Launch HN: Shimmer (YC S21) – ADHD coaching for adults

I'll try and describe one briefly: I use a free app called Virtual Motivaider[1] to make my phone vibrate every 2 to 6 minutes. I'll print a sheet[2] that has a table with two columns. Every row is the same: the first column has the text "Am I on Task?" and the second column has two check boxes, "[ ] Yes [ ] No". When I start a task that I typically struggle to hold my attention to, I start the app, and when I feel the vibration, I check off if I was on task or not. I picked the 2 to 6 minutes interval arbitrarily; there could be many other intervals that work just as well. There's also probably other apps out there that just vibrate at a user-set interval.

This has worked extremely well for me. It seems that just recording a behavior can increase it or decrease it in the direction that you want.

I learned about this from a textbook called "Applied Behavior Analysis" by Cooper et al, in a chapter titled "Self-Management". If my technique (technically known as "self-monitoring of attention" or "self-monitoring of on task behavior") sounds interesting, I would recommend finding a pdf of that book and reading that chapter. It has some vocabulary that's defined earlier in the book, so you can just look them up in the index or glossary as you read. The book and the field it hails from can be annoyingly dogmatic, though.

I'll stop talking about it for now, but I do like to share this whenever adult ADHD comes up because its helped me dramatically, and much more so than any professionally-run special education program I was in or popular psychology book about habits or getting things done. OP, I haven't looked at your app or page too deeply so maybe you're already doing something like this or other behavioral techniques, but if you're not, it might be worth checking out.

[1] The company that made Virtual Motivaider also sells (well, they stopped producing them because of COVID difficulties, but they're currently trying to get them back) a physical product called Motivaider. It looks like a digital kitchen timer but it just does the same thing as the app. I bought one after using the app for some time, and while the app worked very well, the physical product has some nice benefits, like a very distinct and quiet vibration, and a lot less friction to start a new session.

[2] Printing out new sheets for each task, or printing out a lot and then having to get one for each task, turned out to be pretty inconvenient, so I've since compressed the table into a 2 row by 15 column one, where in the first column the first row has a "Y" and the second one has an "N". The rest of the columns are for putting an x in the Y or N row. I fit 6 of these in a 6 x 9 inch document, made a pdf of 100 of these pages, then used a print on demand service to print a spiral bound book of it, which I carry with me between work and home. This has eliminated a ton of friction and I've ended up using this technique much more often.

Yes. Well, not really snake-oil, but this spaces is definitely associated with low-effort pill mills and broken marketing promises.

Therapy is hard. Doing it at scale is nearly impossible. Doing it at scale at a price point consumers expect is literally impossible. As a result, you end up with a bunch of "mental health" "tech" companies that are making big promises, but essentially just putting their patients through checkboxes.

These ADHD coaching services come up a lot, and this is the general advice I give out:

Always start with your insurance options first. Many people are surprised to learn that they can get therapy (for ADHD or otherwise) for as little as $10-20 per session through their normal health insurance. Telehealth has been normalized, too, so it's likely you can do it from home.

Always check insurance first to evaluate costs. Consider how deductibles play out through the course of the year, too. This coaching service is a lot to pay out of pocket relative to what many people in tech would expect to pay with insurance involved.