How I Run a Company with ADHD

Went through a bad spell last year. Got what I thought was the ideal contract: working from home on (non-game i.e. $$$) VR. Billing more in USD than I had ever billed in CAD. Working with genuinely nice people.

Couldn't make it work. Would get into loops of crunching all weekend to finish the work I'd committed to doing in the week. Became a shitty and irritable Dad due to work stress. Spent hours in loops like "This would be totally doable if I just started now ... but it hurts too much to stop thinking about what I'm interested right this minute ... but it's going to hurt later ... let's analyze all of the ways this is a repeat of my previous fuckups to see if I can figure my way out of this one ... and down the HOOOOOoooooooole"

Confounding factors: (1) trying to do school at the same time. (2) getting served with divorce papers when I thought I had come to terms with things. (3) Sleep apnea treated with CPAP. Impulsivity / exhaustion / obstacles at bedtime results in not using CPAP which results in greater distraction and higher impulsivity -> downward spiral for the week.

I learned a very valuable lesson, though.

You CANNOT fight procrastination by analysis. You MUST start the thing. There is no other solution. Any other choice is procrastination. Mantra: "You need to stop. What's your next action? What's your next action? ... " This seems obvious, but in the throes of an analysis / procrastination spiral it seems like maybe, just maybe you might be able to think your way out of this. NO.

I also started a new medication at the beginning of 2017 - generic Strattera. It didn't prevent these problems, but it has actually been a great help. There are side-effects, but I'm willing to accept them. I call it my "anti fuck-it" medication. It damps down impulsivity without reducing my creativity (impulsivity is the source of creativity). This is suprisingly multi-faceted. I am less likely to overeat (less likely to say I don't need more pie but fuck it!). I can do deeper search in strategy games or planning (less likely to look a few moves ahead, get befuddled, and say fuck it, I'll just do this random action). It also feels like I have another register of short-term memory, although this could be due to sleep, etc.

So ... don't rule out meds, but they're not a silver bullet. Also, the wrong meds can damage or kill you. I still have some interesting minor mental issues from Dexedrine a decade and a half ago. On it, I got paranoid and that almost killed me.

EDIT> One other tip: limit any online discussion to 1 reply. You get one reply, and that's it. Don't keep responding to a thread. It really doesn't matter, and is a huuuuuge time sink.

Yes, kids are difficult -- not to mention kids with ADHD! I often used to regret having kids, and still get anxious about taking care of them. And then all of a sudden I see pictures of their sweet faces, or imagine their laughter, and all is good in the world. My place is a shitty mess, because I've been doing physics/biology/machine learning/tennis instead of chores? It's okay. Let it go and just love them.

I'm separated and co-parenting and realized that I would freak out every Thursday because clearly my place is too shitty for the kids to arrive, and obviously I'm a terrible father. Once I could name the "Thursday freakout", it became a lot easier to manage and to reduce the intensity from wanting to bail on everyone to just laughing it off.

It gets easier (before it gets harder?, don't know yet.) A former colleague put it best -- the highs are higher, and the lows are lower. It's just no one really tells you how low the lows can be.

These articles and posts confuse me. Aren't most people dealing with these problems?

> and am supposed to be doing a site today, check my comment history for how well that's going

I burst into laughter when I read this, holy shit if I'm not doing the exact same thing right now. You could probably graph my mood by HN comments frequency.

I'll never understand how we name things. It's weird to have "Hyperactive" in the umbrella term when only two of the three categories have it as a trait.