Procrastination and the fear of not being good enough

My tricks for beating procrastination are:

1) Give yourself permission to do bad work.

If you're stuck, just start writing whatever junk is in your head. Make it hilariously bad! Write like a total idiot.

But often that alone is enough to unstick you. Having very rough work is infinitely better than staring at a blank page.

2) Procrastinate "a little bit"

Rebrand some procrastination as manageable short breaks, stop beating yourself up, and take control back from your rebellious subconscious. That way, you're working with yourself, not against it.

3) Always be asking yourself, "What's the smallest thing I can do RIGHT now?" and doing it.

E.g. you might not know how to write a full paper, but you can write down all your random ideas on a sheet of paper. Do that. Then once you're done with that, the next step might be writing an outline. Then, expanding each outline into a short paragraph...

But don't think that far ahead, just do the smallest thing now!

You... what? You can't be serious. Simply putting "exercise and adhd" into Google® got me multiple studies which say that exercise helps, along with many other websites (some reputable and others possibly not) all saying essentially the same thing. You can easily find licensed physicians giving this same advice to their patients, and they observe that it works. And, off the top of my head, exercising elevates dopamine and some other neurotransmitters, which are well-known to be deficient in people with ADHD. That's one of the reasons the drugs work: stimulants raise the levels of those neurotransmitters. Personally speaking, I've found that any activity or action that raises my dopamine level has the same effect on my executive function as a stimulant drug, although this can be a very short-lived improvement (worst case, it comes and goes entirely within ~5 minutes).

You may also consider this from an evolutionary angle. Mammals such as us are not meant to sit inside at a desk all day (whether that's school or any other menial work), so it's no surprize that doing that alters and impairs development versus the conditions we evolved to live in. It's really easy to encounter the biological equivalent of undefined behaviors and invalid state in modernity. If you don't know what I mean, here's an easier to see example: It's well-known in recent years that myopia (shortsightedness) is predominantly caused by insufficient exposure to sunlight as a child. As an aside, I find it very interesting that the reason sunlight exposure matters is it elevates dopamine in the retinas, and eyes with dopamine deficiency don't develop correctly.

Another angle is mental exercize: It's more difficult to physically exercize with ADHD, but it's possible, so mentally pushing past the difficulty (or, more likely, having someone encourage you and help you) can train you to do that with other things and teach you how to self-manage your symptoms with mental decisions / willpower. This is a pretty poor solution on its own, but it's a great force multiplier when combined with other strategies.

I have suffered from this myself. The only way forward to your point is to take action and not worry about the outcome or how others perceive it. I write now to share, document and also to make myself accountable

Something related to this that I've been thinking about. We all have kind of a story of ourselves and our life through various memories that make a picture of who we are. But if you ever meet up with someone you haven't seen for 20 years, or find some old documents, or whatever, stuff can easily come up that you've completely forgotten, or reframe things in a whole different light.

We know this kind of thing happens with history - certain people become famous while others drift into obscurity, things get remembered incorrectly etc - but it also happens with your own memory of your own life. The only real way around it is keeping a journal.

Love the overall message, and you’ve obv got the HackerCreds to back it up, but I’ll throw an obligatory “what does it mean to force oneself to do something?” IMHO the idea that you can ‘force’ yourself to do things puts a moral/normative element in the discussion that does more harm than good. It makes one feel like they somehow chose failure, when it inevitably arrives.

We all agree that are limits to self control, otherwise people would force themselves to work all the time, or not be depressed/anxious, or snap out of ADHD - or, hell, not to feel grief. “Encouraging”, “welcoming”, and “promoting” the defeat of perfectionism-based procrastination seems more helpful in the aggregate, IMHO