551–560 of 634 posts
I have ADHD, and my daughter was recently diagnosed as well. Been reflecting on this post as it's been soaking up the front page for the last 24 hours. I want to commend you for shipping maybe the perfect HN post: - Personal Journey - Old school hardware - DIY software - Productivity hack - Great title - Quantified results (2-3x productivity) over non-trivial duration (few months) - A low-effort offline solution that…
I was diagnosed with ADHD at 38, and never expected to hear that diagnosis. Main reason was my misunderstanding of what ADHD is. Like most people, I just naively associated ADHD with hyperactive kids, and thought I was just lazy and having procrastination issues. Now that I understand it so much better, I start to recognise it everywhere. After reading first paragraph of the article, I immediately though: Laurie must…
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Thank you for your comment. Seeing the tickets in the jar really helps you feel like you actually got something done. I cannot wait for you to try my app :)
One comment: You're dopamine hacking. My belief is that eventually the process will stop rewarding you with dopamine, and you'll drop it. Games eventually stop rewarding you with dopamine, and your brain loses interest in them. Same goes for the jar. ADHD brain needs to keep changing the process, in order to keep the reward novel. What works today won't work in six weeks. (With me it was tearing the index card in hal…
Can we just not? Can we wean ourselves from the "addiction" instead?
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> If it is important, you will remember it at some point during the day. As someone with ADHD I’ve never found this to be true. I often forget to eat. I’d forget to file my taxes without reminders.
Serious question: in those scenarios, do you never have awareness about your need to eat? Or does it occur at some point, but then you decide not to eat at the moment, and after making that decision then you never revisit it? I ask because I often realize I'm hungry or it's time to eat, but I'm too engaged in the task I'm doing and I think "I'll eat a bit later" and then once I've done that the first time I often nev…
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> procrastination happens even when they actively don't want to procrastinate, and even when it hurts them right now to procrastinate. That applies to just about everyone. It’s why there are countless books and articles on defeating procrastination.
No, most people have never found themselves staring at a pile of unpaid bills and collection notices, while knowing there's work they should be doing that would pay those bills...and feeling physically and mentally incapable of starting that work. Not "I don't wanna" or "I'd rather play games right now," but "I know I should do that, I know it would make my life better and I want that so bad...but I just can't." It's…
I had never experienced this exact scenario before my thirties but I ran into an exceptionally busy period in my life where I found myself overwhelmed with tasks and accidentally ignored my credit cards for a couple months. I eventually realized this, but I put it off for at least another month, even though every other day I was thinking about it and I wanted to solve the problem, knowing it was an easy problem to fix and that I had the time to solve it despite being busy. The reason I didn't was because of fear, the dread of the unknown (how bad were the overage charges going to be?) but also a fear of being faced with such an obvious failure, even though objectively I knew the loss would be trivial.
I think this drives most forms of procrastination, certainly everyone I've talked to about it (parents, friends, coworkers) describe it in similar words, comparing it to the anticipation of touching a hot stove, etc.
My biggest concern (besides "following through with this? hollow laugh") is when you're not always working in the same place - either hybrid or going to customer sites.
Then for non-recurring areas like job-tasks, I use a separate tool with a simple Kanban board. Prior to Kanban, I used to just track time, and write a list of things I did for the day, but I realized there was no feedback and it was just a passive "I did this stuff".
So coming from that, a Kanban board has been god-sent. Because otherwise Parkinson's Law was a common occurrence for me. Each task in the board is somewhat tied to a project/outcome through a tag. So there is a feedback/working-backwards/active concept to it. I have just started using it, but the more I use it, the more I automatically learn how to set better tasks, because otherwise they do not go from TODO -> DOING -> DONE.
A while ago, I tried writing tasks on sticky notes at home and crumpling them up to toss in the trash once they were done. It felt pretty satisfying at first, but writing each note took too much time, and I eventually gave up. Now that I’ve seen the idea of using a thermal printer to print out little task tickets, it instantly feels like a much easier system. I’m planning to get one next week and see if it actually h…
Accumulate enough of those and you start finding yourself writing more notes than you are crumpling them and can get demoralized pretty quickly every time you look at the board.