The silent struggles of workers with ADHD

Wishing your brother the best.

Every single one of those books hit a point where they stopped being something I could read. I don't know why. The subject still interests me and there's more to learn. I know I should finish them, I consciously want to finish them. And every time I think about sitting down to finish them, my mind will come up with a thousand other things for me to do instead. And it's not just all "interesting" vs "not interesting". My mind will decide that cleaning the dishes, filling up the car or sorting through and deleting all the emails older than 7 years is something more important than finishing any of those books. I assure you the topics of those books are vastly more interesting to me than any of those chores. But for some reason my lizard brain has ranked reading and finishing those books below even the chores.

I finished one such book in the last 10 years of my career, and I only did that because I made finishing it part of a annual goal / metric. And even then it took until the last month of the year and I had to dedicate a fixed time every single day where I forced myself to sit down and read a fixed number of pages no matter what.

That's more than just "can't concentrate on boring things". Those topics aren't boring. Reading isn't boring. The chores my head will convince me to do before reading those books are more boring. And yet those books will remain unread, at least for years, and if past performance is indicative of future behavior, for the rest of my life, because it's impossible for me to sustain the amount of focus and sheer determination it would take to finish those books they way I finished one. Unless and until my brain moves them up the "importance" list, they will forever remain yet another thing I've started and never finished.

And it's not just a "maybe you just find reading non-fiction really boring", it happens with other forms of media content. John Winans (John's Basement on YouTube) has a series he's been doing on building a Z80 computer from the board design up. Massively interesting stuff to me, a subject that I've always found fascinating, having grown up after the home brew computer generation and never having gone into hardware even though I really want to know more about it. The original video dropped over a year ago, and at first I was following with each new video and then one day my head decided this was no longer a priority. He's made 54 videos so far and I've made it through 22 of them. I have a tab with the playlist open. That tab has been open since last year, and the last one I watched was 2 months ago, before that it had been another 3 months and 3 more before that. When I finished the last video, I wondered why it had taken me so long, I was really enjoying it. And then I have't been able to get my head to want to start the next one. I've watched multiples of hours since of other videos. I've had days when I was bored or sick and just watching whatever dumb content caught my eye. The list was there there the whole time, and I never could get myself to keep going. Again, I can't explain why, there's nothing boring about the videos, they're certainly more engaging than a lot of content I've watched since I watched the last one. But the list sits there, more videos get added, and the longer I go, the more the act of watching the video feels like an insurmountable boring chore that will take everything I have to sit down and do, even if I know I'll enjoy the content the entire time.

I've mentioned here before I started ADHD meds for myself after the pandemic started. That was the fist time in decades of living that I had ever been able to think about something I wanted to get done, decide I was going to do it and then do it without going through a process of fighting myself into it. It's probably the only reason I've watched the 3-4 videos I did manage after my brain decided they weren't a priority any more.

And all of that self struggle and fighting is for things that I don't consciously think are dull or boring. It's worse for things I do. Imagine a task that you have to physically and mentally psych yourself up for. Maybe it's going to the doctor for a physical, maybe it's visiting family on holidays because they're party green and you're party yellow, maybe you're trying to get in shape and it's going to gym or waking up at 5 AM to go for a run. Call this your big hurdle. Now think of all the things in your daily life that are "boring". Making food, washing dishes, putting them away, washing laundry, putting that away, filling out TPS reports, documenting changes, making appointments, cleaning rooms, paying bills. Imagine that the same effort and energy you have to put into your hurdle also has to go into any mundane "boring" task that isn't in the top 3 things you'd rather be doing right this moment. That's so much more than "can't concentrate on boring things", and so much more exhausting.

I continued to forget to turn in assignments. Why did I forget them? Because I forgot to check my book to see if I had any assignments to turn in, in addition to forgetting I had it and it was in my bag. I continued to get in trouble for forgetting to do assignments. Why did I forget them? Because I would forget to write them in my book, or I would forget to write down when they were due, or I'd forget to even check the book in the first place, or I would forget the book at home, or in the last class. Or I would forget my pen and not have anything to write in the book with and then forget what I was looking for a pen for by the time I got a new one.

Don't get me wrong. I still use books, post it notes and organizational tools to help me in my profession. Bug trackers are a god send for me. But so is the fact that Slack archives every discussion I have, and gmail never forgets anything no matter how much you wish it would. And that's important because I still often forget to write something in a todo list, or the bug tracker. I've trained myself to check 5-10 different sources of "tasks" before I consider something done because I don't remember where I put everything, and I never remember to put everything in one place. Even with all of that, there are still things I'll forget from time to time.

Do you remember old clip art CDs and galleries? They all used to have a clip art of a finger with a string tied around it. That's clip art for a "reminder". I never understood how that was supposed to work, because if I ever tied a string around my finger to remind me about something, I'd be lucky if I remembered the string was there at all, let alone what it was supposed to remind me about. Tools are often just one more thing to try and remember.