Damiano retweetledi
This is all good, reasonable, prudent advice. It is probably what you should do. But i will say, in full disclosure, that it is somewhat different than what i have done and a different path exists.
First on terms.i know ADHD is overdiagnosed. I know many have negative reactions to it as a disability claim (im anti extra testing time to be clear!) and some doubt its a medically identifiable thing at all. That's all fine. I'm going to use the term but if you want to hear it as meaning something like "the far tail of personality traits commonly associated with the false label ADHD" or something like that, that's compatible with my points. Feel free to hear that if helpful.
At its most fundamental, the problem is that you are very bad at governing what your brain thinks is important. Things that have long term impact on your future may be important but if they arent gun to head urgent or organically pleasant to be doing, it is an extraordinary challenge to make yourself do them. This is in a sense a very low conscientiousness though it has some semblance of very high disagreeability, though often not paired with disagreeableness in other vectors. The consequences of deprioritizing non urgent things often builds an avoidant response as it feels like "important but not urgent" things are fine when you arent looking at them but when you come to fix them the problems come out. This is of course not quite what's happening but emotions are a poor judge of fact.
If you're smart you often come off feeling a little disabled in the very simple sense that there are whole sets of tasks you wont (can debate cant but in practice wont) do well. Do your homework every day hah. Put a week of work into the essay due in a week, fat chance. And so on.
Most solutions, and they're good solutions, rely on a few vectors. First, chemically improving focus regulation which is to say making it a little easier to decide to treat something as important. Second, creating detailed organizational systems. Fight ADHD with neuroticism by using the negative emotions of failing the organizational system's demands as a sort of bootstrapped urgency. Third, reduce distraction. Get the shiny interesting things that pop up and feel "urgent but not important" out of sight because you dont sort important well and will get drawn to them, and also because you blur urgent and interesting in a way that leaves you prone to dumping time on flashy wastes. And again this is all good advice, it is advice to basically mitigate ADHD and act in a way that is less ADHD. It's success case is a long thriving career and life where people are surprised you have ADHD.
But the alternative is to just embrace it, build a life that's optimized to just run on the urgent half of the Eisenhower quadrant, avoid, outsource or ration everything important but non urgent, and lean into it so extremely that a decade into your career your colleagues will notice an ADHD at work seminar and several will be like "obviously this is relevant to you" despite you never mentioning it to them. That's option B.
So what does option B look like?
Fernando 🌺🌌@zetalyrae
I wrote 8k words on how to manage ADHD
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