job, and it's very possible that contributed to the problems I had, but this was definitely a bug, not a feature.
Exactly. It's not a way to relax, it's more like spinning your wheels in place and having the engine overheat from all the wheel spinning. You just feel worse and worse the longer you stay in that state.
Would you believe me if I told you I’d explained this with that exact metaphor to someone relatively recently? I literally mean with those same words in that exact order. This feels matrix-y :)
I was going to mention doing things in pairs really helps, or maybe just mentioning plans to others.
Me and my fiancee are both slackers in general, but when we start even discussing doing a project aorund the house or similar which is in any way together we always give it 100%.
nah. you can have non-romantic accountability partners.
in fact, i'd say it's more the norm than the exception. (and often sort of emergent and far from the phrase "accountability partner", which is a bit formal)
The level of pessimism here seems a bit gratuitous. Working with my partner worked well for me, but I've seen people in similar situations achieve a lot of success through participating in supportive online communities (e.g. a Slack group for alumni of a coding bootcamp), or coworking with friends (whether or not everybody is working on the same stuff). Therapy can also be helpful, both in addressing the roots of the problem and in providing some external accountability. And there are doubtless many other options if you look around a little.
i read an article about how we should all form squads, that is turn your main memetic friendgroup into a economical and carework selfhelp squad... or something, i have since lost the link to the article though...
I can relate to working with others. So far in the WFH pandemic I've been mostly all right, but I work so much better in a team, with someone actually telling me what to do, what they expect, instead of me having that responsibility myself.
I'm guessing it's a 'subservient' personality trait of sorts. Others are 'natural' leaders, good at keeping an overview of what needs to be done and distributing that. Others are self-motivated and driven and make amazing things all on their own. And all of those probably fit in a venn diagram.
I don't think you're subservient, you just prefer to be part of a tribe which is normal. Even the self-motivated, natural leaders have strong supports to ensure that the tribe around them keeps them sane.
It's much more difficult to proliferate culture at home and I think people are having to compensate by forcing themselves to work, without any of the cues they normally get in the office.
I really like my current company because it's small but people have well-defined wheelhouses. I don't really have to think too hard except when I need to defer to more experienced engineers.
What really gets me is that if I push stuff off and then finally get around to it how little time it usually takes to deal with the thing I've been putting off. I'm quite capable of spending 3 days to avoid 10 minutes of concentrated hard work. Very frustrating.
That's an interesting observation: yes, I do get stuff done, in the end. But the path to it is usually long, torturous and leads along many places that weren't the destination along the way and plenty of that could be avoided. And quite a few of my achievements are probably the result of procrastinating on something else!
I wonder how the real achievers (Fabrice Bellard?) deal with these sort of things.
And also: what I need to do makes all the difference. Work on my bike: Present! Work on the company VAT reporting? Oh, I think I need to go play some piano. Hm, interesting bug in pianojacq, I should fix that. Hm, even more interesting, this allows me to refactor that bit. Then, on the 29th of the month I will work on the VAT filing.
Pay someone to do the VAT filing for you. There are people that actually likes to play with that stuff so why don't you do the things you enjoy doing? Ok, I have no idea how much work the VAT stuff is, I'm not from US. But in general, remove the unneeded stress from life and enjoy it instead. Don't try to be a success, it's OK to just get along with life and family. Live on one salary if you can, split the time 50/50 between the two of you and just live cheap instead. Spend the extra time together with family doing things you enjoy.
I do. But even that requires me to hunt up all the receipts, send in all invoices received and all invoices sent. So there is always at least half a days' worth of work in there.
I can relate to this a lot. The one silver lining of the shameful, interminable hell that is procrastination is the random skills that come out of it.
I was so dysfunctional at my last job during covid-induced WFH I found time to completely redo my backyard, which included tasks like "research sod options, schedule a delivery, learn how to install it and lay it before it dies" which if someone officially assigned me to do I never would have been able to get myself to complete.
This feels very relatable to me. Looking back, I'm pretty sure a few large projects spawned out of procrastinating on some other project I was supposed to be doing.
One was installing a tile floor in the kitchen, including lots of research, sistering joists, ripping up the old floor, etc etc. And replacing the kitchen range, which required a range hood, which required some cabinet mods. Lots of interesting new DIY skills learned in that project.
And then last year, building a video editor, instead of recording some videos for a course.
I discovered this in my early 20s and it has been the key to my rarely if ever dealing with with issues with procrastination. When I think of something I don’t want to do immediately, one of the first things that pops into my head is both how quickly it will get done and how good it will feel to have it done, and so I do it right then and there.
The satisfaction of knocking off something you didn’t want to do is the corollary to the negative feelings holding you back, and it’s the key to establishing a positive feedback loop in place of the painful one you’re experiencing.
For that to work you need to be able to frame the problem as something that can be done immediately. If the problem has a blocking step, like "fill out this form, then in two weeks, check back to see if it worked," I find it much harder to see the joy in completing the task.
I normally approach that mentally as advancing the task towards completion, and as a matter of framing I try to remember that larger tasks feel better to complete than bite-sized ones. The regular practice of this approach gives one reinforcing feedback loop of ‘momentum’ and a mental image of oneself as a person who gets things done, which reduces the feeling of inertia that contributes to the sort of shame spirals we’re talking about.
This is interesting since it reminds me of the dynamic I have with my boyfriend as well. We seem to be opposites in this regard.
I work better alone. Having someone else there, even if they aren't purposefully distracting me, just adds another tiny bit of awareness: Is he hungry? Is he bored? Does he want coffee? We haven't had lunch - should I cook? I should tidy. I feel like when there's a guest in my house I need to take care of them somehow, and make the place (and myself) presentable. When I'm by myself I can just focus on work, forget to eat for a day, and not bother cleaning my house and nobody will give a crap.
Even when I know he is totally fine fasting all day with me if that's what it takes while we focus, I still get concerned with starving the poor guy while I'm in "the zone". And often he cooks for us as well, which is nice and very appreciated, but then I'm distracted by eating and then thinking about how I should return the favor that evening by preparing dinner. But what if I was going to work through the evening?! You get the idea... I much prefer to be selfishly alone and not think about anyone else's presence.
But my boyfriend seems to be the opposite, and closer to what you're describing. He sometimes likes coming over specifically to work. He says my focus on work during the day helps him focus and stop procrastinating, too. In the end, we compromise. I find a way to still be productive and focus when he's here, and accept that I'll just feel a little bit bad about not paying attention to my visitor.
I have a similar issue. Its hard for me to get work done when there are other people around whether its at my place or someone else's. Just the fact that another person is there can be super distracting to me and it makes it difficult to get into a flow state. This is a problem I don't know how to deal with honestly, besides just not working on important stuff when around other people. It does impact me a little at work but luckily I'm pretty solo 90% of the time when I'm there
The mere awareness of stuff happening around in the office is enough to prevent me from focusing on anything. At home, the main source of distraction is the endless queue of undone household chores all around me.
Over half of my committed code has been written at work after hours in complete silence.
If you work freelance with someone who's also your lover, I highly recommend going to a cafe where you can sit across the table and literally only talk about (1) work or (2) a brief, funny thing you saw on the internet, which I don't want to bother you with but it's so good you have to stop for 30 seconds and see it. During your work hours. And where you can otherwise ignore each other, or go on a walk alone, or read a book, and there are servers to bring you coffee or food so you don't have to do it for yourself or each other. And then you finish and you don't take the work home with you. Tip your waiter well.
[edit] This presumes you are really good at working with random conversation happening around you. To me, it actually helps me focus if there's chatter going on. But it really helps if the chatter is in a language I don't understand well.
I'm a non-eater (24-hr faster, usually this goes along with other manic, focused, driven episodes where I'm really being the best I can be at what I do). I lived for 10 yrs with my ex-gf (still my business partner and best friend) who used to have these worries about me, even though we were both working together. I was like don't worry about me, I'm fine -it was always she who needed to eat. She kind of put it onto me. Eventually, she'd get up and cook herself food. But she was more like me. She was driven to work too.
Now I'm with a woman who's the opposite. She'll come over for the weekend and sit there quietly for 8 hours while I work and the whole time I know she's starving or bored and I feel like a shitty boyfriend. She'll be reading a book or texting her friends and in the back of my mind I'm like, uh, why are you in my house? Like, you could have this much fun in a dentist's waiting room. You think you're not experiencing aloneness but you don't know how to be alone with someone else so we're in this situation where I have a knot in my stomach because all I want to do is work, and you have a knot because you're waiting for me to say something to you. This is not how it was with my ex.
I think maybe if I read way between the lines, you and your bf haven't quite established how to truly be alone together and take care of your own needs (or he hasn't).
On the other hand, this is what it's like to have a pet. The more expensive the pet, the more care it requires. If you're a true nihilist and you don't even enjoy the company, maybe you just enjoy that extra little bit of stress it brings you to have to deal with their problems.
It's true that when my gf or my ex ever had problems, they lit a fire under me and gave me a reason to care; my work became more stressful, but it was in service to something that I finished it. Because there's some other, imminent problem in my life, in the form of another human being who needs my attention. People with children can probably attest to this, although, thank God, I'm not one of them. They say it makes your life seem more meaningful. Occasionally that might be true.
Thanks for sharing. I think in my case it's mostly like you and your ex-gf. I just have trouble internalizing the fact that I don't need to think about him while we're working. My boyfriend says he's totally fine sitting there not getting any attention when he knows we are in work mode. He _does_ have a higher requirement than what I was used to for spending quality time with each other in general, but it does not extend to work-time (according to him). It's just that on weekdays, my entire day late into the night could be work-time. I think knowing quality time is important to him is partly what makes me feel this need to pay attention to him, or feed him, or something while he's here for work. But that is a me-problem vs a he-problem.
He regularly tells me that he is fine eating one meal a day or not at all, but I still feel the compulsion to make snacks all the time when he's here. He is a big person and needs way more calories than I do to maintain his desired weight. Even though he says he's fine with not eating I see him shoveling down three times as much food as I normally do when we do eat, and then making more rice or popcorn later to top up. It makes me think "Holy crap, poor guy hasn't eaten all day and now he's starved." Which is silly, because of course he can get up and get his own food while we work if he's hungry.
I also have pets, and do enjoy their company. They are quite high maintenance, but they're cats. They come over and lick my head when they want attention and then go back to napping nearby. I could not handle children and am in awe of those who do.
I mean, maybe it's not really a problem. It can be really hard to work and live with someone, and there's always a balance; we perceive that it might be rude to switch into work mode and ignore someone who we know wants to spend quality time, but we only care that it might be rude because we do want to spend quality time. We want these people in our life but we want them on certain terms, and that's okay. The boundaries always shift back and forth a little. As long as you're happy with the time you do give them, I think it's natural.
With my ex, we lived together; my current gf and I have separate places. But we quarantined together through most of 2020, and she was out of work. The pandemic really forced a lot of people who might not be so compatible in terms of their expectations for attention, work habits, sleeping and eating habits, into constant close quarters. Almost all of the unmarried couples I knew split up from 2020 to now (some more than once). I think my relationship has survived this long because we're both very aware of each other's needs - including the need for alone-time and boundaries.
Anyway, it's interesting to hear someone talk about it this way. I don't know too many people in parallel work-from-home/relationship situations. I guess it's really just about communication, and it sounds like you do have that in your relationship.
> He sometimes likes coming over specifically to work. He says my focus on work during the day helps him focus and stop procrastinating, too. In the end, we compromise
FYI: That's an ADHD trait, and what you are describing is a common technique to combat executive dysfunction called body doubling[1].
One trait isn't an indication of anything, but a dozen could be; maybe show him this- I wrote up my experience here: https://romankogan.net/adhd
I'm curious how long you've been dating your boyfriend. I've been with my girlfriend for a little under three years, and I think I would have felt much more pressure to attend to her like you're describing if we were only, say, a year in. (Although I don't actually know, because at that point we were in a long-distance relationship, so all the time we spent together in person was intensive relationship time.)
The other factor for me is that job searching is not like coding: it's a series of separate tasks/decisions/evaluations, rather than me trying to immerse myself in a problem or system, so interruptions or distractions aren't nearly as costly; I'm not going to go into flow state from job searching. And a lot of the difficulty comes from the emotional aspect, so I found having someone to talk/vent to about it very useful.
It's been three years, but a very weird three years (as is probably the case for most people) because of the pandemic. He was unable to self isolate due to his job, and was around hundreds of people daily. I worked from home and self isolated for about a year and a half. There was maybe a handful of times where we could work out ways to spend time together for a few days to a week at a time safely over that year and a half, but for the most part we barely saw each other except in video calls. So I don't think that three years of real time really amounted to three years of relationship time.
Good point about job searching vs coding, I think you're right.
I don't think it is totally straightforward what to take away from that experience. I mean one option is to tackle everything that has to be done eventually right on instead of postponing it. But on the other hand how about learning to relax and have some trust in yourself and that things will work out. This is what I would strive to learn. And I am saying as somebody suffering from the same ailment. I experienced what you describe myself. Why so anxious, so worried all the time - I'll die eventually anyway most likely from cancer like all of us - but I cannot even relax a few months? I'm not even financially stressed.
Been battling with this mindset shift myself. When I get annoyed with myself for delaying a task I try to remember the concept of "last responsible moment" from the Agile methodology books; after all I've never missed an important deadline so far, so clearly my effort-estimate calibration isn't far off.
Ugh I feel you, had same situation, except I can’t live with my gf due all the border closures and lockdowns so it was extra hard for me. You should consider yourself very lucky and privileged.
I do - and I sympathize, because I was living 600 miles away from my girlfriend before the pandemic, and it was everything going remote that let me move to be near her.
I've been dealing with overcoming some severe procrastination issues again. I was doing some "Spring" cleaning over the last few weeks and came across several books I had bought and read in the past. I picked up, The Now Habit[0], and opened it to page 103 (of my version/copy).
Below is a bit of a wall of text with I assume several typos. Please forgive me, I read the following excerpt out loud and used speech to text to get in here.
--Excerpt Begin--
Worrying can warn you of danger and evoke action to prepare for that danger. Respect your ability to worry as a means to alert you to potential danger. But the rapid flow of frightening thoughts characteristic of most counterproductive worrying simply creates more threats - you think, "it would be awful if that happened. I couldn't stand it. I have to do well or else." Stopping there, with simply the frightening aspect of worrying, is like screaming "Danger!" Without knowing what to do or where to run. In effect, your screen has caused a lot of disturbance in people but has not told them what they can do to escape the danger. By alerting yourself to a potential danger without establishing a plan for how you will cope, you have done only half of the job of worrying. You've left out the positive work of worrying - developing an action plan.
Once a threat is raised it must be dealt with to avoid worry and anxiety - that trap energy that can't be used productively now. Until you reach a solution or cancel the threat, worrying can operate like a recurrent nightmare that repeats a puzzle or problem. Plans, action, and solutions are required to direct the energy and complete the work of worrying.
Procrastination is an ineffective way to cope with worrying because it stalls action and simply piles up more worries. The worry that accompanies procrastination is usually learned very early in life. Parents, bosses, and teachers often use threats and images of disaster to motivate us to achieve goals they have chosen. This belief that vinegar can motivate better than honey is so prevalent among those in charge of our schools, factories, and offices that most of us suffer from some form of fear of failure and worry about being unacceptable because of our imperfection.
Familiar examples are the boss who stingly withholds compliments for the work completed while freely criticizing what is unfinished and imperfect, saying, "You'll have to do a lot better than this.. there's a lot more to do and I need this as soon as possible." Or the parent or teacher who tries to motivate by saying, "So what if you got three A's, why did you only get a B in math?"
This terrible training - that your work is never good enough - leads to the belief that you are never good enough to satisfy a parent or a boss. Feeling ineffectual regardless of how hard you try is very depressing and damaging to yourself work. Without an established sense of worth that bounces back from criticism in the face of normal mistakes, it is extremely difficult to step into the work arena, where some failures can be anticipated and where the longed-for praise for hard work and progress is seldom forthcoming. Eventually the risks seem too great to take and the threats lose their ability to motivate you.
This syndrome is particularly sad when people with talent will not risk trying for fear of being less than number one. At its worst, their perfectionism and fear of failure ( failure being defined as being less than perfect ( cause them to let their own talents atrophy rather than complete a task and risk being found second best. The more common solution for individuals raised on threats is to use their own threatening self-talk in an effort to win approval by mimicking their critical mentors. Rather than helping them to face their fears, such threats will only contribute to the procrastination cycle: threatening self-talk leads to anxiety, then to resistance, resulting in procrastination. Procrastination May temporarily lessen t...
Pair programming can be a solution. Your employer may fear you are slower than on your own but in reality it will vastly increase your productivity and make you feel better at the same time. Also the result will often be better than what you would have eventually achieved by yourself.
Me also, which is why it threw me immensely when I joined a team where they're somewhat dismissive of pairing.
I realized that I'd been using it as a sort of crutch for a while.
It not only motivated me it drew me out of my shell. It made me more willing to reach out to people i needed coz i was already in a "social mindset". It also made it easier to assess and take risks as a pair.
Whereas alone I become somewhat risk averse and asocial.
Yes definitely. I had quite a long a period of procrastination a while ago, then suddenly a colleague called and asked me to help debug some issue he had problems with. That day the time went very quickly and we solved the problem together. I felt a lot better afterwards, not only because the problem was solved but also felt so productive. Sometimes I need a trigger like that to get out of procrastination mode.
I am reminded of the concept of "deep procrastination" by Cal Newport. He's written about it in a handful of articles from a decade ago, rather disappointing that the concept hasn't caught on and isn't talked around more. It sounds a lot like burnout- either a cause or a symptom of it.
> Deep procrastination is a distressing affliction. Students who suffer from it lose the ability to start school work. Deadlines pass and they hand nothing in. Professors provide special extensions, but the students still can’t bring themselves to do the work. And so on.
> One way to understand deep procrastination, therefore, is as a rejection of an ambiguous, abstract answer to the key question of why you’re going through the mental strain required by the college experience.
His solutions involve mindset refocusing (diving into the why's of the goal that is being procrastinated on), which I think I've seen in another anti-procrastination guide posted somewhere on HN before recently, and seem to be a bit cursory.
I had this issue with my first software job right out of college. I was unproductive for weeks, just due to culture shock and (shamefully) malaise. The procrastination snowballed. Luckily a fellow engineer eventually noticed, sat down with me, and recognized exactly what was going on. In the kindest way possible, he sat down behind me and basically made me finally start my next project. He stayed there with me for the rest of the day, answering and asking questions to keep my progress going. It had quite an impact on me. Having another person involved and actively care about my work went a long way.
I remember teaming up with a former colleague at a point where their SRI had just kicked in, and my motivation was down the drain. I felt they were doing me a huge favor, and they felt the same way back. Pair programming is, so far, the only certain cure to my procrastination. I'll certainly work when not pair programming, but pair programming will make me give 100% for 12+ hours simply because of the commitment to another person, and the reward of continuous socialising.
I'm guessing Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor. I've seen friends on it and it has a weird effect of being extra optimistic and helpful toward others. I can see how if you're feeling in a low energy state pairing up with someone like that can be a good thing. Second hand meds ;)
Eventually that person couldn't be standing behind you making sure you were doing your work and at that point how did you make sure you were being productive?
Not the person you replied to, but I've had similar experiences. Just having another perspective to compare to can help. If I've had a good experience, I can tell when I'm not there. That's often enough to close the gap.
I don't have a great answer for that, as it's still something I occasionally struggle with. I try to pick work where I can closely collaborate with another person. It sounds silly and maybe a bit childish, but just knowing someone else will be happy/proud when I finish a task helps a lot.
I didn't know that. I once hired someone to do that but didn't know it had a term, or that it was common, or that you could find a service when you needed it.
I'm convinced that procrastination is a rats nest of things which is constantly changing shape and that nobody can give you advice for your unique situation. Getting past procrastination is like hitting a plateau in a gym and everyone just gives general advice on how to get bigger. Maybe the answer is that you have to change things up to shock your body past the plateau.
Maybe getting past procrastination is shocking your brain with a frame which puts you in a situation where you're not settling towards some sort of rot. Seems like we get into this rut in most things in life.
I have plenty to do but the last few years I've done a smart thing to avoid this for smaller tasks:
If someone comes with a small request that I want to help them with I do two things:
1. make sure following up on it is their responsibility. I'll do it, not be PM for it.
2. for really small things, bring it to my house at a time we agree on and wait until it is done. Nothing gets left here for me to look at "whenever I have time" because I never have. If it is important they come to my house and wait until it is done.
Just wanted you to know that you've made my life a bit better today.
"I'll do it, not be the PM for it" -> a great, more positive rephrasing of what I often tell people for this sort of thing: "please bother me until I get back with you about it."
And the second is a brilliant filter for how much someone truly needs/wants something "small".
So many people suffer from this. I guess most of us had at least stretches in their career where procrastination dominated the work day. For some, this is just the standard mode of operation.
It is important to understand that this is a sign of exhaustion. Work is hard and if we don't have the energy to start then it doesn't get done. Personally I found the following to help:
1) Get enough sleep. Every day. Nothing drains your energy more than consistently not getting enough sleep.
2) Cultivate interaction with other people outside work, in person. This is particularly important now. Talking with others and listening to their little problems can help put your perceived misery in context. So does having a life outside work.
3) Say "No" more often. Focus on the tasks that need to be done to meet your life goals. Decline the tasks that look interesting or even fascinating when they don't help you move forward.
Maybe a wakeup light would be helpful. really helps you feel awake if you dont feel very awake when you get up, so you are not tempted to sleep some more in the morning.
I share the same problem for a very long time and the situation gets worse as I grow up.
But recently at least I have more understanding of my problem on this. The most important thing I want to share with you is that:
Not most of things online are not useful to people like me, because the people are different. A lot of advices can be misleading too.(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arj7oStGLkU) this one especially. Because for different people, the procrastination experience is very different.
If you have the same issue as me, the core problem is not actually about planning and decision making. It is about my ability to do things. It's a long essay but I will put the essence here: To some of the people (about half the population as I estimate), there are two way to obtain knowledge, one is learning, the other is training. People tends to acquired knowledge by learning and lack of training will be highly likely to have my kind of procrastination, especially on something we are not really trained on.
The common experience of me doing things is plan things, make time estimates and do it. This sounds familiar but it is extremely different experience among people. As a "learner" although I made the time estimates, I don't really know them well. But with something that I am more comfortable with, I have a special feeling about the time estimates, that will have a strong confidence on that I can finish in a certain time frame. I tend to have no decision hesitations on tasks like this. This is usually the reason that I can finish tasks at the last minute, because usually I will assemble the things I trained more often, and use less the things I learned.
The solution that now I am trying on, is to train more and learn less. Also I have done more things that I already familiar with(with I force myself to do because I need to resist myself considering it as waste of time), to at least know that I can get things done.
Hope this will help you. comment here if you need more clarifications or advices.
Usually, I solve this by making it the only thing on my list that day, and clearing as many hurdles as possible the day before. This can mean anything from preliminary googling to cleaning up my workspace and taking out the required tools.
This means that on the fateful morning, it’s the first thing I do after making coffee. No checking emails, no small chores, just a shower, coffee and getting to work.
I read somewhere that a lot of procrastination is fear of failure or fear of the unknown. Sometimes tackling the latter is the best way to start. I circle the problem late in the evening when there is no pressure to start working. I just read, take notes and draft plans. Making it easy to get started is sometimes the best first step to take.
This is great advice, even if it sounds cliché and obvious. I like to say that you have to set yourself up for success. That is, make it as easy as possible for your task to actually be easier and more straightforward (i.e. get the other stuff out of the way the day before, clean up, mute your phone, empty your agenda, etc) It’s very common for us to do the exact opposite, and then we feel bad later because we failed. Of course! We made it even harder for ourselves then it already is. I think that many people (especially coders) got used earlier in life to do things naturally, to have natural motivation to work and that was enough. If at some point that’s not the case anymore, because you’re older, has more responsibility, is tired, or a combination of all these, you lose your “method” and don’t know what to do. So: recognize the difficulty of what you are going to do, and set yourself up for success. And also learn to expect less from yourself and be happy when small goals are achieved (you’ll learn this the hard way anyway; after not doing anything, even a small thing will feel like success).
I try to get as far as possible without actually starting work. I'll get all the little things out of the way.
- Prepare clothes for the next day
- Prepare a mug with a teabag, sugar and a spoon
- Close tabs, launch the IDE, start the Docker containers
- Gather the addresses, emails or phone numbers I need to call
- Write a very short term to-do list to get the day started
- Clear small unrelated tasks if needed (inbox triage, small errands etc)
It's very similar to mise en place when you're cooking. You take care of the small tasks first, so that the main task goes smoothly.
It's really effective. In fact, it's sometimes hard to snap out of it and do other things.
>I read somewhere that a lot of procrastination is fear of failure or fear of the unknown
The Brain Science podcast from Changelog has an episode about perfectionism and how it can lead to procrastination, by the fear of rejection or failure.
There's a book called "Eat That Frog". The main advice, as the title of the book suggests, whatever the biggest most-important task, regardless of how unpleasant (akin to eating a frog), just do it first and do nothing else until it's done.
Highly recommended! While I still procrastinate this understanding has helped me control my urge tememdously. A true gem! (This is also available as a video in Tim Urban's TED talk on YouTube)
I used to get yearly emails from Pocket when I used it saying I was in the top single-digit-n% of readers with a word count in the low six digits. That's maybe an hour of reading a day, which suggest the later never comes for most articles saved to Pocket.
These days I accept I don't care enough about most things to read articles on it until I get interested, and then it's hard to find good reading on it unless I've drilled my well. Now I save any interesting-looking article in Notion for when I get interested and go searching.
FYI, I'm not posting "the" link to my site. I'm linking to the specific posts I've written that directly relate to the comments I am responding to. I believe my writing is useful in such cases - not in the least because people have directly reached out to me to say thanks.
Just trying to increase the chances that someone stumbles upon something that helps them. I don't see many people talking about ADHD here.
If public awareness of ADHD was anywhere where it needs to be, I wouldn't have spent 34 years living without help.
I just want to say that I think it's awesome that you are sharing your personal experience with ADHD here. The stigma around mental health does no one any good, and too often when ADHD comes up on HN, the loudest voices are people dismissing ADHD as a boogeyman that's over-diagnosed. It's important for people to know that ADHD is real and too often it isn't even diagnosed until adulthood.
I don't have a problem focusing per se [1]. The disorder's name is misleading [2].
In fact, I often have an excess of focus: focusing on something to the detriment of everything else [3].
Like, coding (or making music) till 5AM, forgetting to eat and sleep.
The problem I have is directing where the focus goes.
Let me make a camera analogy:
* Most people don't have laser-sharp focus, but it's good enough for what needs to get done, and they can switch it quickly and at will, like a manual focus on a camera;
* My focus is laser sharp... but it's automatic, and with a janky chip. So it takes time to engage, and often picks out the wrong subject.
Whatever it focuses on looks great, but if there's a squirrel in the frame, the focus always goes there, and it never focuses on some things just because.
Anything shiny and fine-textured (jewelry, fine art) will come out excellently, in super fine detail.
Anything that's bland and the same throughout (like plain cloth) doesn't have enough edges for the autofocus to catch on.
-------
Does music help? Well, it's one thing I can focus on. That's how I failed gym: I couldn't leave the music lab on time to make it to the next class... Every time. Breaking hyperfocus is painful.
Music isn't an ADHD cure, but what it is, is a place for many ADHD people to find themselves, and feel comfortable at. It ticks all the boxes: creative, important, necessary, and urgent — if you are performing. It's the shiny thing my autofocus chip can lock onto.
It gets the dopamine flowing, and when you get enough, you suddenly get the action points to do other things.
It's also a way to meet and connect with people. I made many friends through music — unsurprisingly, quite a few of them have ADHD.
So it helps, but not in a way you might think.
And classical piano music instruction is outright harmful IMO. I'm mostly self-taught/playing by ear; the skills I needed to play live weren't taught in school. People who spent years playing classical pieces somehow were never taught basic musicianship: playing by ear, improvising, arranging, basics of composing, etc; not to mention zero knowledge about music tech (of which we have more than a century now).
That said, I have taken several semesters worth of music production classes — and barely scratched the surface of what there is to learn.
On that note, I can highly recommend Huang's class on Monthly if you can truly dedicate time and effort needed for it, which is much more than the minimum required to just get through it. It's super condensed and hands-on.
Let me know if you want more info about music and resources.
While the analogies in these articles are great, from personal experience, the second article's tips on how to beat procrastination are abysmal. Yes, breaking large steps into small chunks is good advice, but your goal should not be to live in a constant state of stress and anxiety by setting up "panic monsters". That's just a recipe for getting yourself burned out and becoming a "disastinator".
What I would instead suggest is reducing your workload, resting, and if that fails to fix the problem, seeing a medical professional to check for ADHD or other executive dysfunction issues. (It also really does bother me that Tim Urban never even mentioned that "procrastination" is known in the medical community as "executive dysfunction" and that clinical treatments are an option. Not saying that it's the root of all procrastination issues, but for major problems, it's worth looking at.)
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 502 ms ] threadI hope I can solve this someday. My coping mechanism is to never commit to anything (outside work obligations).
I’m a fan of this quote from Steve Jobs – (paraphrasing) “every day you wake up and look in the mirror, do you like what you’re doing that day? If not, it’s time to do something else.”
The other quote I like is Jeff Bezos and his “picturing myself on a rocking chair when I’m 80, do I regret not doing this?”
If you can solve these problems then the pills become just a tool to help you execute on the solutions.
Source: Diagnosed with ADHD (because I asked for it - duh, this is the only way), never had a real job but fairly happy with my direction so far. YMMV of course. Be happy with yourself first and foremost and everything else will follow.
You can also set timers/alarms to timebox tasks, and reign in hyper focus - it should be relatively easy to change tasks with the alarm interruption (vs. unmediated, where I find it practically impossible to move to any new task).
In terms of raw productivity, it can definitely make things worse (like the comment I replied to). Or at least, it can replace one problem with another – suddenly your creativity is gone and your hyperfocus is completely misdirected.
Personally I’ve sought out the (re-)diagnosis at times when I felt creativity was less of a priority than execution. If you know exactly what you need to do and can commit to it, the pills can help keep you on track. But they are not the original source of the commitment.
I’m honestly not sure whether it’s worth it, but the dopamine it releases sure does its best to convince me that it is.
I've found that the effects change massively with sleep quality. When I'm short on sleep for a few nights, it almost feels like the medication stops working. It still has an effect—I am noticeably more clumsy and forgetful without it—but it feels different and the higher-order effect on focus or executive function is less pronounced.
Another thing I've heard is that protein in the morning helps. I've tried drinking a protein shake for breakfast and it seems to make the day better in general, but with a much smaller effect than sleep quality. For all I know, it might just have been the case that I only remembered to have breakfast on days when I had slept well...
I was burned out and got into depression because I was going hard on myself for years. Blaming my motivation and asking myself if I even "genuinely want to do the task required to accomplish your[my] goals". Getting my diagnosis was a huge relief. Looking back, I have been motivated beyond everything. I put in at least double the time and effort of everyone else and got not a half out of it than others. Motivation was not the problem and it took me years to realize that. Finally: Actually, I am good enough.
It would depend on the individual.
A lack of focus from ADHD can translate to a lack of motivation due to a lack of progress.
In fact I’d say the clearest indicator of ADHD is a surplus of motivation coupled with a dearth of execution. You know you want it, but you can’t do it, despite being acutely aware of your day-to-day actions fucking it up. This is what medication helps with in my experience.
For anyone wanting to learn more - welcome to my world: https://romankogan.net/adhd/
And these ludicrous notions of needing to provide because you are male and that's your job. Get lost. So the world wants me to perform in a certain way because I was born into it and will judge me harshly if I don't. Take a hike world. But my mind exists in a cage of hardwired pleasure responses and no matter which way you twist and turn you cannot escape the pain of not confirming to them. Get lost world you are too cruel and too stupid to be worth my effort and as a side note, I will not be dictated to by some mindless watchmaker.
In broad terms, taking humanity's current state as a starting point, what would the nearest (aesthetically? existentially?) acceptable point in the human-cultural phase space look like for you?
No intent to antagonize, but I am curious since I have passed through similar worldviews here and there.
Find your people, and you'll see a world worth contributing to.
I subscribe to the view that the notion of a dream job — as opposed to a dream vocation — was created by those you call mindless watchmakers.
That said, they are not necessarily mutually exclusive. There's a lot of middle ground. Is there place for you there? Not all work is corporate work, after all.
And if not, what would your vocation be?
Is there something you'd see yourself doing if the constraints of the world were not a concern?
If you struggle to answer this, the only thing I can recommend is taking a break from the rat race to heal and find your bearings. Therapy is something that helped me in this process, as therapists are like Stack Overflow for human problems (and, like with SO, it's quite rare to have a problem that nobody has already experienced and found a solution for).
Professional coaches are another resource that can help avoid stepping on the same rake again. It sounds like corporate isn't a good environment for you, and if you are still trying to find what is one, they can help to home in on the next step that would feel fulfilling (and, hopefully, provide income you can live on).
Best of luck, and if you feel isolated, reach out; you can find my info in the profile. Things really don't have to be this way.
Thinking about how I might regret things I haven't done just gives me worse anxiety, not motivation to start doing stuff.
I'm also not sure how you're supposed to "be happy" if you already aren't. Controlling emotional states is not something you can actually directly do rather than trying to affect them indirectly through behaviour and exercises.
2 years after my diagnosis (and medication since then), I'm still stuck. I've never had anyone professional to show me how to deal with this other than "here're the pills". I'm currently looking for a therapist.
Most likely, especially that if it's exactly like described in the article it's more like a anxiety and/or long-term-miss-conditioning problem then one caused by a short attention span.
> xanax you lose the anxiety but also you won't care about the thing that's causing anxiety
but I didn't as I was missing the expertise/experience with that.
Just from my understanding anxiety is (often?, sometimes?(1)) a unhealthy over reaction of the same "thing"/"system" which makes you care about thing. I heard about it before that for some people with anxiety disorder and depression, the time they where least anxious was the time they where most depressed, because they simply didn't care about anything anymore.
(1): Anxiety and especially depression are not a very clear cut defined (i.e. not like a broken bone) and can have noticeable different effects on different people, I do not have the expertise to guess in which range this effects can lie for it to still count as depression and/or anxiety.
Medication[2] does help me quite a bit, but it's not a silver bullet.
Have you tried Body Doubling[1]? It works wonders for me. The idea is working alongside others, when everyone is doing their own thing. There are online Zoom and Discord groups that facilitate it (look up Discord Study sessions; and also more at [1]).
[1] https://romankogan.net/adhd/#Body%20Double
[2] https://romankogan.net/adhd/#Medication
Anyone have coping mechanisms they can suggest? This is really getting out of hand.
So far the best I've been able to do is intake massive portions of caffeine and use the resultant high/numbing of emotion to allow myself to push through. Not the healthiest or most sustainable option.
(1) learn why your habits are bad and how to fix them through hit and miss self help and therapy until, after a lot of trial and error you find something that works for you.
(2) just stop caring at all about the emotions. They aren’t real. It is made up guilt. Not giving a fuck is a super power. Embrace your inner distraction and become a being of pure Internet.
I’m sort of kidding, but, sort of not. Maybe check out the new book that’s popular called Atomic Habits, it’s a cool book. I’ve been dealing with ADHD and it’s effects for over two decades, I’ve been there and done that. Ultimately, it requires a lot of difficult fixing of your life loops. There are really specific reasons and habits you probably have that lead to NGTD (Not Getting Things Done). You have to decide if you are going to address them or not. At some high level concept it is choices we are making that fail to steer the ship right. But be kind to yourself, the underlying mechanisms making you do this are deep and not obvious things… you don’t have complete control over them. You must guide your thinking you to a place that makes your not thinking you get it’s shit together.
So I trick myself and say “I’m not going to do the whole thing tonight, I’m just going to do a single trivial thing.” So I do it. It takes a second. Then I do another. Then something more substantial. And before I know it I’m working in earnest.
For instance, if I have to do a sink full of dishes and clean up a whole dinner, I will say “just one dish”. But after one dish the water is hot, the gloves are on, so why not a second dish? Then a third. Before I know it the dishes are done!
We tend to be attached but uncommitted, when we need to committed but detached. Otherwise the emotional angst of failure eats away at efforts we know to be weak.
If you're getting other things done but not some particular task you've agreed to, then that's probably a good indication that the various subconscious processes in your mind have come together and deemed it unviable. These processes evolved for a reason and shouldn't necessarily be ignored (at least, not usually!).
Rather than tyrannising yourself into completing every single task asked of you, I think a much healthier way to approach this is to simply stop and ask yourself whether or not it actually makes sense for you to do something before you agree to do it.
Awful, maybe one way to deal with this is to just admit that's how it is with commitments and just don't do them. I often fear that leads to a life of dullness and regret tho. The alternative is a struggle until the end of our days.
One idea that stuck with me both for myself and in a team setting:
Fear of failure and how it is overcome: at one point the book tells the reader to imagine walking across a 2x4 beam or something laying on the ground, then walking across the same beam between two highrise towers. The first is really simple, the second is something most of us would never do if we could avoid it even if we knew the beam is perfectly safe. Now the author ask the reader to imagine being stuck at the top of the high rise with a fire raging below and coming closer. Most can probably now imagine themselves crossing the beam in some way, if nothing else by sitting on their butts inching themselves across. This is a someone who has a pathological fear of failure when a deadline is looming. Last the author asks the reader to imagine walking the same beam between the same two highrises but now there is no fire and there is a perfect safety net directly below it. Most people could probably do this, many would even enjoy it. This is a challenging job with a "safety net" where failing is safe.
I realize Neil Fiore didn't come up with this, this goes further back, see for example https://medium.com/s/radical-spirits/the-man-who-helped-the-...
... but the book is were I learned about this example.
EDIT: also after looking at your profile I want to say, I hope your authorship goes well. I hope the reply I've written could even be of help in that endeavor.
http://structuredprocrastination.com/
It's a really tough tendency to fight. One thing I think is helpful is to acknowledge failure as early as possible. If meeting the deadline would require me to work faster than normal or make some heroic last-minute effort, I've already failed, even if that deadline is still a long way out. Admitting that to myself and others now, so that expectations about the future can be adjusted, is a much smaller blow than admitting it weeks or months down the line. And it means I only have to feel a little flaky and underperformant, rather than super flaky and underperformant and also dishonest.
[1] https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/depression-anxiety-i...
of course ymmv. had only 5/6 such bosses. the only one that wasnt like that, was not in software but a little shop selling custom built computers and i was a teenager back then, so that might have made it a little easier on me too
But some things help - when giving estimates or timelines, I go through my usual charade of "they are guestimates, usually you should double or triple them, the further out they go the less likely they are accurate etc".
Also, I promise I will monitor progress, keep them up to date, and let them know as soon as possible when plans deviate. I also discuss backup plans early (cutting features or pushing back, starting with pilots and tests, etc..)
It has worked pretty well for me so far. Not to say it's _just_ about how you handle the situation, you can have a shitty manager, that part is out of your control unfortunately.. :)
> to avoid cognitive dissonance
> promptly shunt thought of the painful topic back to my deepest mental recesses.
> ...
This sounds a lot like an anxiety disorder causing more then natural procrastination.
I.e. it doesn't sound like "I'm not motivated" but like "I'm too anxious to do it even if I'm motivated".
This hopefully gets you a bit of mileage until there's one thing you really don't want to do; which you can either hand off to someone else to do (possibly at great dollar or favour cost), or fail at.
That to me feels like a much deeper and more terrifying doom than simply reading bad news.
I hate it.
edit: and depressed people are also great procrastinators, if getting out of bed seems a chore, then you're not going to be productive.
The thing that made the difference for me was directly and consistently involving my girlfriend. All she did most of the time was sit in the same room as me, working on her own stuff, but some combination of being unable to completely avoid working while she was there, having her there to vent anxiety to, and being able to make commitments to her rather than myself made an enormous amount of difference.
I'm not thrilled with myself for the procrastination I did in the first place, but I'm taking it as a hard-won lesson: doing difficult things can be vastly easier if you have someone you trust as support and confidant.
I would feel fine working at 711 and coming home to grind on code. I'm not an atom though. My wife can't pay the rent alone forever and my dog needs to seemingly eat every day. I've gone through this cycle previously before pursuing coding professionally, and this time I at least have the consolation of knowing my next salary will more than make up for my many strings of resigned couch tending.
I'm also now thoroughly convinced that our behavior can be chemically diverted. I don't feel like a piece of shit when I feel sad or unmotivated anymore, just more like a puzzle that's temporarily missing some neuromolecular pieces.
I did need a break after my last job, and it's very possible that contributed to the problems I had, but this was definitely a bug, not a feature.
Me and my fiancee are both slackers in general, but when we start even discussing doing a project aorund the house or similar which is in any way together we always give it 100%.
in fact, i'd say it's more the norm than the exception. (and often sort of emergent and far from the phrase "accountability partner", which is a bit formal)
I'm guessing it's a 'subservient' personality trait of sorts. Others are 'natural' leaders, good at keeping an overview of what needs to be done and distributing that. Others are self-motivated and driven and make amazing things all on their own. And all of those probably fit in a venn diagram.
It's much more difficult to proliferate culture at home and I think people are having to compensate by forcing themselves to work, without any of the cues they normally get in the office.
I really like my current company because it's small but people have well-defined wheelhouses. I don't really have to think too hard except when I need to defer to more experienced engineers.
I wonder how the real achievers (Fabrice Bellard?) deal with these sort of things.
And also: what I need to do makes all the difference. Work on my bike: Present! Work on the company VAT reporting? Oh, I think I need to go play some piano. Hm, interesting bug in pianojacq, I should fix that. Hm, even more interesting, this allows me to refactor that bit. Then, on the 29th of the month I will work on the VAT filing.
I was so dysfunctional at my last job during covid-induced WFH I found time to completely redo my backyard, which included tasks like "research sod options, schedule a delivery, learn how to install it and lay it before it dies" which if someone officially assigned me to do I never would have been able to get myself to complete.
One was installing a tile floor in the kitchen, including lots of research, sistering joists, ripping up the old floor, etc etc. And replacing the kitchen range, which required a range hood, which required some cabinet mods. Lots of interesting new DIY skills learned in that project.
And then last year, building a video editor, instead of recording some videos for a course.
The satisfaction of knocking off something you didn’t want to do is the corollary to the negative feelings holding you back, and it’s the key to establishing a positive feedback loop in place of the painful one you’re experiencing.
(Have the same problem, not too bad but still)
I work better alone. Having someone else there, even if they aren't purposefully distracting me, just adds another tiny bit of awareness: Is he hungry? Is he bored? Does he want coffee? We haven't had lunch - should I cook? I should tidy. I feel like when there's a guest in my house I need to take care of them somehow, and make the place (and myself) presentable. When I'm by myself I can just focus on work, forget to eat for a day, and not bother cleaning my house and nobody will give a crap.
Even when I know he is totally fine fasting all day with me if that's what it takes while we focus, I still get concerned with starving the poor guy while I'm in "the zone". And often he cooks for us as well, which is nice and very appreciated, but then I'm distracted by eating and then thinking about how I should return the favor that evening by preparing dinner. But what if I was going to work through the evening?! You get the idea... I much prefer to be selfishly alone and not think about anyone else's presence.
But my boyfriend seems to be the opposite, and closer to what you're describing. He sometimes likes coming over specifically to work. He says my focus on work during the day helps him focus and stop procrastinating, too. In the end, we compromise. I find a way to still be productive and focus when he's here, and accept that I'll just feel a little bit bad about not paying attention to my visitor.
Over half of my committed code has been written at work after hours in complete silence.
[edit] This presumes you are really good at working with random conversation happening around you. To me, it actually helps me focus if there's chatter going on. But it really helps if the chatter is in a language I don't understand well.
That inner monologue is somehow humorous; but wow, you seem to be such a considerate partner!
Now I'm with a woman who's the opposite. She'll come over for the weekend and sit there quietly for 8 hours while I work and the whole time I know she's starving or bored and I feel like a shitty boyfriend. She'll be reading a book or texting her friends and in the back of my mind I'm like, uh, why are you in my house? Like, you could have this much fun in a dentist's waiting room. You think you're not experiencing aloneness but you don't know how to be alone with someone else so we're in this situation where I have a knot in my stomach because all I want to do is work, and you have a knot because you're waiting for me to say something to you. This is not how it was with my ex.
I think maybe if I read way between the lines, you and your bf haven't quite established how to truly be alone together and take care of your own needs (or he hasn't).
On the other hand, this is what it's like to have a pet. The more expensive the pet, the more care it requires. If you're a true nihilist and you don't even enjoy the company, maybe you just enjoy that extra little bit of stress it brings you to have to deal with their problems.
It's true that when my gf or my ex ever had problems, they lit a fire under me and gave me a reason to care; my work became more stressful, but it was in service to something that I finished it. Because there's some other, imminent problem in my life, in the form of another human being who needs my attention. People with children can probably attest to this, although, thank God, I'm not one of them. They say it makes your life seem more meaningful. Occasionally that might be true.
He regularly tells me that he is fine eating one meal a day or not at all, but I still feel the compulsion to make snacks all the time when he's here. He is a big person and needs way more calories than I do to maintain his desired weight. Even though he says he's fine with not eating I see him shoveling down three times as much food as I normally do when we do eat, and then making more rice or popcorn later to top up. It makes me think "Holy crap, poor guy hasn't eaten all day and now he's starved." Which is silly, because of course he can get up and get his own food while we work if he's hungry.
I also have pets, and do enjoy their company. They are quite high maintenance, but they're cats. They come over and lick my head when they want attention and then go back to napping nearby. I could not handle children and am in awe of those who do.
I mean, maybe it's not really a problem. It can be really hard to work and live with someone, and there's always a balance; we perceive that it might be rude to switch into work mode and ignore someone who we know wants to spend quality time, but we only care that it might be rude because we do want to spend quality time. We want these people in our life but we want them on certain terms, and that's okay. The boundaries always shift back and forth a little. As long as you're happy with the time you do give them, I think it's natural.
With my ex, we lived together; my current gf and I have separate places. But we quarantined together through most of 2020, and she was out of work. The pandemic really forced a lot of people who might not be so compatible in terms of their expectations for attention, work habits, sleeping and eating habits, into constant close quarters. Almost all of the unmarried couples I knew split up from 2020 to now (some more than once). I think my relationship has survived this long because we're both very aware of each other's needs - including the need for alone-time and boundaries.
Anyway, it's interesting to hear someone talk about it this way. I don't know too many people in parallel work-from-home/relationship situations. I guess it's really just about communication, and it sounds like you do have that in your relationship.
FYI: That's an ADHD trait, and what you are describing is a common technique to combat executive dysfunction called body doubling[1].
One trait isn't an indication of anything, but a dozen could be; maybe show him this- I wrote up my experience here: https://romankogan.net/adhd
[1]https://romankogan.net/adhd/#Body%20Double
The other factor for me is that job searching is not like coding: it's a series of separate tasks/decisions/evaluations, rather than me trying to immerse myself in a problem or system, so interruptions or distractions aren't nearly as costly; I'm not going to go into flow state from job searching. And a lot of the difficulty comes from the emotional aspect, so I found having someone to talk/vent to about it very useful.
Good point about job searching vs coding, I think you're right.
Even better if it's external accountability because it's also easy to self-sabotage.
Below is a bit of a wall of text with I assume several typos. Please forgive me, I read the following excerpt out loud and used speech to text to get in here.
--Excerpt Begin--
Worrying can warn you of danger and evoke action to prepare for that danger. Respect your ability to worry as a means to alert you to potential danger. But the rapid flow of frightening thoughts characteristic of most counterproductive worrying simply creates more threats - you think, "it would be awful if that happened. I couldn't stand it. I have to do well or else." Stopping there, with simply the frightening aspect of worrying, is like screaming "Danger!" Without knowing what to do or where to run. In effect, your screen has caused a lot of disturbance in people but has not told them what they can do to escape the danger. By alerting yourself to a potential danger without establishing a plan for how you will cope, you have done only half of the job of worrying. You've left out the positive work of worrying - developing an action plan.
Once a threat is raised it must be dealt with to avoid worry and anxiety - that trap energy that can't be used productively now. Until you reach a solution or cancel the threat, worrying can operate like a recurrent nightmare that repeats a puzzle or problem. Plans, action, and solutions are required to direct the energy and complete the work of worrying.
Procrastination is an ineffective way to cope with worrying because it stalls action and simply piles up more worries. The worry that accompanies procrastination is usually learned very early in life. Parents, bosses, and teachers often use threats and images of disaster to motivate us to achieve goals they have chosen. This belief that vinegar can motivate better than honey is so prevalent among those in charge of our schools, factories, and offices that most of us suffer from some form of fear of failure and worry about being unacceptable because of our imperfection.
Familiar examples are the boss who stingly withholds compliments for the work completed while freely criticizing what is unfinished and imperfect, saying, "You'll have to do a lot better than this.. there's a lot more to do and I need this as soon as possible." Or the parent or teacher who tries to motivate by saying, "So what if you got three A's, why did you only get a B in math?"
This terrible training - that your work is never good enough - leads to the belief that you are never good enough to satisfy a parent or a boss. Feeling ineffectual regardless of how hard you try is very depressing and damaging to yourself work. Without an established sense of worth that bounces back from criticism in the face of normal mistakes, it is extremely difficult to step into the work arena, where some failures can be anticipated and where the longed-for praise for hard work and progress is seldom forthcoming. Eventually the risks seem too great to take and the threats lose their ability to motivate you.
This syndrome is particularly sad when people with talent will not risk trying for fear of being less than number one. At its worst, their perfectionism and fear of failure ( failure being defined as being less than perfect ( cause them to let their own talents atrophy rather than complete a task and risk being found second best. The more common solution for individuals raised on threats is to use their own threatening self-talk in an effort to win approval by mimicking their critical mentors. Rather than helping them to face their fears, such threats will only contribute to the procrastination cycle: threatening self-talk leads to anxiety, then to resistance, resulting in procrastination. Procrastination May temporarily lessen t...
I realized that I'd been using it as a sort of crutch for a while.
It not only motivated me it drew me out of my shell. It made me more willing to reach out to people i needed coz i was already in a "social mindset". It also made it easier to assess and take risks as a pair.
Whereas alone I become somewhat risk averse and asocial.
> Deep procrastination is a distressing affliction. Students who suffer from it lose the ability to start school work. Deadlines pass and they hand nothing in. Professors provide special extensions, but the students still can’t bring themselves to do the work. And so on.
> One way to understand deep procrastination, therefore, is as a rejection of an ambiguous, abstract answer to the key question of why you’re going through the mental strain required by the college experience.
https://www.calnewport.com/blog/2011/07/15/how-to-cure-deep-...
His solutions involve mindset refocusing (diving into the why's of the goal that is being procrastinated on), which I think I've seen in another anti-procrastination guide posted somewhere on HN before recently, and seem to be a bit cursory.
The other two blog entries about it:
https://www.calnewport.com/blog/2009/02/16/the-danger-of-dee...
https://www.calnewport.com/blog/2010/04/29/the-upside-of-dee...
I remember teaming up with a former colleague at a point where their SRI had just kicked in, and my motivation was down the drain. I felt they were doing me a huge favor, and they felt the same way back. Pair programming is, so far, the only certain cure to my procrastination. I'll certainly work when not pair programming, but pair programming will make me give 100% for 12+ hours simply because of the commitment to another person, and the reward of continuous socialising.
Maybe getting past procrastination is shocking your brain with a frame which puts you in a situation where you're not settling towards some sort of rot. Seems like we get into this rut in most things in life.
If someone comes with a small request that I want to help them with I do two things:
1. make sure following up on it is their responsibility. I'll do it, not be PM for it.
2. for really small things, bring it to my house at a time we agree on and wait until it is done. Nothing gets left here for me to look at "whenever I have time" because I never have. If it is important they come to my house and wait until it is done.
"I'll do it, not be the PM for it" -> a great, more positive rephrasing of what I often tell people for this sort of thing: "please bother me until I get back with you about it."
And the second is a brilliant filter for how much someone truly needs/wants something "small".
Thanks!
It is important to understand that this is a sign of exhaustion. Work is hard and if we don't have the energy to start then it doesn't get done. Personally I found the following to help:
1) Get enough sleep. Every day. Nothing drains your energy more than consistently not getting enough sleep.
2) Cultivate interaction with other people outside work, in person. This is particularly important now. Talking with others and listening to their little problems can help put your perceived misery in context. So does having a life outside work.
3) Say "No" more often. Focus on the tasks that need to be done to meet your life goals. Decline the tasks that look interesting or even fascinating when they don't help you move forward.
So, get enough sleep, but not too much. Don't start another sleep cycle.
But recently at least I have more understanding of my problem on this. The most important thing I want to share with you is that: Not most of things online are not useful to people like me, because the people are different. A lot of advices can be misleading too.(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arj7oStGLkU) this one especially. Because for different people, the procrastination experience is very different.
If you have the same issue as me, the core problem is not actually about planning and decision making. It is about my ability to do things. It's a long essay but I will put the essence here: To some of the people (about half the population as I estimate), there are two way to obtain knowledge, one is learning, the other is training. People tends to acquired knowledge by learning and lack of training will be highly likely to have my kind of procrastination, especially on something we are not really trained on.
The common experience of me doing things is plan things, make time estimates and do it. This sounds familiar but it is extremely different experience among people. As a "learner" although I made the time estimates, I don't really know them well. But with something that I am more comfortable with, I have a special feeling about the time estimates, that will have a strong confidence on that I can finish in a certain time frame. I tend to have no decision hesitations on tasks like this. This is usually the reason that I can finish tasks at the last minute, because usually I will assemble the things I trained more often, and use less the things I learned.
The solution that now I am trying on, is to train more and learn less. Also I have done more things that I already familiar with(with I force myself to do because I need to resist myself considering it as waste of time), to at least know that I can get things done.
Hope this will help you. comment here if you need more clarifications or advices.
This means that on the fateful morning, it’s the first thing I do after making coffee. No checking emails, no small chores, just a shower, coffee and getting to work.
I read somewhere that a lot of procrastination is fear of failure or fear of the unknown. Sometimes tackling the latter is the best way to start. I circle the problem late in the evening when there is no pressure to start working. I just read, take notes and draft plans. Making it easy to get started is sometimes the best first step to take.
I try to get as far as possible without actually starting work. I'll get all the little things out of the way.
- Prepare clothes for the next day - Prepare a mug with a teabag, sugar and a spoon - Close tabs, launch the IDE, start the Docker containers - Gather the addresses, emails or phone numbers I need to call - Write a very short term to-do list to get the day started - Clear small unrelated tasks if needed (inbox triage, small errands etc)
It's very similar to mise en place when you're cooking. You take care of the small tasks first, so that the main task goes smoothly.
It's really effective. In fact, it's sometimes hard to snap out of it and do other things.
The Brain Science podcast from Changelog has an episode about perfectionism and how it can lead to procrastination, by the fear of rejection or failure.
Works for some things ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Part 1: https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/why-procrastinators-procrasti...
Part 2: https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/11/how-to-beat-procrastination.h...
Bonus: https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/03/procrastination-matrix.html
Highly recommended! While I still procrastinate this understanding has helped me control my urge tememdously. A true gem! (This is also available as a video in Tim Urban's TED talk on YouTube)
These days I accept I don't care enough about most things to read articles on it until I get interested, and then it's hard to find good reading on it unless I've drilled my well. Now I save any interesting-looking article in Notion for when I get interested and go searching.
Then, last year, I have learned about ADHD - and, to my surprise, realized I'm a textbook example.
There are a lot of resources available for us, and ways to do things differently. If you relate to WaitButWhy, check this out:
https://romankogan.net/adhd/
And if you find yourself scrolling and relating - there's a good change your life will drastically change for the better when you get help for ADHD.
Just trying to increase the chances that someone stumbles upon something that helps them. I don't see many people talking about ADHD here.
If public awareness of ADHD was anywhere where it needs to be, I wouldn't have spent 34 years living without help.
ADHD is not an issue focusing.
I don't have a problem focusing per se [1]. The disorder's name is misleading [2].
In fact, I often have an excess of focus: focusing on something to the detriment of everything else [3].
Like, coding (or making music) till 5AM, forgetting to eat and sleep.
The problem I have is directing where the focus goes.
Let me make a camera analogy:
* Most people don't have laser-sharp focus, but it's good enough for what needs to get done, and they can switch it quickly and at will, like a manual focus on a camera;
* My focus is laser sharp... but it's automatic, and with a janky chip. So it takes time to engage, and often picks out the wrong subject.
Whatever it focuses on looks great, but if there's a squirrel in the frame, the focus always goes there, and it never focuses on some things just because.
Anything shiny and fine-textured (jewelry, fine art) will come out excellently, in super fine detail.
Anything that's bland and the same throughout (like plain cloth) doesn't have enough edges for the autofocus to catch on.
-------
Does music help? Well, it's one thing I can focus on. That's how I failed gym: I couldn't leave the music lab on time to make it to the next class... Every time. Breaking hyperfocus is painful.
Music isn't an ADHD cure, but what it is, is a place for many ADHD people to find themselves, and feel comfortable at. It ticks all the boxes: creative, important, necessary, and urgent — if you are performing. It's the shiny thing my autofocus chip can lock onto.
It gets the dopamine flowing, and when you get enough, you suddenly get the action points to do other things.
It's also a way to meet and connect with people. I made many friends through music — unsurprisingly, quite a few of them have ADHD.
So it helps, but not in a way you might think.
And classical piano music instruction is outright harmful IMO. I'm mostly self-taught/playing by ear; the skills I needed to play live weren't taught in school. People who spent years playing classical pieces somehow were never taught basic musicianship: playing by ear, improvising, arranging, basics of composing, etc; not to mention zero knowledge about music tech (of which we have more than a century now).
That said, I have taken several semesters worth of music production classes — and barely scratched the surface of what there is to learn.
On that note, I can highly recommend Huang's class on Monthly if you can truly dedicate time and effort needed for it, which is much more than the minimum required to just get through it. It's super condensed and hands-on.
Let me know if you want more info about music and resources.
[1] https://romankogan.net/adhd/#Focusing
[2] https://romankogan.net/adhd/#Awfully%20Described%20Human%20D...
[3] https://romankogan.net/adhd/#Hyperfocus
What I would instead suggest is reducing your workload, resting, and if that fails to fix the problem, seeing a medical professional to check for ADHD or other executive dysfunction issues. (It also really does bother me that Tim Urban never even mentioned that "procrastination" is known in the medical community as "executive dysfunction" and that clinical treatments are an option. Not saying that it's the root of all procrastination issues, but for major problems, it's worth looking at.)