4 ms·

My feelings are mixed on such. I was on Ritalin as a teenager and I felt like it stripped me of my creativity and started refusing to take it. I had trouble f

by wheels 17y ago

My feelings are mixed on such. I was on Ritalin as a teenager and I felt like it stripped me of my creativity and started refusing to take it. I had trouble focusing a lot of the time (though I also have the ability to hyper-focus). I've taken a few times illicitly since just to have a reference point, and I still find that the mental gymnastics that I've had to develop as an adult (I'm 28) to try to get myself to hyper-focus on the whole are a better coping mechanism than taking amphetamines on a regular basis. I feel like scatter-brained-ness is a dual-edged sword. On the one hand, it contributes to difficulty in staying "on-topic" on a regular basis; on the other hand, I feel like it's been the mechanism that's allowed me to broaden my interests and to absorb a lot of information in usually disconnected areas and sometimes connect pieces that might be less natural for others without this "affliction". This is of course an anecdote, and I believe as others have pointed out concentration is spectrum and there are extreme poles where medication may be the only option, but I'm leery of it becoming a catch all solution as it has become in the US (but not in other developed countries).

aswanson 17y ago
Does alcohol help with the ADD? I remember around that age that moderate drinking would dampen some of my scattering and made me feel as though I could focus more.
- wheels 17y ago
  Not predictably. Right now often jumping into a debugging session I'll have a glass of wine or so, but historically if I look back over the most productive phases of my life they've varied between times where I didn't drink at all to where I drank too much. The most effective coping mechanisms have been combinations of removing distractions and sometimes short meditation. More recently I find if I'm distracted that going running for 15 minutes will help clear my head. If I find myself procrastinating too much I often run Freedom.app for an hour or two at a stretch to help drop me into the zone. When I'm working in an office I tend to start extremely early or extremely late so that I'm alone at the office for long stretches. When I'm working from home (I live with my co-founder) I tend to shut the door for long stretches and occasionally notice that I shift my sleeping schedule so that a large block of the time where we're awake is mutually exclusive.
stanley 17y ago
Would you mind elaborating on how you invoke that ability to hyper-focus?
- wheels 17y ago
  It's mostly the stuff I mentioned in the comment below (or above, depending on how the voting goes). For those not familiar with hyper-focusing, it's a trait that's been observed in a significant minority of ADD cases where the person has the ability to focus extremely closely on a task for an extended period of time (for me often 12-16 hours). I get most of my code written in those blocks, which happen on average 3-ish times a week. The ground rules for me are that it has to be something that I can really get into. Today I'm writing docs, so that's a no-go (hence the proliferation of news.yc comments). Code will do, hard debugging will do, reading research, writing essays will do. Catching up on email, writing docs -- really a good half of startup-y tasks -- won't. Sometimes it comes naturally and I can start as soon as I wake up, especially if I just slept because I was too exhausted to continue and am still in the middle of a problem. Every once in a while, this will last for periods even up to two weeks. The trick is building up momentum. It's easy to get distracted at the beginning, almost impossible once I'm "in". So I open up my to-do list. Pick a problem. Turn off the internet. Close my door. Usually it takes about half an hour. If it doesn't work in the first half hour, I can try a couple of things to jump-start the process: 10-15 minutes of meditation or running will work probably half of the time. From there I'm usually good until a problem is solved. There are some activities that won't snap me out of it -- cooking, playing bass a bit (often I do that when thinking through a problem), but I can't, for instance, talk to people. Sometimes the problem lasts an hour; sometimes it's a week. Since there's momentum already built up, I usually have a quick break of doing administrativa and maybe 30-50% of the time can jump right into the next problem. Naturally most people that know me never see me in those blocks, so I often come off as scatter-brained or generally laid-back, but that's because my largest bursts of productivity are partitioned off into those blocks.
  - bokonist 17y ago
    I've always been puzzled. Is ADD an actual disorder? Or is it the normal state of most humans? I have never been diagnosed with ADD. Nor have I ever thought of trying to get diagnosed. But I identify with your comment. In fact, your work habits actually seem pretty normal. I think a lot of people get most of their work done when they are "in the zone" and then spend the other rest of the time procrastinating and wasting time.
grandalf 17y ago
+1 same here!

by wheels 17y ago

aswanson 17y ago

Does alcohol help with the ADD? I remember around that age that moderate drinking would dampen some of my scattering and made me feel as though I could focus more.

wheels 17y ago
Not predictably. Right now often jumping into a debugging session I'll have a glass of wine or so, but historically if I look back over the most productive phases of my life they've varied between times where I didn't drink at all to where I drank too much. The most effective coping mechanisms have been combinations of removing distractions and sometimes short meditation. More recently I find if I'm distracted that going running for 15 minutes will help clear my head. If I find myself procrastinating too much I often run Freedom.app for an hour or two at a stretch to help drop me into the zone. When I'm working in an office I tend to start extremely early or extremely late so that I'm alone at the office for long stretches. When I'm working from home (I live with my co-founder) I tend to shut the door for long stretches and occasionally notice that I shift my sleeping schedule so that a large block of the time where we're awake is mutually exclusive.

stanley 17y ago

Would you mind elaborating on how you invoke that ability to hyper-focus?

wheels 17y ago
It's mostly the stuff I mentioned in the comment below (or above, depending on how the voting goes). For those not familiar with hyper-focusing, it's a trait that's been observed in a significant minority of ADD cases where the person has the ability to focus extremely closely on a task for an extended period of time (for me often 12-16 hours). I get most of my code written in those blocks, which happen on average 3-ish times a week. The ground rules for me are that it has to be something that I can really get into. Today I'm writing docs, so that's a no-go (hence the proliferation of news.yc comments). Code will do, hard debugging will do, reading research, writing essays will do. Catching up on email, writing docs -- really a good half of startup-y tasks -- won't. Sometimes it comes naturally and I can start as soon as I wake up, especially if I just slept because I was too exhausted to continue and am still in the middle of a problem. Every once in a while, this will last for periods even up to two weeks. The trick is building up momentum. It's easy to get distracted at the beginning, almost impossible once I'm "in". So I open up my to-do list. Pick a problem. Turn off the internet. Close my door. Usually it takes about half an hour. If it doesn't work in the first half hour, I can try a couple of things to jump-start the process: 10-15 minutes of meditation or running will work probably half of the time. From there I'm usually good until a problem is solved. There are some activities that won't snap me out of it -- cooking, playing bass a bit (often I do that when thinking through a problem), but I can't, for instance, talk to people. Sometimes the problem lasts an hour; sometimes it's a week. Since there's momentum already built up, I usually have a quick break of doing administrativa and maybe 30-50% of the time can jump right into the next problem. Naturally most people that know me never see me in those blocks, so I often come off as scatter-brained or generally laid-back, but that's because my largest bursts of productivity are partitioned off into those blocks.
- bokonist 17y ago
  I've always been puzzled. Is ADD an actual disorder? Or is it the normal state of most humans? I have never been diagnosed with ADD. Nor have I ever thought of trying to get diagnosed. But I identify with your comment. In fact, your work habits actually seem pretty normal. I think a lot of people get most of their work done when they are "in the zone" and then spend the other rest of the time procrastinating and wasting time.

grandalf 17y ago

+1 same here!