social.noyu.me

We used to think we might have ADHD, and in fact we even got diagnosed with it a few years ago (after a serious investigation), but we no longer believe we have it, or at least it has lost its explanatory value. Instead we see a battle for our attention we're slowly winning…

I don't think we have an attention deficit. It is very easy to sit down and do nothing but practice kanji for 100 straight minutes and to do that daily, or to do Anki reviews, or to do certain guitar activities. Hell, it is easy to spend an hour doing cleaning.

What we have had a problem with, and continue to have a problem with, is habitually seeking distractions. I don't think we tend to do this while sitting down with a real-world task these days, but when at a computer or on our phone, it is tempting to <Ctrl-T>youtube⏎ for example

Twitter is no longer engaging enough to function well as a distraction, but there are websites that we can seriously question why we regularly visit. Hacker News is one. YouTube is another, if we visit it without a clear purpose in mind. And we read the (national) news too often.

Then there is the fact that seeking distractions is a behavioural loop you get stuck in. Websites with algorithmic recommendations are of course optimised to try to put you in it and make it harder to escape. We used to periodically block YouTube in /etc/hosts for this reason.

Avoiding distractions is one part of the executive function puzzle, the other is… living intentionally. We have a spreadsheet we use to remind ourselves what we ought to be doing. We try to keep in the habit of checking it. We don't do it nearly enough, however.

We are prone to delaying tasks that can wait. I don't think we have any solution to that one but scheduling them for particular times so we know we will do them. But then there has to be the will and ability to stick to the schedule… which doesn't always happen.

Perhaps all of this is just an attempt at describing an ADHD coping strategy.

I don't want to sound like we've totally solved our problems, because this was prompted by realising this was yet another weekday where we sat down at our desk to use the computer and got nothing done.

But the thing we've realised is that there's a specific pattern here that we can work with. “Sitting at our desk, using the computer” used to be our default activity for our free time. We also used to regret how so many hours of our life would get wasted. These aren't unrelated.

It seems like we've started being a lot more productive and a lot happier in general since we started spending most of our time away from our desk. I guess we can elaborate on that some other time, this was a really annoying thread to write.

By the way, the text box that you type tweets into on Twitter dot com is subtly broken for me now in this web browser, and it's infuriating (backspaces, ctrl-c etc randomly not registering).

@hikari theres a text box on twitter dot com? i thought they’d moved it elsewhere.