Professionally: I did very well in high school and then came very close to failing out of college. I am in my thirties and I have had many jobs. My average time on a job is less than 6 months. New jobs start well. Everything is novel and new and this drives concentration. After a while this wears off and I cannot keep on a task. I generally fall behind and feel ashamed about my performance. When this is finally noticed and I am reprimanded I quit the job. Even the gentlest reprimand feels utterly unbearable (emotional disregulation is a big part of ADHD for me.)
Socially I feel like I basically do ok. Often I blurt things out that I shouldn't but people are usually reasonably forgiving and I have good friends. I struggle with romantic relationships because after the initial novelty wears off there's often not much there.
I have to-do lists, timers, systems etc. These help but aren't a silver bullet. A list won't help you it takes you 12 hours of procrastination to complete a 5 minute task.
I have tried concerta for treatment. I couldn't really tell if it helped. Maybe, maybe not. I experience some fairly bad side effects and it is quite pricey so I decided to not continue with it after a few months.
I know exactly what to do to change though. I know that the most important pillars are diet, physical activity and good sleep, I own all the right books, I take all the right supplements, I intellectually understand you have to break tasks down to their smallest step in order to reduce activation energy and I know about the compound-effect...and still I can't do it or build a good habit.
I tried many approaches: extensive to-do lists, pomodori, journaling, gamification, tough love, self-love, meditation. Nothing seems to help. Even if I manage to do something positive for a few weeks, I eventually "slip up" and I don't even notice for a few days how I haven't been running in the morning or how I haven't been drinking enough water during the day.
I've been trying to get an official ADHD diagnosis (and perhaps medication down the line) for more than a year now but the process gets delayed and dragged out time and time again, so much that I suspect that the mental healthcare department tasked with giving out ADHD diagnoses must be staffed with fellow ADHDers. It's especially frustrating to read on the internet how some people seem to get a diagnosis and medication within weeks while I'm losing more and more lifetime.
My life sucks. I'm unemployed and burning through my savings at an insane speed, only running on fumes now. But I just can't get myself to look for a job or a healthy social life when everything else seems so much more interesting. The impulsiveness has stopped being charming to people a long time ago. A number of them have been separating from me or actively removing me from their lives over me "going nowhere in life" or being an "energy vampire".
I solved the doctor issue by unofficial ways. I would be on the street now if I didn't (as I was living in my car when I began). Keep trying to get a doctor, medication really helps - though I need oversight, I would snort it all at once without my girlfriend by my side... Don't go the medication way if you don't have a doctor or a partner to help you.
If I find a way to selectively apply the hyperfocus to useful tasks that might work. So far, my experiments with gig-based work from places like Upwork were rather discouraging. I always worked customer-facing roles, unfortunately I never managed to learn coding beyond absolute beginner level (Python, C++) but I'm pretty good at engrossing myself chasing down rabbit holes for information.
Finding work that combined this trait with a purpose, would surely be my Ikigai[1]. Perhaps something like an Analyst position. But as a college dropout with a spotty resume like mine that's probably not going to happen.
I often also wonder if ADHDers would perhaps do well in short-term emergency response roles (IT or business).
I’ve tried medication as an adult. It doesn’t fix all my problems but helps me get started doing things I don’t particularly want to do.
Unsure of your insurance situation. I’ve identified two paths:
1. Specialized ADHD care
2. Generalized psychiatry/medication
I went with #2 as #1 seemed to require several thousand dollars upfront, and potential insurance gymnastics which I doubt my ability to follow through on.
With #2, a shotgun approach to finding care is effective. Some practitioners are not accepting new patients. Try a bunch. Psychiatrists aren’t the only ones who can prescribe medication. If you have a PCP they can also prescribe it. There are also nurse practitioners.
#1 may be better long-term. Haven’t explored this further.
I had a good laugh imagining pouring eggs on an old-school electric stove.
My childhood was very unhappy.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27063872
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27076941
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I prefer to split tasks into two types.
Marathons. So if I'm not over-tired and I've had my morning coffee, and a good night's sleep, I will do a marathon session of 4-5 hours of solid work, no interruptions apart from social media feeds where I need to know what's going on in the world so I have context for what I'm working on. (If Github's down for example, I need to know that).
Sprints. These are smaller tasks that take 5-10 minutes, but I treat them as micro-habits that compound over time, or in other words; many-littles-make-a-lot and the desired outcome reveals itself over longer periods of time.
It's good to know which mode you're in, because with ADHD, you need to pre-allocate time-frames to the important things and know when you're in sprint-mode vs marathon-mode. Some people mix them up and end up doing 4-5 hours on something that should be a 5-10 min sprint, and needs to be incrementally improved on over a long duration (we're talking months or years of progress here).
What I believe doesn't get talked about as much is the emotional dysregulation component. I alternate between hypersensitive and feeling nothing, even about the same situation. I struggle keeping long term relationships because I'm addicted to the initial excitement, but when it slows down I get bored. I'm single where most of my friends are now in long term committed relationships. I don't blame this entirely on the ADHD, but I don't think it helps.
Each time I context switch between the areas, I recount 1) What issues I have in the area and 2) What handful strategies of strategies should I be actively using while I am 'in that area'
With this it's been helpful to divide & conquer, e.g. "these ~5 things help with work life, these ~5 things help personal life" as opposed to trying to adhere to a long list at all times.
At the very least, it seems more manageable to approach slide back events (slippery slope of poor inhibition) as isolated to just one of the 'problem areas'
But before that, I've been fired from more jobs than most people have even applied for.
Socially, I'm a blurter and an interrupter. This is also somewhat cultural. It rubs some people the wrong way.
At first, partners or co-workers found this quirky but it got old fast and leads to frequent arguments.