As someone with ADHD and memory issues, your comment is what I hope my future looks like. Would you mind expanding on how you're able to work through ADHD symptoms, motivation issues and such?
- Learning CBT from a book with the help of a therapist to guide me. https://www.amazon.com/Feeling-Good-Handbook-David-Burns/dp/... The core of it is in the first few chapters. Never read the later ones once I got the concept.
- Learning how to have realistic expectations about what I can do day after day.
- Prioritize self-care and optimize for long-term performance over short term success. This includes going to bed earlier than I want. :(
- Working with my manager to have the proper accommodations. In my case, strict 40-hour work week, no work interruptions outside of that, and time off as needed.
I’ve needed accommodations less since things have evened out, but I’ll never be able to do on-call.
Any time I get too distracted and drift off there's someone to nudge me back into focus. Occassionally I'll have to apologise and just say, "Sorry I didn't catch any of that" which sometimes takes a lot of understanding on their part to not be offended.
There are some days where I struggle to explain things which is very frustrating especially for architecture type issues. I also struggle to actually build anything from scratch, and definitely have a brain more wired for destruction than creation.
Secondly, you need to find an understanding workplace. The best places I've worked have been understanding of the fact that some weeks they'll get less out of me than a freshly hired junior because other weeks I'll do some very good work.
It helps if you can have a niche, and helps if you can start off making a good impression. For me that niche is more of a bug finding and security focus. On weeks I'm feeling very motivated I can spend my extra energy being useful finding security holes and general bugs. Good managers will see the value from that.
If you tasked me with writing even the most basic "todo list" web-app from scratch you'd probably find me after a week deep in analysis paralysis still deciding between frameworks having not written a thing, but give me the simplest "todo list" web app even one that's too simple to have bugs I'll have found something wrong with it before the day is out.
But everyone is wired differently, so your niche might be the building side. Just work out from experience what your strengths are and lean heavily into them, or at least strong enough to get a reputation than you're good at your job, but not so heavily you get pigeon-holed in a role.
And if it's just not working for you, don't be scared to just quit and find somewhere else. There are good and bad workplaces, and a surprising amount of advice is from people who have only ever worked 1 or 2 jobs at most so don't actually necessarily have the experience of different workplaces to be able to back up some of their assertions so take all advice with a pinch of salt and work out what works best for you.
Motivation- you need to actually align your tasks with an actual concrete personal goal or sense of accomplishment. And be invested in the work. Lacking that, you'll be dependent on external stressors to get anything done, which will reflect poorly on you if it gets to that.
One of my issues with motivation is what you mentioned: I really really struggle to get invested. Things that are "work" seem to live in an anti-motivation bucket, regardless of how organically interesting they may be to me outside of a work contest. I'm in my 30s now, and I've been doing this my whole life and it is killing me. It takes a tremendous amount of effort and an extremely imminent deadline to get me to start anything. This (ostensibly) runs completely contrary to my self-concept and value system, but the motivation problem permeates every fucking inch of my life, and always has.
I can read this back and recognize a defeatist attitude, but I don't know what else to do.
This has helped in two major ways. I've let go of the idea that the hyper productive days are my natural state, and that the 90% of the days that aren't there are some kind of failure. I've also built my career to avoid having daily accountability and prefer weekly/monthly.
That mindset shift, separate from the daily "how do I get stuff done" tactics, has really helped prevent the kinds of negative spirals that adhd can put me through.