5 ms·

I've ADHD and I'm on the spectrum. Others may differ - it's a spectrum after all- but I feel no list-only app will ever silence the drunk baboon on my shoulder

I've ADHD and I'm on the spectrum. Others may differ - it's a spectrum after all- but I feel no list-only app will ever silence the drunk baboon on my shoulder constantly pulling my attention from what I'm doing. I'd advise goblin.tools to market itself differently and aim for the neurotypical market as well. #my2cents

danesparza 2y ago
[flagged]
- McGlockenshire 2y ago
  Not the parent, but I'm also AuDHD. My current drunk baboon is named OOH LOOK, SHINY but sometimes it's named THIS IS BORING LETS GO DO SOMETHING ELSE. A sufficient dose of a medically prescribed stimulant medication quiets him down enough to usually ignore him, for me. It's been literally life changing. My lack of concrete executive function cost me the job of a lifetime.
  - SubiculumCode 2y ago
    Same here. I went through college and grad school by sheer will over sleep. Once I allowed myself to think that maybe it was ADD I got a prescription and now I get twice as much done with half the effort. It's frustrating as hell, all that time I spent...when I could have done more while also invested more time into my family.
    - superultra 2y ago
      With all the disclaimers of talk to your own psychiatrist noted, I’m curious what specific medication is helping you. I went through a similar process and some of the side effects were too much to balance.
      - doormatt 2y ago
        Vyvanse here. Very "soft" compared to other ADHD meds.
        superultra 2y ago
        Thank you!
      - McGlockenshire 2y ago
        Grandparent commenter here. I'm on the Oregon state health plan, which requires you to cycle through any of the standard ADHD drugs before they'll let you prescribe the long term versions. The lowest dose of adderall (sp idk) didn't do much for me, but the next level up silenced the distraction demon pretty well. I ended up trying ritalin next, and am currently on the second highest dose of the long term extended release version. I was able to notice adderall's stimulant effects, but I didn't notice ritalin's. That got me in trouble on the second day of taking the high dose long term one, or should I say it got me in trouble at 5 AM the next morning. Folks, always modify your full screen games to include a real time clock. It's important. For now I find it to be acceptable. I've adjusted my schedule to make sure I take the meds on time and go to bed on time. Additionally, thanks to it I now have enough executive function to not only make a schedule but actually be able to mostly stick to it. Again, this stuff can be life changing. If you have the opportunity, go a month or two with all of the major drugs to see what they do for you. I'm 44 and could have been diagnosed and on meds at 11. Don't wait.
- testacc74 2y ago
  As a diagnosed ADHD. Nope. I found them boring and I used none of them except Instagram but I use it to dump some photos and contact friends only (Less than 1hr per week). It is not YouTube or Netflix or you name it either. It is about the executive function. Even if I sit in front of the work my brain will not do it. For example when I watch a lecture or read a book, knowledge just cant get into my brain. But sometimes they do, and when they do, I cannot stop it either. There are numerous times I kept coding until my blood sugar was too low that I almost passed out because I counldnt stop to grab some food. For me, ADHD symptoms are that I have no control over my attention.
- p_l 2y ago
  As another AuDHD Iwish it was so. Then I could just blink them and get benefits. Instead I sometimes can't follow a book that is both engaging and interesting to read because 3 pages in my brain will throw at me at least one novel story plot bunny, musing on alternative solutions to whatever is the problem in the book, musing on implementing things from the book, possibly multiple software project ideas, etc. And all of the above can happen for both fiction and non fiction. And then come the interrupts while trying to focus, which quickly lead to situations where I can't focus due to expectation of interrupt, which only then leads to doom scrolling because it both fills a need to do something and is worthless enough to not care about being interrupted
  - Ardon 2y ago
    Backing this one up with my own experience of ADD (I was never hyperactive): I've tried all the distraction reducing techniques, and the distraction reducing techniques have been tried on me. In school, I was, at least 70 percent of the time, sent to the isolation desk, facing a wall, only a pencil. This didn't help. I've tried going to remote cabins, no internet. I've tried no devices. This did not help. The problem (so far as I've come to understand) is not that I am unusually susceptible to distractions, it's that it's unusually difficult to convert 'needing to do something' into 'focus'. The problem is not that something derails the train, but that there's no tracks. Starting something does not make it more likely that I'll continue it. Going in a direction doesn't have 'momentum'. This is very difficult to understand, since it's not really 'a tendency that everyone has but more', it's a different brain. You aren't going to understand it by going 'oh like when I'm distracted', you have to try and create a picture from scratch, not based on your experience, but by listening to people. Not that what people tell you should be just immediately imported into your worldview, people sure can be wrong about themselves. But you can't necessarily check other people's experiences against your own. (The word "you" in this comment is referring to the general non-ADHD person)
    - johnisgood 2y ago
      Yeah, just when people who have never experienced depression, anxiety, and panic attacks tell me to "think about something else"... I can't focus either especially if there are any sounds, for possibly different reasons than ADD/ADHD, but Lord knows, I am full of psychiatric co-morbidities.
- throw80521 2y ago
  Fair warning, what will write only applies to my circumstance and I have no intention to denigrate the life experiences of others. I used to prescribe myself labels like ADHD. In fact I probably got into this habit at a very young age since people around me were already talking about labels and how they did or didn't apply to me, and I soaked all this up as children are wont to do. I no longer abide by such labels anymore and still live comfortably. I discovered that what I called "ADHD" and motivated me to get on the Ritalin/TODO list/5-alarms-a-day train was my method of relieving myself from stress. Distracting myself was my way of coping with stress I found impossible to deal with or even approach at a lower level. And historically, I had experienced the consequences of not distracting myself firsthand. In the past, when I forced myself take breaks and do literally nothing for a week at a time, I was stressed for what seemed like no reason for every waking hour. The stress would only be relieved when I went back to distracting myself with something (on my computer, at work, etc.). The difference was I was previously unable to recognize the cause of this stress and this address it effectively. When I was able to address the underlying cause of stress (and this lurked in the background for years or even decades and would not have appeared consciously without heavy-duty and sustained focus), my desire for Facebook-Twitter-HN disappeared overnight. So did my stimulant prescription. With that, the label "ADHD" disappeared as well. I called myself that a lot over the years. It turns out I was just fighting myself the whole time for seeing myself as "too weak" to deal with being unable to sustain "attention", and targeting my distraction as if it were the ultimate cause, not the symptom it really was. The stress was the real problem, and it remained latent for years without me so much as thinking of it. On top of being distracted all the time from stress, my belief was if I couldn't stick to a stringent schedule with every minute detail mapped out for each day, I was a failure. Because my impression was that that's the standard you needed to set for yourself to address "ADHD", and if you weren't putting in your reps, your condition would dominate you and you'd live a miserable existence... which made miserable, which only made me believe more strongly in this narrative, and so on in an endless spiral. I should mention everyone around me also believed in the "disease model" of psychology, so they only served to reinforce these beliefs. I think I renounced this model a bit too strongly in hindsight, as a few of my relationships have been left permanently altered as a result. Now I don't bother to follow a strict schedule except for work things. I clean my place on Sunday. That's my only real obligation I've set for myself. Things that "need to be" done somehow get done automatically - because I don't need to pressure myself into doing them, I just want to, and they don't take much time. I no longer feel the need to sweat any of those details or micromanage my own life anymore, and instead just take life as it comes. It shouldn't come as a surprise that I've never been happier with myself living this way.
y42 2y ago
I second that, I saw a lot, I tried some... most of them are just task planners, but I was always missing same basic features.
- NationOfJoe 2y ago
  what is that same basic feature they are all missing?
  - y42 2y ago
    Let's start with some simple basics: I need an integrated app, not a website, not a standalone app. It must seemlessly integrate into Android. A webinterace is okay for maintaining purposes. But the app itself must be an integral part of my smartphone. Visible in my taskbar and stuff like need. Without any detours. Something that integrates with Outlook/Gmail. Why? That helps to keep information synchronized. I need synchronized information, not the 12th app that offers me to help my organizing my day, while infact it's adding up another item to my mind-pile. Of course it must be simple. Not a fancy interface. Not too much UI elements. No bling-bling. And one feature I like specifically: A reminder, that tells me how many days/hours/weeks/months I am overdue for recurring tasks. Like a dynamic todo list where I can uncheck items. Let's say the task is "Watering Plants", every 2 days. I must uncheck this item, otherwise it would increase the amount of days its overdue.
    - me-vs-cat 2y ago
      https://tasks.org/ https://tasks.org/ meets every requirement you list. With one exception, as I don't know what you mean by "Visible in my taskbar and stuff like need". I don't have a taskbar on my phone, but if you mean on a desktop, then I solve that using sync. I access synced tasks with desktop apps, which this is not. I also share one synced task list with my spouse. Other phone integration I use is having multiple task widgets on my home screens. All of my personal reminders and tasks are tracked in this app. I use a lot of recurring tasks. While it doesn't explicitly count days overdue, it does show and can sort by due date, and can (re-)trigger notifications X days past due. Chances are your plants don't need watered every 2 days. If you're actually married to the exact implementation you described, carry on and good luck! Otherwise, having learned from my share of drowned plants and as I read those requirements, they'd be met by a task recurring for a due date 4-10 days after completion and a start date 1-3 days before due, so you'd not see it again until a few days after it was last completed and have some days in which to complete it, where this repeats as desired regardless of when it actually gets done. This is a common pattern for me, such as my "check tire pressure" task recurring X weeks after completion. The start date controls how many days before that next due date that it starts being shown again, I do not worry about it going negative, and, after the start date, I get a location-based notification when at the location where I normally complete the task.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
mvieira38 2y ago
Yeah, no gameification or breaking down can make doing the dishes or writing documentation more interesting than whatever my interest of the month is, unfortunately. I'd be beyond cooked without medication
r00fus 2y ago
I have to say my neurotypical family members love goblin chef tool as well as the spectrum individual.
dirtyfrenchman 2y ago
ADHD + spectrum as well. I couldn't agree with this more.
laurentlbm 2y ago
There are other tools in the menu.
gcanyon 2y ago
I'm not diagnosed anything, but I'm a paid user because of Magic ToDo -- and I don't even use it that often. It really is magic, and I use it most often as a demonstration of what LLMs are capable of in somewhat unusual use cases.
- xp84 2y ago
  I’m quite NT and I tried Magic Todo and was impressed. This is really a great application of the tech.
oriel 2y ago
I ended up taking my own path towards small-scale tooling. I've been using the binaural audio trick through youtube for some years now, particularly the rendered 40hz trick to clear my head. The insight was that a lot of the noise pulling me off center was coming from built up clenching of muscles around my head and back, and a destabilization of core posture while sitting, leading to shaky leg and such. The project I built was simply a mixable tone dashboard for different frequencies. Ive been dogfooding it hard, and its my goto to push around my headspace to clear out the noise and make a protected space for work. The easiest litmus for tone choice has just been, 'does this help or hurt'. On my better days its like im giving my brain a massage and I have the most productive times. https://1ps0.github.io/binaural https://1ps0.github.io/binaural A note: i load the file directly from repo when I use it on Firefox, theres an audiocontext policy i havent been able to figure out. Should work great on mobile and elsewhere.

danesparza 2y ago

[flagged]

McGlockenshire 2y ago
Not the parent, but I'm also AuDHD. My current drunk baboon is named OOH LOOK, SHINY but sometimes it's named THIS IS BORING LETS GO DO SOMETHING ELSE. A sufficient dose of a medically prescribed stimulant medication quiets him down enough to usually ignore him, for me. It's been literally life changing. My lack of concrete executive function cost me the job of a lifetime.
- SubiculumCode 2y ago
  Same here. I went through college and grad school by sheer will over sleep. Once I allowed myself to think that maybe it was ADD I got a prescription and now I get twice as much done with half the effort. It's frustrating as hell, all that time I spent...when I could have done more while also invested more time into my family.
  - superultra 2y ago
    With all the disclaimers of talk to your own psychiatrist noted, I’m curious what specific medication is helping you. I went through a similar process and some of the side effects were too much to balance.
    - doormatt 2y ago
      Vyvanse here. Very "soft" compared to other ADHD meds.
      - superultra 2y ago
        Thank you!
    - McGlockenshire 2y ago
      Grandparent commenter here. I'm on the Oregon state health plan, which requires you to cycle through any of the standard ADHD drugs before they'll let you prescribe the long term versions. The lowest dose of adderall (sp idk) didn't do much for me, but the next level up silenced the distraction demon pretty well. I ended up trying ritalin next, and am currently on the second highest dose of the long term extended release version. I was able to notice adderall's stimulant effects, but I didn't notice ritalin's. That got me in trouble on the second day of taking the high dose long term one, or should I say it got me in trouble at 5 AM the next morning. Folks, always modify your full screen games to include a real time clock. It's important. For now I find it to be acceptable. I've adjusted my schedule to make sure I take the meds on time and go to bed on time. Additionally, thanks to it I now have enough executive function to not only make a schedule but actually be able to mostly stick to it. Again, this stuff can be life changing. If you have the opportunity, go a month or two with all of the major drugs to see what they do for you. I'm 44 and could have been diagnosed and on meds at 11. Don't wait.
testacc74 2y ago
As a diagnosed ADHD. Nope. I found them boring and I used none of them except Instagram but I use it to dump some photos and contact friends only (Less than 1hr per week). It is not YouTube or Netflix or you name it either. It is about the executive function. Even if I sit in front of the work my brain will not do it. For example when I watch a lecture or read a book, knowledge just cant get into my brain. But sometimes they do, and when they do, I cannot stop it either. There are numerous times I kept coding until my blood sugar was too low that I almost passed out because I counldnt stop to grab some food. For me, ADHD symptoms are that I have no control over my attention.
p_l 2y ago
As another AuDHD Iwish it was so. Then I could just blink them and get benefits. Instead I sometimes can't follow a book that is both engaging and interesting to read because 3 pages in my brain will throw at me at least one novel story plot bunny, musing on alternative solutions to whatever is the problem in the book, musing on implementing things from the book, possibly multiple software project ideas, etc. And all of the above can happen for both fiction and non fiction. And then come the interrupts while trying to focus, which quickly lead to situations where I can't focus due to expectation of interrupt, which only then leads to doom scrolling because it both fills a need to do something and is worthless enough to not care about being interrupted
- Ardon 2y ago
  Backing this one up with my own experience of ADD (I was never hyperactive): I've tried all the distraction reducing techniques, and the distraction reducing techniques have been tried on me. In school, I was, at least 70 percent of the time, sent to the isolation desk, facing a wall, only a pencil. This didn't help. I've tried going to remote cabins, no internet. I've tried no devices. This did not help. The problem (so far as I've come to understand) is not that I am unusually susceptible to distractions, it's that it's unusually difficult to convert 'needing to do something' into 'focus'. The problem is not that something derails the train, but that there's no tracks. Starting something does not make it more likely that I'll continue it. Going in a direction doesn't have 'momentum'. This is very difficult to understand, since it's not really 'a tendency that everyone has but more', it's a different brain. You aren't going to understand it by going 'oh like when I'm distracted', you have to try and create a picture from scratch, not based on your experience, but by listening to people. Not that what people tell you should be just immediately imported into your worldview, people sure can be wrong about themselves. But you can't necessarily check other people's experiences against your own. (The word "you" in this comment is referring to the general non-ADHD person)
  - johnisgood 2y ago
    Yeah, just when people who have never experienced depression, anxiety, and panic attacks tell me to "think about something else"... I can't focus either especially if there are any sounds, for possibly different reasons than ADD/ADHD, but Lord knows, I am full of psychiatric co-morbidities.
throw80521 2y ago
Fair warning, what will write only applies to my circumstance and I have no intention to denigrate the life experiences of others. I used to prescribe myself labels like ADHD. In fact I probably got into this habit at a very young age since people around me were already talking about labels and how they did or didn't apply to me, and I soaked all this up as children are wont to do. I no longer abide by such labels anymore and still live comfortably. I discovered that what I called "ADHD" and motivated me to get on the Ritalin/TODO list/5-alarms-a-day train was my method of relieving myself from stress. Distracting myself was my way of coping with stress I found impossible to deal with or even approach at a lower level. And historically, I had experienced the consequences of not distracting myself firsthand. In the past, when I forced myself take breaks and do literally nothing for a week at a time, I was stressed for what seemed like no reason for every waking hour. The stress would only be relieved when I went back to distracting myself with something (on my computer, at work, etc.). The difference was I was previously unable to recognize the cause of this stress and this address it effectively. When I was able to address the underlying cause of stress (and this lurked in the background for years or even decades and would not have appeared consciously without heavy-duty and sustained focus), my desire for Facebook-Twitter-HN disappeared overnight. So did my stimulant prescription. With that, the label "ADHD" disappeared as well. I called myself that a lot over the years. It turns out I was just fighting myself the whole time for seeing myself as "too weak" to deal with being unable to sustain "attention", and targeting my distraction as if it were the ultimate cause, not the symptom it really was. The stress was the real problem, and it remained latent for years without me so much as thinking of it. On top of being distracted all the time from stress, my belief was if I couldn't stick to a stringent schedule with every minute detail mapped out for each day, I was a failure. Because my impression was that that's the standard you needed to set for yourself to address "ADHD", and if you weren't putting in your reps, your condition would dominate you and you'd live a miserable existence... which made miserable, which only made me believe more strongly in this narrative, and so on in an endless spiral. I should mention everyone around me also believed in the "disease model" of psychology, so they only served to reinforce these beliefs. I think I renounced this model a bit too strongly in hindsight, as a few of my relationships have been left permanently altered as a result. Now I don't bother to follow a strict schedule except for work things. I clean my place on Sunday. That's my only real obligation I've set for myself. Things that "need to be" done somehow get done automatically - because I don't need to pressure myself into doing them, I just want to, and they don't take much time. I no longer feel the need to sweat any of those details or micromanage my own life anymore, and instead just take life as it comes. It shouldn't come as a surprise that I've never been happier with myself living this way.

y42 2y ago

I second that, I saw a lot, I tried some... most of them are just task planners, but I was always missing same basic features.

NationOfJoe 2y ago
what is that same basic feature they are all missing?
- y42 2y ago
  Let's start with some simple basics: I need an integrated app, not a website, not a standalone app. It must seemlessly integrate into Android. A webinterace is okay for maintaining purposes. But the app itself must be an integral part of my smartphone. Visible in my taskbar and stuff like need. Without any detours. Something that integrates with Outlook/Gmail. Why? That helps to keep information synchronized. I need synchronized information, not the 12th app that offers me to help my organizing my day, while infact it's adding up another item to my mind-pile. Of course it must be simple. Not a fancy interface. Not too much UI elements. No bling-bling. And one feature I like specifically: A reminder, that tells me how many days/hours/weeks/months I am overdue for recurring tasks. Like a dynamic todo list where I can uncheck items. Let's say the task is "Watering Plants", every 2 days. I must uncheck this item, otherwise it would increase the amount of days its overdue.
  - me-vs-cat 2y ago
    https://tasks.org/ https://tasks.org/ meets every requirement you list. With one exception, as I don't know what you mean by "Visible in my taskbar and stuff like need". I don't have a taskbar on my phone, but if you mean on a desktop, then I solve that using sync. I access synced tasks with desktop apps, which this is not. I also share one synced task list with my spouse. Other phone integration I use is having multiple task widgets on my home screens. All of my personal reminders and tasks are tracked in this app. I use a lot of recurring tasks. While it doesn't explicitly count days overdue, it does show and can sort by due date, and can (re-)trigger notifications X days past due. Chances are your plants don't need watered every 2 days. If you're actually married to the exact implementation you described, carry on and good luck! Otherwise, having learned from my share of drowned plants and as I read those requirements, they'd be met by a task recurring for a due date 4-10 days after completion and a start date 1-3 days before due, so you'd not see it again until a few days after it was last completed and have some days in which to complete it, where this repeats as desired regardless of when it actually gets done. This is a common pattern for me, such as my "check tire pressure" task recurring X weeks after completion. The start date controls how many days before that next due date that it starts being shown again, I do not worry about it going negative, and, after the start date, I get a location-based notification when at the location where I normally complete the task.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

mvieira38 2y ago

Yeah, no gameification or breaking down can make doing the dishes or writing documentation more interesting than whatever my interest of the month is, unfortunately. I'd be beyond cooked without medication

r00fus 2y ago

I have to say my neurotypical family members love goblin chef tool as well as the spectrum individual.

dirtyfrenchman 2y ago

ADHD + spectrum as well. I couldn't agree with this more.

laurentlbm 2y ago

There are other tools in the menu.

gcanyon 2y ago

I'm not diagnosed anything, but I'm a paid user because of Magic ToDo -- and I don't even use it that often. It really is magic, and I use it most often as a demonstration of what LLMs are capable of in somewhat unusual use cases.

xp84 2y ago
I’m quite NT and I tried Magic Todo and was impressed. This is really a great application of the tech.

oriel 2y ago

I ended up taking my own path towards small-scale tooling. I've been using the binaural audio trick through youtube for some years now, particularly the rendered 40hz trick to clear my head. The insight was that a lot of the noise pulling me off center was coming from built up clenching of muscles around my head and back, and a destabilization of core posture while sitting, leading to shaky leg and such. The project I built was simply a mixable tone dashboard for different frequencies. Ive been dogfooding it hard, and its my goto to push around my headspace to clear out the noise and make a protected space for work. The easiest litmus for tone choice has just been, 'does this help or hurt'. On my better days its like im giving my brain a massage and I have the most productive times. https://1ps0.github.io/binaural https://1ps0.github.io/binaural A note: i load the file directly from repo when I use it on Firefox, theres an audiocontext policy i havent been able to figure out. Should work great on mobile and elsewhere.