Ask HN: How do ADHD people cope on here?

a) I categorize patterns of discussions that return again and again on here and they slowly become less stimulating until I stop looking. Most internet sites present the same information again and again, it doesn't satisfy anymore.

b) I get annoyed, say something disagreeable and wisely take break from internet commentary and reading until I've moved on from whatever was annoying me. It can take months.

Working with your hands on real life objects helps a lot too. You no longer desire to follow thoughts into addictive loops when it also hurts your body at the same time.

For example, following a youtube video tutorial on repairing bicycles and cars, makes it plainly evident that you have to choose your battles, come up with creative solutions for your own environment and suffer some scars to actually follow through on your stimulating thoughts. Your back will hurt, you will find rusty bolts you can't move no matter how much you think it and have to let go of hyperfocusing on one solution and reframe your headspace.

The internet and computing has a very low physical cost to participating in stimulating thoughts. Be wary of that fact.

I understand some will find this hard though, and am not suggesting it's a fix if you have ADHD.

File and forget is incredibly effective when you have ADHD. There are just too many things that are "interesting" that you'll never have time to do anything about.

Just write it down (or an equivalent) so your brain can stop worrying about it. You'll find in a few weeks time the things that didn't actually matter are gone.

When I was having anxiety problems it was also an extremely effective way of getting out of the circular thinking loop. Write down all your worries on a new tab in Notepad++. All the worries stopped circulating. When I might occasionally look at that tab in a month or two's time. usually I didn't even care about any of those things anymore. Even though they'd all been thought obsessing distractions a couple of months earlier.

And lists, lists, lists. I'm at my most happiest when every day I create a short-ish to-do list for work and a list for home and throw it away at the start of the next day. I try and keep it below 7-8 things, in reality I often get 3-5 done. I fall out of the habit fairly frequently, and that's often when I start feeling overwhelmed.

Plus exercise, exercise, exercise. If I haven't exercised for more than about 5 days, I start becoming a right asshole who gets anxious about the most ridiculous things.

* Anything not being immediately looked at is shovelled to a different desktop to help keep focus. Tabs on phones are move to this desktop on one of the other machines.

* When browser memory use starts to climb it is time for a pruning session. Things that I don't really remember usually weren't that significant and are just dropped. Other get filed with notes in my collection of “possible projects/playthings” text files that are kept on a server accessible to all my devices⁴. This can take some time as I usually get distracted and end up climbing back down the rabbit-holes that resulted in some of those open tabs in the first place…

* I've started actively trying to be “evil” with myself and controlling the amount of time I'm here. This sometimes means passing up on links in favour of others, or just opening the tab but not looking at it until later (if I don't end up having time later this either gets closed or moved to that dumping ground desktop). If something is relevant to particular projects or idea groups the links (source and HN thread) go directly into the relevant project text files, skipping further attention/triage, to be looked at in more detail in that mythical future time that I properly look into said project(s) again.

I used to use a mind-mapping tool to keep the lists of lists of related lists of lists & notes together, but that became unwieldy so went back to tetx files. I've tried or just looked at various apps² and not spotted anything that matches what I want. A couple of those many project files concern writing my own tool to manage my brain-dumps, or at least a tool to help index/search the lists/notes as they are currently stored.

Occasional lost windows full of tabs due to browser crashes that have had no lasting effect on my life should probably be a sign that I should just stop caring to a large extent, but that is never going to happen!

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[0] unless I am but undiagnosed!

[1] home main PC, laptop, phone, work machine, old phone that I haven't decommissioned yet as moving the FirstDirect banking app over is a PITA, old phone I use for work as I refuse to have Teams & other work stuff on personal devices

[2] like OneNote, keep and various FOSS options – Keep sometimes acts as a temporary³ dumping ground for things on their way to the text files

[3] though not temporary enough, I have too much in there ATM

[4] and, or course, backed up & historied along with other work, not actually in proper source control like I almost certainly should⁵, but at least in backups that allow access to older versions

[5] yet another not-on-going project being to rationalise how I store and backup everything.