Ask HN: How do ADHD people cope on here?

Distractions usually happen when you’re not satisfied with the other things in front of you. Of course nothing is black and white, but that’s what I’ve found.

I wrote a book on ADHD that quite a few HN users enjoyed: https://adhdpro.xyz/

I hear you and am right with you—-I recently spent the weekend trimming out Safari on my iPad from 500 tabs (mostly from HN articles) down to 20, and I’m already back up to about 75. And yep, super-frustrating to feel like there’s all these cool ideas and projects and sites out there and all I’m doing is reading and marking them for later.

One thing that helped was accepting that bookmarking it was just a way of putting it down for now, and that I always have the option to come back to it. That doesn’t happen often, but pruning back all those tabs did remind me of a couple things I’d marked that I wound up doing things with. And then on a regular basis I’ll run into a problem and think, “Wait, I think I marked a site in Raindrop about this…aha! There it is.” So storing those marks (as long as they’re searchable!) still has benefit without immediate action, which helps me not leave them open (although I’m still wrestling with it…).

Meanwhile, the act of browsing all those interesting reads and looking at those projects is beneficial in its own right even if I do nothing else but read and bookmark. By reading and absorbing all those different ideas, I make it far more likely that when I’m working on projects at work or talking with other people, my brain will pull those random articles together and make a connection or a reference that’s useful.

A friend of mine likes to call herself the “corporate bumblebee”, gathering bits from one project and connecting it to other projects like a bumblebee spreading pollen. Think of reading HN as being a tech bumblebee: you’re gathering the pollen that you can later give to other people.

I also compulsively[?] bookmark things to get to them "later" but I think this is just something that stems from how ephemeral the web can be. I've started trying to regularly send my massive set of bookmarked links to a selfhosted ArchiveBox instance to preserve the content. Haven't figured out search yet, but I'm looking at Yacy and possibly Elastic. I cobsider it a personal knowledge base. It's reassuring to know that the feeling of "oh, I saw this! or read about that!" or "yes there was this project posted that solved this problem..." and know you can find it again with very little effort even if the original has long vanished.

As for coping with ADHD in general... the tack I'm taking lately is to just embrace the mundane. "Mundane excellence" is kind of the mantra. I'll do outrageous things to avoid the mundane business of everyday life and work, but it causes a lot of problems and discomfort. But it actually tends to feel rewarding to engage with it over avoiding it. The whole frustrating "thing I put off for months just took ten minutes at 5% effort to just do"... I don't know. It all remains a challenge, despite medication.

I'm 72 and retired. A blessing and a curse. I spend a lot of time ferreting out obscure facts on obscure topics and pursuing and commenting on social issues on web sites and to elected officials. I can't stand online videos or podcasts as the transmit information too slowly. I prefer to read and think about issues or concepts being presented. I have thousands of books in my house. I have thousands of bookmarks that I continually re-categorize. When I interact with people (which my wife, a nurse, forces me to do as a mental health measure) topics come up that I feel compelled to research and provide a report on later. This need to know, this feeling of missing out is exhausting. I have to force myself away from the computer and relocate myself physically somewhere where there is no access to the internet. My eyesight is failing me which is a blessing as I find it frustrating to use my mobile to look up things on the internet and instead actually use it for what it was originally designed to do - handle phone calls. Drugs just put me in a contemplative state that makes the browsing just that more dopamine rewarding. Therapy has been frustrating - primarily for the therapist - as I bring far too much information to sessions in order to "share". I've come to accept this state of existence and do my best to time manage the impact and not let the compulsion overwhelm other aspects of my life. My growing existential realization that the end of life is closer than the beginning provides an incentive to experience other things besides the internet as it may be the last time I experience that other thing. My advice to younger people with ADHD is to force yourself away from the compulsion. Very hard I know. You need to recognize and internalize that it's simply not possible to absorb everything we, as a species, are creating. The rewards for actually experiencing life far out weigh the rewards from simply reading about it.