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Comment by ryandvm | Hacker News Reader

In my experience, most ADHD is really just a case of "I have limited willpower for extremely boring shit." Give me something interesting to do and I can work on it non-stop for 12 hours.

The problem is that most jobs and almost all schooling is flat out incompatible with being an easily distractible person. I think it's just a phenotype that doesn't work well in the traditional professional environment.

And yes, Adderall will help you focus on boring shit.

[Source: I'm clinically diagnosed with ADHD)

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Idk my experience is much different. On the weekend, I would have a list of games I really wanted to play. Boot one up, play for a few minutes, feel like I should be playing a different one, switch and repeat.

Or I would have hobbies or activities I would want to do. But would end up in the same cycle.

Then at the end of my weekend I would feel down because I spent the entire past two days constantly task switching with zero enjoyment.

But on Adderall I am able to sit down and enjoy the first game / hobby I pick.

Has this helped long term and repeatedly? I have that same struggle of switching between things all my life even if I enjoy one activity a lot. Very occasionally I do find something I can sit and enjoy for hours but it is rare.

Yes willpower is too simple and too tied up with connotations of hardworkingness and virtue to adequately explain it. It's more like "don't have control over where attention is focused." Wanting to do it may make it more likely but there are other factors, and I can also easily get caught up in a task that is actively unpleasant. Unmedicated the focus goes where it wants to go, not where I want it to go; but not necessarily nowhere either.

And ADHD people in my experience aren't worse at activities that do require what I would call simple willpower. Things like race cycling or endurance running, where persisting through discomfort and even pain are necessary.

In my experience, simply being "not boring" is not enough. Usually for me it needs to have at least three qualities of the following four: pressure, interest, competition, and novelty. If a game is interesting but lacks competition or novelty, I may start playing it, but it's unlikely I'll continue for more than 15 minutes.

Same. Novelty (or something "innovative") and competition are huge drivers for me to focus on something.

That sounds somewhat like depression/anxiety paired along with ADHD. In adult ADHD they can often be very intertwined because by the time you've reached adulthood you have a history of impulsive decisions or bad time management to regret. Or perhaps it's just a symptom of ADHD combined with aging. I don't know about you but "hyperfocus" seemed to come much easier when I was younger which I associate with being less aware of my shortcomings.

I am not depressed and experience the exact same weekend malaise of the person you’re responding to described.

I found an exceptional game last weekend that I played through. I laughed, I cried, it was fantastic. I spent a lot of my free time on it, and beat it.

This weekend I was just a little disappointed I couldn’t wipe my brain and play that game again.

I don’t think that’s depression, it’s just being unwilling to put up with a game or activity being boring.

Yeah for sure, I wouldn't ever say anything is truly universal. Just a trend I've noticed with my own ability to focus on even things I do enjoy and in my own experience it can be difficult to untangle things when you have a comorbidity of depression, ADHD and anxiety which is pretty common in adults.

Do you like digital card games at all? Try Inscryption, it's fantastic (as far as I've gotten anyway, it's also quite difficult). I like it better than Slay the Spire personally, which it definitely took inspiration from, and ran with it.

It's also a game you probably should go into not knowing hardly anything about it ahead of time. I've already accidentally spoiled myself on a few things looking for help getting past a couple parts that I wish I didn't know about ahead of time.

What's the game you played that you wish you could wipe your memory of and play it again?

The game I just recently played is Roadwarden, which plays like a very prosaic RPG, and after playing I realized is using the RenPy virtual novel engine to fantastic effect. All said and done I played about 20 hours for $9, felt like buying a good fantasy novel/ choose your own adventure, or one of those old Gamebook RPGs from the 80s.

It’s also fun because the source code is all in Python and just sitting there in the folders, which has made me interested in making something similar. Now to just write an interesting branching story…

Since I enjoyed it so much I’ve been branching out and trying games I wouldn’t have considered before, and just downloaded Vampire Coteries of New York.

Roadwarden looks very cool and wasn't on my radar at all, thanks for sharing it. Also I'm surprised that was made with RenPy, looks like it really took it above and beyond what that engine was built for originally.

I am having this issue at work, and have throughout my career, come to think of it.

Give me a challenge, AND all the tools to conquer it, and I can get it done. Give me a lab environment with the servers and scripting tools I need to automate something, and I'll put it all together.

Hamstring me by not giving me the tools I need, make the barrier to accomplishment too much, or give me really boring work without some kind of clear path, and I lock up.

I can play Factorio for 12 hours a day when I get my yearly mood for it. When I am assigned a cool automation task with the tools available to BUILD it, I can run with it. Too bad my current job, a multi-billion dollar software company, can't spare me a few VM licenses without me jumping through hoops.

Oh, and Adderall can help, but it makes me so anxious and even more impulsive once I'm done with work.

One thing that worked for me with the anxiousness is pairing stimulants with something like hydroxyzine. Taking half of a dose 1-2 times a day when you feel that helps smooth the edges quite a bit.

Guanfacine is a non stimulant med, might be worth talking to your doc about.

>> Hamstring me by not giving me the tools I need, make the barrier to accomplishment too much, or give me really boring work without some kind of clear path, and I lock up.

I'd like to point out that, at least in the first two cases, the workplace is hoping you will lock up and the system is functioning as intended. This isn't a shortcoming on your part.

If you still feel compelled to be productive in those instances then a fun game is to dig into your employer's policy/security/IT hoops in order to identify the hidden workarounds in which you can get stuff done.

> In my experience, most ADHD is really just a case of "I have limited willpower for extremely boring shit."

I'm really happy that ADHD has had such a limited impact on your life experience. However I think your statement is an unfair oversimplification & reads like a dismissal, whether you meant it to read that way or not. Very minor distinction, but phrasing it as 'most of MY ADHD' would have been much better.

In my experience, these are a significant aspect, but not at all the whole thing.

The biggest hurdle for me, is management's expectation that I be passably as competent at staying on top of multiple async communication threads, and being on time for things.

Even if I say up front that "I will try and likely fail at following up with things that require me to check back in on things that may or may not have changed in a while, or remembering to respond to people." They eventually end up saying "I'm able to be in n meetings a week and manage k jira boards concurrently, surely you should be able to do x"

Nope. DM me or tag me if something needs a new look.

Hey, why don’t you try harder is what I’ve heard all my life. I can’t. I’ve tried. I failed. I lost a lot of things. Made a lot of mistakes due to focusing on the wrong thing at the wrong time (most recently nearly got heavily hurt with a mill although I know I need to be very careful and I was fully engaged)

So no, it’s not only with boring task. I’d love to. My life would be far easier.

Heck I can have hyper focus on boring task because it’s relaxing.

So no. It’s not only will with boring task :(

I think the clinical way to describe what you're saying is "executive function disorder". Some ADHD researchers believe this is a much better way to describe it and distractability/inattentiveness are just noticeable symptoms of that root cause.

I also think there is a common problem that people are addicted to stimulation and novelty. As soon as something doesn't give that dopamine hit of being new or interesting, something else has to be found to replace it. I think this addiction is very common in society today and manifests in internet and device addiction

I don't know any proper data, but judging from my own experience I'd bet that many ADHD people disable things like notifications and often use devices more consciously than others.

My phone works almost in a pull-only manner - not many things are allowed to cause push notifications there. I can't imagine being able to get through my life with so many things constantly begging for my attention. I have to use ad-blockers and disable JS by default to browse the Web and keep some sanity. Neurotypicals don't seem to mind.

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