Hacking ADHD: Strategies for the modern developer

The way I work is being driven by obsessions. I have strong hyperfixation and hyperfocus tendencies that I can't control. If there is something interesting that captivates me, I will do it continuously for hours, days and even weeks. Sometimes I seemingly lose all interest for no reason and have a hard time picking it up again. When the hyperfocus hits, it feels amazingly euphoric and "zen". It's the same feeling you get when you're watching a video and just become a zombie starting at the screen, purely consuming the content without any other thought, and when it ends, you're left with this dreadful feeling of coming back to your pitiful existence.

My mind is always preoccupied. I have a constant inner monologue. Whenever I tend to be in a waiting room I just stare at the wall and start imagining conversations and situations and start talking to myself about various topics. My mind always makes connections between so many different topics, I can never keep a straight line of thought. One subject will bring another and another. A constant web of thoughts. I tend to have very long-winded (up to 5 continious hours or more) conversations with friends that leave me sweaty and exhausted.

I've heard that ADHD helps a lot with introspection, self-reflection. While the constant noise and urge to be active feels debilitating, I've had some pretty interesting and life-changing conversations with myself that a lot of people don't often experience without anyone else present. Although it balances out with the constant anxiety.

When it comes to entertainment, I'm always a binge-reader, binge-watcher and binge-player. Visual novels have probably kept my attention the most and I must have spent entire days reading them.

When it comes to doing my work, it's a weird dance. I must have the impression that the task is easy, and the steps are obvious. That often is not the case, but the situation gets me in a zen state where I combat the problem until I come to a reasonable situation that passes one way or another. If I know it's going to be hard, I can't even start without having a panic attack. You can feel it in your stomach. Your mind starts to blank out. Your vision gets blurry. It's the sort of feeling when you see something that makes you really ill. For some people that's a dead body, for me it's medical descriptions.

Even saying all of that, I still doubt that's how I really function. Looking from the outside, I just get the urge to do something, and I act on that urge. That's all. Whatever it be. It will take all my focus, and all of my energy, and you won't be able to get me out of that focus state. I will keep thinking about it until I either get to sleep or something snaps me hard out of it, and that severely decreases my motivation. Relying on instinct and acting on my obsessions was the only thing that helped me, either directly or indirectly. Otherwise I can't manage.

Medication has immensely helped me control my focus and help me take breaks, but not even that stops me from acting sometimes. I've seen a few comments here mention body doubling, this has also helped me a lot, services like FocusMate are amazing and I can't praise them enough, so simple, yet so effective, and my anxiety really pushes its effectiveness further.

Yes, I am currently hyperfocusing on writing this, if you couldn't tell by the several paragraphs of text and over-sharing. I have a task to write an article about my ADHD, yet it's still sitting there, because posts like these are the only things that get me to write about it.

I tried getting diagnosed and medicated and I was scheduled an appointment with a horrible psychiatrist that dismissed all of my problems and said I couldn't have ADHD if I could recite the days of the week backwards and sit still. The horrible things I felt after that still haunt me to this day and it occasionally slips into my mind and makes me sick. It is an extremely embarrassing thing to share, but a previous comment mentioning this told me that it's alright, and it's a reasonable traumatic response.

Writing about how I dealt with school would be just repeating what others have said. Deadlines never had any effect on me, I would always do things on the last day or few days, and I had an extremely difficult time with math because I how I mostly think is by making connections between previous information, which I find hard to do with math, that requires pure reasoning and logic.

I don't like breaking down tasks. I don't want to plan anything. The only reasonable way I get work done is by bashing away, being pissed off it doesn't work as I expect, and keep working hours non-stop until I get to a reasonable state. The less I know, the better. Unfortunately, that doesn't work for most of the time, especially for big projects. All the things people use as crutches make me ill. I have never planned my day. I go with the flow. The only "productivity tools" I've ever used is the reminder and a simple task list just to keep track of interesting goodies I might pursue. I have a horrible working memory and externalize an immense amount of information and keep it in notes format. I am a RABID fan of Zettelkasten and preach it like the second coming of Jesus Christ.

N=1, I sleep better on stimulants than off them. No problem falling asleep after drinking coffee (usually it makes me more sleepy), or even taking a prescribed stimulant before going to bed.

It is mentioned at the bottom of the post that the images are generated by OpenAI‘s DALL-E.

This isn’t accurate. Holding down a job is not a criteria because people learn to compensate.

But those compensation mechanisms eventually stop working and I guarantee that persons life outside of their job is a complete dumpster fire.

Is ADHD a real thing? I see too many SV engineers diagnosed with ADHD to the point that it feels like a large scam run by psychiatrists that they lowered the threshold of the actual ADHD.