Hacker News Reader

Comment by usefulcat | Hacker News Reader

> I have an endlessly growing list of projects I want to make, books I want to read, and skills I want to learn, so productivity means a lot to me!

If it really meant a lot, it wouldn't be a challenge to actually do it. It sounds like the real problem is a lack of interest in the particular books, skills, etc.

View on HN

> If it really meant a lot, it wouldn't be a challenge to actually do it.

Dear god I wish this were true. You have no idea. Hell, I would pay good money right this second to make it true for myself.

One of the major struggles of ADD is having things you actually care about being challenging to do. Doesn't matter how important, your brain just says "nope".

I struggle with this constantly. Things I truly care about, or which are exceedingly important are a huge uphill battle just to put any effort at all towards them.

In general in the replies here there are a lot of people who aren't aware that other people might experience life differently from them.

I couldn’t have said any of this better myself.

> Things I truly care about, or which are exceedingly important are a huge uphill battle just to put any effort at all towards them.

This is the sentence that hit the hardest for me. I’ve been struggling with this since before I can remember and it frustrates me to no end. The worst part to me isn’t even being less productive than I want to be, it’s my brain sometimes not even letting me do things that bring me joy, like spending time with my family or indulging in hobbies. Anything but what I want to be doing is what my brain wants to do.

Talk to a psychologist or psychiatrist, to get you tested for adhd. It might not be that, as depression can also present itself as adhd symptoms, but either way, you will find out why it's like that and fix it. It helped me a lot when I found out what I'm battling with.

Thank you for the advice. I’ve been seeing a therapist for about a year and a half now and I’m in the process of seeing a psychiatrist in the very near future. I wish us both luck in overcoming our struggles.

I mean no disrespect to sufferers of ADD, or for that matter anyone who finds it difficult to do anything which is 'important' to them. I too have many things that I wish I had done that I think would be very worthwhile but which, for whatever reason, I haven't.

What I have observed repeatedly is that the best way to tell what is actually important to a person (myself very much included!) is to ignore what they say and look at what they actually do and don't do. That's where my comment was coming from--not a glib dismissal, but an invitation for frank introspection.

Often the things we want to be important to us are different from the things that are actually important, and it can be difficult to even be aware of that difference.

I've been diagnosed with adhd by a psychiatrist, I have a big stack of projects and activities I want to do, because I like them or they solve a problem I have. See, the thing with adhd inattentive types is that you have a dopamine intake problem, so you get random bursts of focus and motivation on things that are novel and you find intriguing,but as soon as figure out how something works, that dopamine dissappears and you can't focus on that thing even if your life depends on it. Same as the article author, I'm a lot more productive when I have someone breathing down my neck or I'm doing something out of spite, just to show them how it's done or that I can.

It's not about apps, techniques, habits, tricks or what have you, most of those things don't work for adhd peeps. What works is having a job be variable enough to keep you interested for a long long time or have adhd meds (Adderall, Concerta etc.)

Did the psychiatrist really help you?

Did you productivity improve? I think I have ADHD but not diagnosed yet and I am facing the same annoyance of not being able to do what I actually need to.

They did. I've been on meds (Concerta) for 10 months now, i'm able to focus on almost anything. I'm attentive, focused and do a lot of work, instead of being distracted, watching youtube for no reason and doing chores a lot more easily.

I think there’s something to that. It could be that there’s no immediate interest, i.e. everything is tantalizing but roughly equally so, so they cancel each other out and all simply exist as vague desires rather than actual goals.

This sounds like a complex way of maintaining an identity as interested in things that are not actually interesting.

Not sufficiently interesting, at least.

TikTok will always release more dopamine than doing basically anything else I can do. That doesn't mean I'm uninterested in doing other things, it just means tiktok has succeeded in optimizing content that immediately releases dopamine.

The good thing about my type of ADHD is I get addicted to things and then lose interest in them. TikTok is no longer exciting for me now, now that I am just using it for live DJs and checking out the videos my best friend shares with me and not much else. Got addicted to Reddit and then Twitter for years but now my Twitter addiction has largely been replaced with Manifold Markets. The key is to find balance, or to impose a rule on yourself that you only go to the problematic site a little bit unless you have spare time, or to find something else more exciting.

I somewhat identify with this. I have dozens of things I want to do and if I get started on something, I can happily work on it until 2-3 in the morning, even though I usually go to bed at 11. It’s the getting started on something that takes so much effort.

I have the same problem. For me what helps is having a schedule, you do your thing at a certain time automatically every day, which seems to lower the activation energy. For one-off tasks it helps to set myself a reminder that I intend to do whatever it is at a certain time.

But I still struggle with this for sure. I could always use more advice myself.

Agreed, it reminds me of when people say "I've always wanted to learn <Insert foreign language here>". If you really wanted to learn Spanish, you'd learn Spanish.

there is nothing wrong with saying that. With all the things that must be done in adult life, learning a language is a luxury akin to getting a rare delicate plant or something. Maybe the person saying this will actually follow through when they retire, you never know.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com