Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

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I have ADHD, so this is a constant struggle.

Make sure the thing you have to do is something you want to do. While you can procrastinate on the things you're truly interested in, ultimately you're more likely to follow through with the things that interest you than the other random tasks that require doing.

Writing that design doc, report, or review at work? Meh. I drag my feet until I'm the last person in the office and I have to finish.

That obscure side project that really interests me? Hell yeah. It's called hyper-focus, and those with ADHD know what it's like.

Check out my Github streak. I think I've got the world's fastest faster-than-realtime CPU-only neural TTS and Voice Conversion (VC) systems with multi-speaker embeddings outside of Google. And I wrote an entire data ingestion, cleanup, and curation engine to build massive data sets for training. A year ago I didn't even know what any of this stuff was, and now I can't pull myself away from it. Building is magnetic and addictive, but it's not the thing I need to do.

Sometimes you can pivot the energy you have from a desirable task into an undesirable one. I tell myself I can't work on the fun thing until I get the mundane one done. It's a hack that doesn't always work.

I want to structure my life around things I want to do to the exclusion of all else. I think I'm starting to get there. I've trimmed a lot of unnecessary things from my life.

My dream is to get rich enough doing desirable side hustles that I can pay people to take care of all the undesirable tasks. Delegation to achieve efficiency.

I can work like there is no tomorrow on random side projects. I just wish I could redirect all that focus and energy at will into the areas that need them.

I can't. So I have to become what interests me.

>Sometimes you can pivot the energy you have from a desirable task into an undesirable one. I tell myself I can't work on the fun thing until I get the mundane one done. It's a hack that doesn't always work.

It can even backfire: sometimes you end up just browsing reddit or doing some other nonsense thing for hours just so you can avoid doing the mundane task. At the end of the day you wonder how you wasted an entire day without doing the fun side project or the mundane task.

>My dream is to get rich enough doing desirable side hustles that I can pay people to take care of all the undesirable tasks.

Hiring somebody to do the cleaning at home seems to help quite a few people. People in tech probably earn enough to be able to afford to just hire someone to clean the apartment/house once in a while. It's probably a better option than to either hate yourself for it or to just not clean for a long period of time.

I don't have an ADHD diagnosis, but I struggle with procrastination.

Does it help you at all to have external recipients of your work, or does it not factor in at all in what gets done?

It helps me if I tell someone else "I'll send you the report today", because it makes me more accountable. I'll probably delay it until panicking at the end of the day, but I will at least hammer something out and send it off. Or worst case finish it tomorrow morning, after having started, but having to leave work the day before, which is still better than postponing even longer.

For me to do tasks, I need to reach the "Screw quality and completeness, I need to send _something_!", which usually turns out to be plenty good enough based on feedback. I just need to find someone to promise sending the result to for my more important tasks.

Not OP, but.

It helps, because eventually people will start to call you and inquire about the thing you promised them. This of course causes anxiety.

Eventually, after spending enormous amounts of energy on riding that guilt wave some work gets done, typically at night.

This does have a downside. Sometimes you associate that anxiety and negative feelings with the person that would inquire about it. This can make you just want to avoid them as much as possible, even if it costs you elsewhere.

Very important insight, yes that happens.

Basically all things ADHD has are downsides.

"Typically at night" made me smile :-)

So true.

Your post resonates with me greatly - often I'll find myself making up _new_ side projects to take the place of the things that actually need to get done.

How do you push yourself to get the right things done now, that is, until you get rich enough to do otherwise?

I wish we could switch. I had the same maker drive but something changed in me as I've gotten older and now I struggle with tasks. I could easily spend the rest of my life writing/reporting/reviewing/etc and never get any actual work done ever again. I know, it's crazy.

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