Also, I'm concerned that readers would judge my whole existence and the entire library of my life choices if any part of my (theoretical) comment fails to be... well, perfect.
As a public open source (yep, open source can be private) programmer (currently x86_64 assembly), and I am very aware of this pitfall.
It is very important to move forward in code, because you cannot predict how will actually end up a complex program: you need to have all the (sane) features in to actually know. Since code is all about trade-offs, there is "no perfect".
You have to be carefull at avoiding falling into a mental spinning loop about this.
Once you have a reasonable minimum of usable features in, publish it. It help breaking such mental loop.
For instance, currently writing a printf implementation, and printf specs are already brain damaged by themselves, so I am not looking for perfection, far from it. I did set myself a minimal set of features (full format decoding, hexadecimal and byte strings) before publishing it. Until it does not require the complexity of a compiler, does a good enough job, I'll be happy.
Sometimes it is not about perfectionism, but a question of resourses required to achieve something reasonably working: you have a montain to deal with just to get something minimaly working, and you are given a spoon... when you are lucky.
As I said in my post, I did not release it yet, and it will be very incomplete. But I am not alone, and some did assembly written printf like functions (gogol).
The actual real way to work around the inappropriate complexity of that function is to remove it and switch to a brutal "put string" with string conversion functions (with space allocated on the stack). In the end it would be not that much more work in most cases, then in the end I may not even use my assembly code, but lower some printf function usage to what I said.
I'm guessing it's referring to the "corporate open source" ecosystem where Google and similar companies make code public but everything else is closed. There is no collaboration, no public roadmaps, no influence given to the community and such. Not sure it's a vital distinction, for me both are as public/private as the other, but that's the only meaning I could try to extract from that...
Isn't assembly programming already a form of perfectionism in itself. Compilers do the job well enough 99.9% of the times. If you are in the 0.1% where writing assembly is justified, you are probably also expected to put many, many times more effort on details most programmers don't care or even don't know about.
Yes, I think it's even less than 0.1%. Assembly should mostly be written as a target for a compiler backend or to inline a hotspot only when it is proven that the compiler can't do it for you. Very few are in either of these two situations outside of artificial environments like a class.
Just to be independent from those grotesquely and absurdely massive and complex compilers(gcc|clang/llvm), justify the additional amount of work for myself.
Not to mention that from the perspective of the life cycle of tons of system software components out there, the actual coding is not that much.
That's interesting! Although I haven't invested any thought in it, I would've assumed that announcing plans would have the opposite effect because people are now watching and know what you're trying to achieve, so you'd be more motivated to avoid losing face. Thanks for the article — I'll have to check it out!
Personally, it would make me feel a burden of shame to have announced a goal and then had a setback, which would become a greater discouragement then just facing a setback if I had not made a big deal about it in the first place.
I’ve heard about the paradox of announcing plans before. It is intriguing.
In light of the need for community, talking about plans might be seen as a way to search for ideas that could have group buy-in and become something to undertake together. Failure to move forward on those plans would reflect that the group interest just wasn’t there. The mistake would have been in assuming you would have ever pursued the goal independently, the social impulse to share could have been the hint.
Shared interests between friends can help individual interests and goals become collective ones.
Ecclesiastes: one may be overcome (by the exhaustion of going to the gym), two can defend themselves (against lapsing on their New Year’s resolution). A three-ply cord is not easily broken.
It doesn't though, as long as you're willing to throw yourself out there. Meetup groups is a great way to meet fellow nerds, especially if you share interests. You'll probably meet some shitty people sometime, just stay clear and keep trying, you'll eventually find at least one or two people who you fit with :)
Acquaintances perhaps, but I wouldn’t say actual friends. I could try it again though. I don’t/can’t use social media so when I got rid of that years ago, almost everyone I knew then went with it.
Friends are just acquaintances you know better than others. You start as acquaintances and as you develop the relationship, you'll eventually be friends.
Some people have so good relationships they even use the label "bestie", which is just a really good friend, who at the beginning surely was a acquaintance :)
Thanks for your input. Being honest, my situation has been like this for so long now I’ve given up hope and lost interest in it ever changing. Used to my own loneliness nowadays so it doesn’t really matter. Fine with being someone who is only ever in the background of other people’s day.
For the past eight years I’ve been telling myself that I was going to end my life if things didn’t improve by this year, and they only ever get worse and worse, so 2024 is my final one on earth. Currently in the process of wrapping up all my business and getting rid of all my stuff so there’s nothing left behind for anyone to deal with. Really not going to miss living or living the life I’ve lived. Eight billion other people on the planet who will get on fine without me.
Sorry to hear that. I’m not in a position to help you but there are many selfhelp support networks in your neighbourhood that can help(most likely, assuming you live in a city).
I’m really just not someone people enjoy the company of or want to get to know or have around. Kind of my conclusion after 40 years of living in cities. Have tried all kinds of groups and programmes. Have tried putting in the interest but everyone I know or meet fades out, either quickly or slowly. Don’t have any family either, or a significant other.
You need to start changing coefficients in your “life physics” and see what happens. Increasing the amount of new social contact is always a good starting point.
I've struggled with perfectionism procrastination. For example, I've tried in the past to start a weekly newsletter for my blog but was never consistent with it.
In the middle of November, I started a daily (M-F) newsletter on topics related to DevOps. I've been consistent with it ever since.
The strategies the article outlines that have helped me the most are breaking things down into small pieces and starting small.
Also, by making my newsletter daily, it took a lot of pressure off me. I didn't feel like I had to have a "hit" every article like with weekly or monthly cadences. If the article sucked, then tomorrow is a new day with a new article.
I have a pet peeve about the term perfectionism - it assumes the target of the idealized 'perfect' state is something other than the absolutely guaranteed limited resource in the world - time.
Every self-proclaimed perfectionist should start caring about time as much as they do about the object they are obsessing over. They'll then see the tradeoff in being less of a ^perfectionist^ in that thing and being more ^perfectionist^ about time.
If you are into the psychological aspects of procrastination, I've found the book Procrastination by Burka and Yuen [1] an amazing read. Perfectionism is one of the themes but apparently there can be multiple, independent sources.
„ We need to think about failure differently. I’m not the first to say that failure, when approached properly, can be an opportunity for growth. But the way most people interpret this assertion is that mistakes are a necessary evil. Mistakes aren’t a necessary evil. They aren’t evil at all. They are an inevitable consequence of doing something new (and, as such, should be seen as valuable; without them, we’d have no originality). And yet, even as I say that embracing failure is an important part of learning, I also acknowledge that acknowledging this truth is not enough. That’s because failure is painful, and our feelings about this pain tend to screw up our understanding of its worth. To disentangle the good and the bad parts of failure, we have to recognize both the reality of the pain and the benefit of the resulting growth.“
When in high school, I returned home after a ski weekend with friends. When I returned home, my relatives, who didn't ski, asked if I fell at all during the weekend. I remarked that I had, especially while navigating some expert trails. They consoled me saying "that's OK, maybe you'll do better next time."
I was confused at first until I realized that they thought of falling as a tragic outcome instead of a natural part of the learning process.
Probably mostly a function of them having no idea what skiing is like. If you never fall you either only use boring routes or ski very slowly - or you are professional skier and have such a breakneck speed you can’t fall (but even then it happens looking at Schumacher)
Lots of tongue in cheek comments for such a very serious issue.
Please know that perfectionism is often fear-based and trauma-based. Learning to recognise the underlying fear and trauma, and working through them, will help with both perfectionism and procrastination. In my experience, there are very few quick wins, only long methodical work to get through the underlying issues.
The best way to do that is with the help of a mental health professional (should be first # in that article).
A true perfectionist such as myself must go through every social media feed before doing more demanding work. Those unclicked links, notifications and red dots must be cleanced.
you cannot turn mammals into efficient obedient workers and expect them to have a sane mental health.
we're mammals with inflated brains, anxiety and depression, and it's too soon since we were hunter gatherers living in caves, we barely started working in cubicles and that's a small sample of the population.
Two tiny hacks changed my lifelong procrastination and people-pleasing nature.
1. Instead of “what will they think?” always ask yourself the alternative question, “what do I want?”. This saves you a lot of time and trouble. Do what you like to see what people will say. Make it a fun game.
2. If something takes less than 2 minutes, just go do it. Make it your “kick”. After few weeks, work your way to turn 2 minutes to 5 then 10 minutes. You will get so much done because of the inertia.
For me, what help a lot is reframing feedback, whatever it is, as opportunity for learning, and not something you need to fear, ashamed, or get rid of(to keep face) Embrace it. See it with the eyes of curiosity, and not fear.
Still do your best, yes, but not overly anxious about things you can't control, e.g. what people think.
Nailed it. With a small caveat. It’s more a matter of executive functioning [1], less one of (strictly speaking) motivation (although that is how it often feels, so I understand why that’s used as a kind of shorthand). I can very easily feel and be motivated to accomplish some task, but still fail to make any progress (or even begin) until it’s deadline time. Then comes feelings of guilt and self-loathing because I just can’t seem to get my shit together (despite knowing that that’s a wildly wrong way of framing it).
It is horrible. But it’s manageable on most days (and yes, I’m medicated and have been since early adulthood). And honestly, having people in your life who understand your condition and can help pick you up sometimes [2], is a huge part of coping.
[2] I do not mean do stuff for you. For me, when I’m in that place where I’m so frustrated that the only options are either to primally scream or to sit in the corner and cry, a simple fucking hug is like a miracle drug.
FYI, the Russel Barkley video from the grandparent comment is a controversial figure. He presents a lot of his own pet ADHD theories as if they were facts.
He's one of the OG internet ADHD influencers, back when ADHD was still commonly stigmatized. Someone I know joked that if you watched enough Russel Barkley videos, anyone could convince themselves they had ADHD.
Nope, I don’t have any of the typical ADHD symptoms (inattention, hyperactivity, impulsivity — rather the opposite), but still procrastinate to problematic levels due to perfectionism.
Procrastination due to perfectionism (instead of working on the thing you want to do perfectly) is also due to emotional discomfort avoidance (because the procrastination takes your mind off the imperfections associated with what you ought to be working on).
ADHD has totally ruined so many aspects of my life. It's a straight-up disability for me. It stops mattering how "gifted" I am when the ability to use that gift is constantly revoked whenever I find something new to use it on. It's like my brain is constantly trying to patch an exploit, like it never wants me to actually use any of my potential.
Meds helped for only a few months. Then my brain patched that exploit too. :/
Procrastination is not a new thing. And ADHD is a pretty rare condition - just look at the diagnosis rate from country to country. The US has the highest one because doctors here are basically legal Speed drug dealers - for children.
The author of the Search Engine pod just had a two-parter about his "ADHD":
(The history of regulating Speed in the US is actually fascinating).
I could focus just fine all my life, then suddenly I couldn't. I've talked to other adults who are experiencing the same.
And it's funny how people get super torqued when you say something like this. There is a lot of room between "I have legit ADHD" and "I am addicted to my phone".
Sometimes I could not start a project at work for weeks - then I got off Twitter.
Just remember adults here are also dealing with being diagnosed for the first time, and all of the stigma around how this affects kids affects adults, too.
The speed for children scare mongering is pathetic and ignorant and betrays your lack of experience with children with this and related condition.
Lots of kids have behavioral and impulse control problems. If you give them amphetamines you see exactly the same problems, but with the boundless energy amphetamines give you. When you give amphetamines to ADHD children they visibly and noticeably become calmer, quieter, and more focused. If you did not come into it with the predetermined idea that this drug is "speed" you would certainly not arrive there from watching the behavior of medicated children with ADHD.
You were addicted to twitter good for you for solving your problems. Don't extrapolate that experience out to kids though. ADHD is fucked up, life ruining stuff. Look at the rates for drug abuse, car crashes and incarceration for adults with untreated ADHD. This sort of scare mongering makes it less likely for children to access effective treatment when it can be most impactful on their lives. It is harmful and you should be ashamed.
Thanks for your comment. I was diagnosed with ADHD as an adult late (after 4 x 2 hours sessions with extensive questionnaires and iq test). Originally I was really worried that I'd be incorrectly diagnosed with ADHD despite not having it so was reassured by how serious the process was.
One thing that jumped out at me though with regards to your comment about medicine. I started taking concerta and quickly noticed that if I'm the slightest bit sleep deprived, concerta doesn't amp me, it doesn't make me have more energy but instead it makes me sleepy. With it, I'm visibly calmer and quieter and I also have a lot less craving for chocolates (which I'd keep eating non-stop during the day). It's quite magical actually.
I have a suspicion the high rate of ADHD may be related to the low rate of employment in kinaesthetic jobs (eg construction, farming, even to a great degree historical militaries) and high rates of high-attention-demand work - which yes, I'll include most fast food industry.
That said ADHD runs through my family like a (mad) bull in a china shop, and yes, hence very much voting this comment up. Lots of individual things can help - getting enough sleep for one, enough exercise ... but at the end of the day, one has to be reasonable and accept that medicines help.
An aside : children under a certain age, one can't (safely) detect ADHD because the symptoms are "ordinary behaviour". This is why I suspect there are lifestyle components too...
My personal family experience had been that today in the US it's very hard to get an ADHD diagnosis, at least if the patient is smart and manages to achieve decent school grades.
Counterpoint: ADHD diagnoses are a hot topic among kids and junior devs right now. Many of them self-diagnose based on Reddit, Twitter, or TikTok information that tells them that ADHD explains away all of their perceived shortcomings: It's the reason they're not motivated, it's the reason they didn't attend an Ivy League school, it's the reason they don't earn as much as their peers, it's the reason their last significant other broke up with them, and so on (these are all real examples from conversations I've had with mentees since ADHD started trending on social media during COVID)
One of the most concerning patterns I've seen is that these people go out and find a doctor who will prescribe them stimulants (during COVID it was as easy as following ads on TikTok, filling out a form, and having a <5 minute virtual visit with a doctor, believe it or not) and then many of them get worse.
By this I mean the stimulant medication supercharges their actual underlying problem: The anxious procrastinators become even more anxious. The perfectionist procrastinators become even more obsessed with perfecting things. The video game procrastinators now game for harder and longer with stimulants in their system. The hobby/side project procrastinators are now putting in more hours on their side project and have even less time for the work or studies they're supposed to be doing.
I'm not saying that ADHD isn't real, because it's definitely real and debilitating. I'm saying that we have a real problem with the current trend of "ADHD explains everything". Social media has supercharged this trend by bombarding people with videos that position ADHD as a perfect excuse and explanation for their frustrations. They are frighteningly good at finding a video or TikTok or Reddit post that tells them exactly what they want to hear, and they're also good at skipping past any content that doesn't confirm their beliefs.
I have extended family who are in grade school education, and the trend goes all the way into 5th and 6th grade from what they tell me: Kids using "I have ADHD" as an excuse for everything and then trying to show their teacher a TikTok that explains why they shouldn't be held accountable for late homework, low grades, or behavioral problems. They're not alone, it's a common topic in /r/teachers on Reddit too ( https://www.reddit.com/r/Teachers/comments/12cfdj3/i_have_ad... )
>> It's generally a sign of progress when diagnoses that were once whispered in shameful secrecy enter our everyday vocabulary and shed their stigma. But especially online, where therapy "influencers" flood social media feeds with content about trauma, panic attacks and personality disorders, greater awareness of mental health problems risks encouraging self-diagnosis and the pathologizing of commonplace emotions what Dr. Foulkes calls "problems of living." When teenagers gravitate toward such content on their social media feeds, algorithms serve them more of it, intensifying the feedback loop.
The reason we fear shipping is that we know there is an absolute truth out there that nobody made any effort to find. ONLY if you ship that eternal fundamental solution have you made anything interesting.
Everything is shit, think before you act! It's better to do nothing, than to deliver more shit.
> It's better to do nothing, than to deliver more shit.
How are you supposed to get better at delivering anything if you won't deliver until you have something "perfect"?
Part of the process of getting better is to be shit for a while, while you figuring things out.
Common saying when making music is that probably your first 100 songs will be absolutely trash, so better get those out of the door ASAP, so you can get to the good stuff :) Practice is the only way to get better, and your output will probably suck for a while, but we all sucked at one point so it's OK.
I meant do mistakes that you don't ship. And think before you make mistakes you don't plan to ship...
I know that it's hard to build the intuition and sharp judgment without failing, but with time anyone can dismiss mistakes in their head. Only money makes you make mistakes because you are 1) pressed for time 2) greedy.
Money IS the problem, soon money will be the problem of the past though (energy is the final problem), so that wasted time (most of 4 billion man centuries) is lost forever in a puff of smoke.
“Nearly done” is sometimes a hidden euphemism for “I feel bad about not having finished this yet, and I fear that others may accordingly look upon me unkindly, so I try to verbally minimize the unfinishedness, and I may yet get lucky and be able to finish it reasonably quickly, so it’s not an outright lie”.
I just saw a simple differentiation between daydreaming (creative/analytic) and detailed planning and execution (productive).
Seen that way you'd need to take care to not fall back into that creative-only daydream mode when you actually need/want to be productive. So you would need to steadily remind you to actually continue with concrete execution planning instead of mentally optimizing models (which of course itself is - and feels - productive and maybe even more important/urgent, but not in the ouput-oriented way you'd like/need to achieve in that actual production task).
Not sure if it actually helps, but besides that perfectionism and "just do it" issue/solution pair it might be a useful perspective and concrete criterion to keep one focused on the task of finishing. I'll try to include it in the repertoire at least.
Fear of losing control (and the thought of everything blowing up) => Perfectionism => „Let me be 1000% prepared before I start doing it“ => Prepares endlessly => external pressure rises above threshold => fear of consequences creates panick => starts doing the job => creates a reference experience („this was traumatic; next time I need to be prepared to avoid this kind of stress“) => until next „important“ task lands on desk.
I tend to think that mostly people with a lot of capacity for creating mental images (who can freak themselves out) are prone to procrastination.
Edit: Apparently it is more complex than that. I believe that self-worth also plays a role (fear of not delivering as good as one would like to), also ADHS (jumping to a thousand other things and losing focus). Generally fear plays a role. Meditation helps. Anything that helps to relax (running, breathing exercises).
I had an instructor for a seminar that I took, keep repeating the phrase “We need to know what 'done' looks like.”
Another manager I worked with, said “The #1 feature of this product is 'Ship'.”
In the app we’re about to release, we don’t have any schedule pressure. We can release when we want.
I found that the rest of the team was in “Perma-Tweak” mode. Lots of “Just one more thing.”
I realized that it was never going to ship, so I set an arbitrary date of … today.
In true software development tradition, we’ll be late, but not by much. Also, we have a great excuse. The CEO had a baby (ahead of schedule, but the deadline was quite firm).
In recent years the increase in launching products and updates without in-depth checks and with unfinished features is becoming routine... as if achieving the introduction of low quality products in the market were the goal, under the "productivity" shield.
"Productivity", the abstract word that looks as if it were invented by the "flat-earthers" to sell books. Just a drug for to make the clients to pay for being alpha-testers, without remorse.
Not easy to talk about perfectionism. In the last decade the threshold changed much, unfortunately. The main problem with this is in the retro-feeding, low quality here, there, affect the time needed for to advance in better products because there are more issues to solve, that of course will be "un-productive" to solve, in loop. Enjoy.
231 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 263 ms ] threadIt is very important to move forward in code, because you cannot predict how will actually end up a complex program: you need to have all the (sane) features in to actually know. Since code is all about trade-offs, there is "no perfect".
You have to be carefull at avoiding falling into a mental spinning loop about this.
Once you have a reasonable minimum of usable features in, publish it. It help breaking such mental loop.
For instance, currently writing a printf implementation, and printf specs are already brain damaged by themselves, so I am not looking for perfection, far from it. I did set myself a minimal set of features (full format decoding, hexadecimal and byte strings) before publishing it. Until it does not require the complexity of a compiler, does a good enough job, I'll be happy.
Sometimes it is not about perfectionism, but a question of resourses required to achieve something reasonably working: you have a montain to deal with just to get something minimaly working, and you are given a spoon... when you are lucky.
I'm curious to see why something like printf is worth writing in assembly.
The actual real way to work around the inappropriate complexity of that function is to remove it and switch to a brutal "put string" with string conversion functions (with space allocated on the stack). In the end it would be not that much more work in most cases, then in the end I may not even use my assembly code, but lower some printf function usage to what I said.
It is not going as fast as I wanted, since I wanted it be finished "yesterday", but I may focus next on, shell matcher and basic/extended regexp.
Open source works more than fine with defence stuff, actually would be a requirement...
Not to mention that from the perspective of the life cycle of tons of system software components out there, the actual coding is not that much.
The spoon isn't the issue - why does that mountain need moving? The parable is about persistence and determination - necessity is ignored!
I think this is kind of like, if you don't fail, you can't succeed.
To be happy, fail. -Me, 2024.
Reminds me of "Announcing your plans makes you less motivated to accomplish them (2009)" - https://sivers.org/zipit - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7496923 (74 points | March 30, 2014 | 21 comments)
In light of the need for community, talking about plans might be seen as a way to search for ideas that could have group buy-in and become something to undertake together. Failure to move forward on those plans would reflect that the group interest just wasn’t there. The mistake would have been in assuming you would have ever pursued the goal independently, the social impulse to share could have been the hint.
Shared interests between friends can help individual interests and goals become collective ones.
Ecclesiastes: one may be overcome (by the exhaustion of going to the gym), two can defend themselves (against lapsing on their New Year’s resolution). A three-ply cord is not easily broken.
Making friends is „easy“ too - treating people how you would want to be treated is a good first step.
Some people have so good relationships they even use the label "bestie", which is just a really good friend, who at the beginning surely was a acquaintance :)
Showing up is already a giant step forwards.
Best of luck
In the middle of November, I started a daily (M-F) newsletter on topics related to DevOps. I've been consistent with it ever since.
The strategies the article outlines that have helped me the most are breaking things down into small pieces and starting small.
Also, by making my newsletter daily, it took a lot of pressure off me. I didn't feel like I had to have a "hit" every article like with weekly or monthly cadences. If the article sucked, then tomorrow is a new day with a new article.
Every self-proclaimed perfectionist should start caring about time as much as they do about the object they are obsessing over. They'll then see the tradeoff in being less of a ^perfectionist^ in that thing and being more ^perfectionist^ about time.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Procrastination-Why-You-What-About/dp...
- Ed Catmull (from the book Creativity Inc.)
edit: by way of the marginalian, which is excellent, one of the best sites out there- go read it: https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/05/02/creativity-inc-ed-...
Please know that perfectionism is often fear-based and trauma-based. Learning to recognise the underlying fear and trauma, and working through them, will help with both perfectionism and procrastination. In my experience, there are very few quick wins, only long methodical work to get through the underlying issues.
The best way to do that is with the help of a mental health professional (should be first # in that article).
doctors say people work too much, and there's an epidemic of burnout
homo sapiens are not made to work and feel guilty when they don't complete tasks
it's a problem of work culture and productivism, nothing else
we're mammals with inflated brains, anxiety and depression, and it's too soon since we were hunter gatherers living in caves, we barely started working in cubicles and that's a small sample of the population.
1. Instead of “what will they think?” always ask yourself the alternative question, “what do I want?”. This saves you a lot of time and trouble. Do what you like to see what people will say. Make it a fun game.
2. If something takes less than 2 minutes, just go do it. Make it your “kick”. After few weeks, work your way to turn 2 minutes to 5 then 10 minutes. You will get so much done because of the inertia.
For me, what help a lot is reframing feedback, whatever it is, as opportunity for learning, and not something you need to fear, ashamed, or get rid of(to keep face) Embrace it. See it with the eyes of curiosity, and not fear.
Still do your best, yes, but not overly anxious about things you can't control, e.g. what people think.
Russel Barkley with a succinct video on "ADHD as Motivation Deficit Disorder": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bR3RJU6838c
It is horrible. But it’s manageable on most days (and yes, I’m medicated and have been since early adulthood). And honestly, having people in your life who understand your condition and can help pick you up sometimes [2], is a huge part of coping.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_functions
[2] I do not mean do stuff for you. For me, when I’m in that place where I’m so frustrated that the only options are either to primally scream or to sit in the corner and cry, a simple fucking hug is like a miracle drug.
FYI, the Russel Barkley video from the grandparent comment is a controversial figure. He presents a lot of his own pet ADHD theories as if they were facts.
He's one of the OG internet ADHD influencers, back when ADHD was still commonly stigmatized. Someone I know joked that if you watched enough Russel Barkley videos, anyone could convince themselves they had ADHD.
Meds helped for only a few months. Then my brain patched that exploit too. :/
The author of the Search Engine pod just had a two-parter about his "ADHD":
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/whyd-i-take-speed-for-...
(The history of regulating Speed in the US is actually fascinating).
I could focus just fine all my life, then suddenly I couldn't. I've talked to other adults who are experiencing the same.
And it's funny how people get super torqued when you say something like this. There is a lot of room between "I have legit ADHD" and "I am addicted to my phone".
Sometimes I could not start a project at work for weeks - then I got off Twitter.
Lots of kids have behavioral and impulse control problems. If you give them amphetamines you see exactly the same problems, but with the boundless energy amphetamines give you. When you give amphetamines to ADHD children they visibly and noticeably become calmer, quieter, and more focused. If you did not come into it with the predetermined idea that this drug is "speed" you would certainly not arrive there from watching the behavior of medicated children with ADHD.
You were addicted to twitter good for you for solving your problems. Don't extrapolate that experience out to kids though. ADHD is fucked up, life ruining stuff. Look at the rates for drug abuse, car crashes and incarceration for adults with untreated ADHD. This sort of scare mongering makes it less likely for children to access effective treatment when it can be most impactful on their lives. It is harmful and you should be ashamed.
One thing that jumped out at me though with regards to your comment about medicine. I started taking concerta and quickly noticed that if I'm the slightest bit sleep deprived, concerta doesn't amp me, it doesn't make me have more energy but instead it makes me sleepy. With it, I'm visibly calmer and quieter and I also have a lot less craving for chocolates (which I'd keep eating non-stop during the day). It's quite magical actually.
That said ADHD runs through my family like a (mad) bull in a china shop, and yes, hence very much voting this comment up. Lots of individual things can help - getting enough sleep for one, enough exercise ... but at the end of the day, one has to be reasonable and accept that medicines help.
An aside : children under a certain age, one can't (safely) detect ADHD because the symptoms are "ordinary behaviour". This is why I suspect there are lifestyle components too...
One of the most concerning patterns I've seen is that these people go out and find a doctor who will prescribe them stimulants (during COVID it was as easy as following ads on TikTok, filling out a form, and having a <5 minute virtual visit with a doctor, believe it or not) and then many of them get worse.
By this I mean the stimulant medication supercharges their actual underlying problem: The anxious procrastinators become even more anxious. The perfectionist procrastinators become even more obsessed with perfecting things. The video game procrastinators now game for harder and longer with stimulants in their system. The hobby/side project procrastinators are now putting in more hours on their side project and have even less time for the work or studies they're supposed to be doing.
I'm not saying that ADHD isn't real, because it's definitely real and debilitating. I'm saying that we have a real problem with the current trend of "ADHD explains everything". Social media has supercharged this trend by bombarding people with videos that position ADHD as a perfect excuse and explanation for their frustrations. They are frighteningly good at finding a video or TikTok or Reddit post that tells them exactly what they want to hear, and they're also good at skipping past any content that doesn't confirm their beliefs.
I have extended family who are in grade school education, and the trend goes all the way into 5th and 6th grade from what they tell me: Kids using "I have ADHD" as an excuse for everything and then trying to show their teacher a TikTok that explains why they shouldn't be held accountable for late homework, low grades, or behavioral problems. They're not alone, it's a common topic in /r/teachers on Reddit too ( https://www.reddit.com/r/Teachers/comments/12cfdj3/i_have_ad... )
A recent nytimes opinion on the subject: https://twitter.com/emmma_camp_/status/1726390207740608823
>> It's generally a sign of progress when diagnoses that were once whispered in shameful secrecy enter our everyday vocabulary and shed their stigma. But especially online, where therapy "influencers" flood social media feeds with content about trauma, panic attacks and personality disorders, greater awareness of mental health problems risks encouraging self-diagnosis and the pathologizing of commonplace emotions what Dr. Foulkes calls "problems of living." When teenagers gravitate toward such content on their social media feeds, algorithms serve them more of it, intensifying the feedback loop.
I think the same ADHD diagnosis problem is happening in New Zealand too.
Get a project to a “good enough” point, then tell myself “I’ll fix it next year”, when I really just want to rip it out and start over.
Of course ‘next year’ never comes as later I come to see that the project is totally fine and doesn’t need a re-do.
Everything is shit, think before you act! It's better to do nothing, than to deliver more shit.
How are you supposed to get better at delivering anything if you won't deliver until you have something "perfect"?
Part of the process of getting better is to be shit for a while, while you figuring things out.
Common saying when making music is that probably your first 100 songs will be absolutely trash, so better get those out of the door ASAP, so you can get to the good stuff :) Practice is the only way to get better, and your output will probably suck for a while, but we all sucked at one point so it's OK.
I know that it's hard to build the intuition and sharp judgment without failing, but with time anyone can dismiss mistakes in their head. Only money makes you make mistakes because you are 1) pressed for time 2) greedy.
Money IS the problem, soon money will be the problem of the past though (energy is the final problem), so that wasted time (most of 4 billion man centuries) is lost forever in a puff of smoke.
Seen that way you'd need to take care to not fall back into that creative-only daydream mode when you actually need/want to be productive. So you would need to steadily remind you to actually continue with concrete execution planning instead of mentally optimizing models (which of course itself is - and feels - productive and maybe even more important/urgent, but not in the ouput-oriented way you'd like/need to achieve in that actual production task).
Not sure if it actually helps, but besides that perfectionism and "just do it" issue/solution pair it might be a useful perspective and concrete criterion to keep one focused on the task of finishing. I'll try to include it in the repertoire at least.
I tend to think that mostly people with a lot of capacity for creating mental images (who can freak themselves out) are prone to procrastination.
Edit: Apparently it is more complex than that. I believe that self-worth also plays a role (fear of not delivering as good as one would like to), also ADHS (jumping to a thousand other things and losing focus). Generally fear plays a role. Meditation helps. Anything that helps to relax (running, breathing exercises).
Another manager I worked with, said “The #1 feature of this product is 'Ship'.”
In the app we’re about to release, we don’t have any schedule pressure. We can release when we want.
I found that the rest of the team was in “Perma-Tweak” mode. Lots of “Just one more thing.”
I realized that it was never going to ship, so I set an arbitrary date of … today.
In true software development tradition, we’ll be late, but not by much. Also, we have a great excuse. The CEO had a baby (ahead of schedule, but the deadline was quite firm).
"Productivity", the abstract word that looks as if it were invented by the "flat-earthers" to sell books. Just a drug for to make the clients to pay for being alpha-testers, without remorse.
Not easy to talk about perfectionism. In the last decade the threshold changed much, unfortunately. The main problem with this is in the retro-feeding, low quality here, there, affect the time needed for to advance in better products because there are more issues to solve, that of course will be "un-productive" to solve, in loop. Enjoy.