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Comment by annie_muss | Hacker News Reader

I appreciate the article's efforts to raise awareness, that said, as a developer with ADHD I wish 'hyperfocus' wasn't always trotted out as a kind of ADHD superpower. The inability to control your attention in order to achieve complex tasks and effect desired outcomes is ADHD. So called 'hyperfocus' is just as likely to waste your time on something unrelated and unhelpful to what you want to do. It's like telling a sleepwalker "Hey, cheer up, sometimes you end up in the office and you can skip your commute!"

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It's so annoying to have people that think they are just doing the 'don't throw the baby out with the bath water' but being honest how good can an executive function disability be?

It's like everyone is climbing a mountain, and they are wearing snow shoes, but I'm stuck with normal boots or worse. However, when I start having fun climbing I plucked off the ground by a ski lift that takes me to a random place up the mountain. If I'm travelling in groups or trying to reach a certain place, to not get lost I have to jump off the lift. Then I'm back to walking on foot, hurt but in an ache but not an actual damage and I have to try to keep up with the snow shoe folk again.

There was a recent article in nature (I think) that talked about dislexia and adhd as being allowed by evolution because in larger tribes or civilizations it provided a benefit for the tribe/civilization to have people with those specializations despite the downsides.

I will say that my hyperfocus as a software developer was almost all upside until I had to support multiple efforts. The talking over people lack of time management and tendency to focus on the most fun task at hand were all things my good managers could work around and forgive.

I've always felt there might be something to the Hunter vs Farmer hypothesis[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_versus_farmer_hypothesi...

I've recently been able to crystalize this as "Hyperfocus is just concentration you don't control". Concentration: that thing non-ADHD people can do too.

In the long run all the unrelated stuff you wasted your time on before will add up as in-depth knowledge relevant to what you liok for now

Yea but how useful is that if I can't control USING that information. The only way to control what I can focus on unless I loop in some way to get ALOT of dopamine out of it.

It's an executive function DISABILITY, it takes so much work to get it close to useful where it just makes it so your basically on par with everyone after it.

> Yea but how useful is that if I can't control USING that information.

I have ADHD. I write down a ton of notes. I have a large, and growing, note-taking environment (Obsidian). After a while using features such as backlinks, etc, you begin to see just _how connected_ everything you know is. Interdisciplinary _is the way to work_, not in some narrow silo.

I do not have a job I care about too much right now, so I am not focused at all on my day job. But I can focus for _hours_ writing code or doing some tinkering in a lab -- the goal is to get a job where I can do either of these...but that requires graduate school.

I have "talk shop" level knowledge in what feels like 20 different domains. I tell people that I am a "jack of all trades but a master of none". A Blessing and a curse.

yea all this is romanized as if the curse isn't a huge part of my life aswell. Like neet I know how to do all this stuff now time to watch everyone be able to complete and do it all as I just collect information and half finished projects

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