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There are too many shiny objects and it is killing me

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151–160 of 198 posts

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

#151

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…

Scarygliders is totally right! Indeed, forget about that fancy shmancy ADD, or all that bullshit the big pharma wants you to believe in like diabetes, heart disease, thyroid-affecting diseases, schizophrenia and cancer! No such thing! Just try harder and stop procrastinating and if you can't just go and off yourself, you loser.

Works for me!!!

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

#152
post #129

It sounds like you are a right brain dominant person[1] with a Myers-Briggs personality of INTJ [2], same as me. Once I understood this about myself I was able to start bringing my life into balance. Part of it was by doing left-brained exercises that Dianne Craft teaches in her videos, also a large part was using essential oils to wake up my left brain which was pretty much in the deep freeze, and finally a few esse…

Are people still doing Myers-Briggs?[1] I had a job interview for a CTO job for a large multinational once, and when I got to the final 3 candidates round, had to take one of these. I had a very good idea what they were looking for, and aced it. The lady doing the testing told me I was a perfect match and would advise as such. I let her know these tests are easily fooled, something she seriously disagreed with. So I did a few more for her, getting every result she asked for nearly perfectly. She started babbling about this being impossible, and it being unique etc. I told her I am just good at bullshitting people. Oh, and I was offered the job (declined it in the end).

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indic...

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

#153
post #16

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 agree. I wasn't like this before. Now I have no more backbone, no discipline.

Consider this: you mentioned a history of depression. Depression doesn't have to be at the level of a major depression to affect your functioning. And moderate chronic depression will certainly affect your focus. I hope I'm wrong, but you should really go and talk to a good psychiatrist/psychologist and see what kind of help you can get and whatever else you might be dealing with. And don't imagine that it means that you're fucked up in some kind of way: last year 13% of Canadians sought services of mental health professionals. That doesn't include those that aren't getting help for their conditions.

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

#155
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "...I think of them 6 months after someone else already had the idea :-/" So true. That's why one of my first steps is to Google my idea. If I can't find a viable competitor, then I move on to the design phase.

Ever think you're doing it wrong? An established competitor guarantees there's a market. You'll just have to do it better than they do.

And odds are, if there is just one player in the market they're not very good. Simply by virtue of being the only one; the odds of that being the case simply because they are amazing and perfect is so miniscule. It's most likely that no one has bothered, or had the effort to out-do them.

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

#156

Sounds all to familiar. I discussed and still discuss this problem with my peers offline a lot, and thought about creating (haha, new project there) a platform where people with this exact problem can pair up and in a way play supervisor for someone else. The point is that my procrastination immediately stops if i make a commitment to someone else: if i promise a friend to deliver xy, I do. Social pressure seems to b…

We need a support group

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

#157
post #82

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 ve…

In my first startup we came up with a cure for this: "Get to the problem"

Don't solve for problems you don't yet have. Solve for immediate problems first.

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

#158
Really awesome story, I can relate. One thing I learned after the umpteenth time falling in the pit of picking a technology: do it in PHP, it's fast, I'm good at it. It's going to invariably be the wrong choice, which will become apparent at some point in the future, but in the early stages of a project speed is the most important thing. Your technology is a tool to create the product, not the other way around.

One more thing, you should spend more time defining the product/business before you begin implementing or even thinking about technology. Bounce the idea off of smart people, use usertesting.com (I'm not affiliated with these guys but I use them a lot) and do market research. You don't want to realize that your idea sucks after a few weeks of development because you'll be discouraged from fixing it at that point.

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

#159

Something you can start doing right now: exercise and take non-computer breaks. Even 30 minutes of walking around will sharpen your focus. 20 minutes on an elliptical will be even better. There's ample clinical evidence on how exercise is really helpful with focus and mood. Then, importantly: don't just "talk your doctor into giving you ADD drugs". Go find a good psychiatrist, or at least, a psychiatrist who will giv…

> Go find a good psychiatrist, ... who will give you a proper ADHD assessment and with whom you can work on medication if needed. ...

As one who does the assessing, I'd endorse your advice. It is of utmost importance to rule out concurrent conditions, but it's a fact that "comorbidity is the rule, not the exception". These other conditions like depression, anxiety, sleep disorders, etc., need to be addressed to really solve the problems.

> ADHD assessment takes at least few hours ...

That's actually an understatement. It may take weeks, months, even years to adequately understand a person's experience and the nature of dysfunction. In this clinical context, there aren't simple tests that reveal the subtleties involved in human behavior, thought and emotion. It requires careful observation, and collaborative communication between the healer and the sufferer to accomplish the task.

It's kind of like software development, an incremental process filled with tweaking parameters and testing the result. Usually over time we arrive at a stable and satisfactory working solution, but we'd never pretend it's an "answer", certainly not one that is "permanent".

Finally, I look at medication therapy as a tool to achieve a goal. Tools are wonderful and interesting artifacts in their own right, but useful only to the extent we employ them skillfully toward achieving a defined purpose.

By themselves medications will not solve the problem, there are many things the patient must practice and learn in order to get better. This is essentially what you said and I think it is spot on.

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

#160
post #88

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 l…

Have you any references you can share for further info / to back this up?
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