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There are too many shiny objects and it is killing me

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Re: There are too many shiny objects and it is killing me

#81

Post by inDigiNeous »

NathanWilliams wrote: post #55
steven2012 wrote: post #8

This is really just a matter of maturity and discipline. The OP is unable to say "No" to themself. Having discipline is being able to power through the boring stuff because you know it's important. OP does not need ADD drugs, all they need to do is commit to finishing a task, and not to pick up anything new until the current task is completed, no matter how "fun" the other tasks seem.

I have a problem with your "OP does not need ADD drugs" comment. How do you know? ADHD is a real condition. You wouldn't tell someone with bipolar that they don't need anti-depression medication and instead just need to "stop being depressed". You clearly don't know how hard it is to push through daily even with medication. Please be more empathetic regarding mental conditions you personally don't experience.

I am bipolar, adhd, add, whatever. "Stop being depressed" definitely doesn't work, but I dont really believe descriping mind altering drugs is the solution either. Especially to little kids as they are doing these days.

There are better ways. Drugs only block the problem, but there are methods to overcome this dis-ease.

Believe me when I say I have been there. About 15 years depressed, always full of energy, but very difficult to concentrate it on any one thing. At some point self medicated for years with natural remedies, but ultimately only got addicted and had to let go of it completely, which vas very difficult and dont recommend to anyone.

Only thing truly that has helped me is meditation and yoga. Those two. They require no drugs, only discipline. Through this practice I am now able to focus, I am now able to relax, let go.

I believe ADHD is a condition which rises from the fact that our society and systems have become ever more complex, while our methods of working have not been adapted to this, and we are trying to cope with old methods of just "grunting it" through, when we need more of just letting go, relaxing, stopping and letting our systems be at ease.

Just to offer an alternative view on this condition, from someone who has suffered with this for the better part of my life and finally realized how to cope with it. It requires work, yes, but all good things in life do.

The medical companies know how easy it is just to sell some drugs and make a buck, and get people addicted.. so we are being bombed with false information also, which makes this very difficult, but I would recommend yoga & meditation & mindfulness to anybody who is suffering from this.

Re: There are too many shiny objects and it is killing me

#82

Post by iak8god »

scarygliders wrote: post #58

Forget what most here are saying about Adult ADHD, ADD or whatever fancy schmancy TLA is this era's Mental Illness Du Jour. You, my friend, are suffering from Procrastination. You have the idea - but you're putting SO MANY barriers in front of implementing that idea. You're finding excuses NOT to just sit down and write code. You're procrastinating. I know this because I too am guilty of it - been guilty of it all th…

Ctrl-f procrast

> You, my friend, are suffering from Procrastination.

1000X this. I recognized this immediately because I see the same pattern in my own behavior. OP starts out doing a bunch of things that will need to be done eventually for the project to succeed, but that are essentially a waste of time and other resources at the initial stage. OP does this (I do too!) because those steps are familiar, easy, and very well defined relative to actually working on the project. Actually making progress on a novel project falls outside our comfort zone. Stop procrastinating.

Re: There are too many shiny objects and it is killing me

#83

Post by singingfish »

ashark wrote: post #37
codecurve wrote: post #25

My GitHub profile is a wasteland of dead side projects and my Gandi account is full of .io domains that I never quite got round to using. I very much identify with this post and I don't know why it happens. When I'm at work I have no problem knuckling down and finishing a piece of software. However, in my free time, I'll come up with an idea, buy a domain, design a logo, create a repo, spin up a Digital Ocean instanc…

About 50% of my projects die in the following way: 1) I've got an idea for a useful library that might finally make my GitHub not look so lame! 2) Search github: (idea) language:(language) 3) Oh, there's the exact thing I was going to build. Never mind. Another 49% die this way: 1) It'd be so cool to have X! 2) (thinks about time to actually develop X versus real value it would give me and likelihood of anyone paying…

The thing I love most about the cpan is step 3. I don't tend to do steps 1 and 2 much because of that. However occasionally I find I get to step 3.5 - oh I need that and the maint has given up on it. Usually I chat to the original author and discover I don't need the feature. Rarely, I'll [steal maintenance](https://metacpan.org/pod/Plack::App::FakeApache) to get some of the features I need.

Re: There are too many shiny objects and it is killing me

#85

Post by slimetree »

slimetree wrote: post #7

Steve Jobs said something I think about a lot: "focus is about saying no." He was talking about what to work on in a company, but it extends without loss of generality to individuals. The world is presumably always going to be a fascinating one with an infinite supply of different ideas. Make a conscious effort to take what matters and go.

Wait, ack. I used that phrase wrong. I have nothing to say for myself.

Re: There are too many shiny objects and it is killing me

#87

Post by drivingmenuts »

I am slowly coming to the realization that there's only so much I can know or care about and maybe it's time to dig in on the things I know pretty well and put the rest aside for later. I'm starting to eval tools and languages with a view to how they help me now, not how useful they'll be in the future.

It's the only way for me to stay sane.

Re: There are too many shiny objects and it is killing me

#88

Post by slvr77 »

Lots of good advice in this thread but it seems you may have pushed your dopaminergic system into a bit of overdrive. Lots of novelty can leave lots of dopamine floating around your pre-frontal cortex which puts things on a hair trigger. It primes the brain for learning and has the side effects of making reaction times faster and unfortunately more spastic, which destroys fine motor skills like handwriting. It also lowers filters for novel stimulation which makes you more easily distracted. Longer term it will inhibit oxytocin release and make you less bonded to your social group, increase your tolerance for risk and has the side effect of making you feel that you don't measure up and need to prove yourself. If your ADHD drugs are dopamine agonists or partial agonists it likely would have made the problem worse.

Generally you may find yourself more productive if you break your day down into research, planning and implementation. During your planning phase you should limit yourself strictly to pencil and paper and remove computers, cell phones and other electronics. Use this time to design your product in your mind, break it up into sub-components and how they will interact. If you hit a wall due to a lack of knowledge you should work on it until you can write down a specific question that you can't answer and then address it in your next research cycle. Once you have something actionable only then do you move onto implementation and if you run into problems go back to planning.

I am going to warn you that the planning stage will be torture in the beginning! You will feel a huge need to 'get something done' because the lack of novelty will lower dopamine. It will be easier if you do your planning sessions in the morning when your brain has had some time to clear itself of excess dopamine overnight.

Some other supplements that will help clear out excess dopamine include SAM-e and/or TMG; melatonin at night; H2 blockers like Tagamet at night (the are antacids but raise prolactin levels), low dose lithium, avoiding blue light in the evening by using f.lux on your devices and/or blue blocking sunglasses and meditation. Usual caveats apply. I'm not a doctor, your results may vary.

Re: There are too many shiny objects and it is killing me

#90

Post by datashovel »

When reading the post, I had the impression that OP has never worked on a large project and seen what it's like to iterate on an existing project to improve it incrementally by working on the critical questions that may only make small changes to the overall app / project. Instead they're always thinking about and working on the large decisions (that are more or less inconsequential in the big picture) that you need to make when starting a project from scratch. I saw one comment about "fear of missing out". I think it's more along the lines of "fear of making the wrong decision and not knowing how to fix it". "Fear of the unknown" maybe. I think it's a useful exercise to think about and work on your early-stage execution (ie. figuring out how you'll prep things for a project, and learning about and understanding the implications of those decisions), but without any experience executing on the later stages of a project, it won't do any good.

There are generally alot of questions that need to be answered early on in a project, but once you've committed you just need to be confident that your skills to architect the project will be solid enough that they will keep you out of trouble, and the code will be modular enough that if you do spot big mistakes you can easily fix them within the existing architecture, avoiding the need for a complete (or large-scale) rewrite.

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