Sorry for the negative post but this disorder is genuinely terrible. I was diagnosed a few months ago and from the report I received it seems like I have an extremely bad case of it.
I lost 8 percent of my final grade in an operating system class because I submitted the wrong file.
Fine, I have syncthing setup between my desktop and laptop so I’ll just check if the assignment is on my shared folder in my desktop. It’s not.
Ok, I’ll turn on my laptop and grab the file itself. Oh, I have a boot error and now I need to open up the recovery environment to see if the hard drive is even being recognized.
It’s not. Now I have to open up the laptop and reconnect it.
At this point it’s been 30 minutes of me scrambling to get my laptop up and working again and I found the damn assignment there. I emailed my professor and I’m praying that he reevaluates the assignment because the earlier submission had nothing on it. It was just the default assignment.
None of this shit would have happened had I taken just one second to check over what I submitted a month earlier.
I hate reading articles pertaining to ADHD as if it’s some quirky condition that just takes a little bit of time and medication to work through. Its not. I have to constantly remind myself that I’m even conscious in order to function at all, and now I have to sustain extra mental effort to do a relatively hard task.
The only thing that keeps me going is my boss saying “nice work” when I diagnose an issue successfully. It feels infantilizing, as if he knows there’s something going on with me that’s making it hard to cope with the demands of life but “atleast he’s trying his best, atleast he shows up to work, this customer said he had a friendly attitude”.
Just as your therapist and agent_flounder say, always start at the very start, just that small step first and remember to stop, don’t go full hyperfocus and attempt the whole huge project in one go. let say you complete three small parts/decisions, slap yourself on the back and go for walk/coffee/game.
At the kinda base of it, it is about steering yourself into the flow, if you start small and get an early success hit, then tackle a slightly bigger item, you’ll be moving along nicely in no time.
We’re all taking about career stuff right now, but don’t be afraid to throw in non work stuff, I’m WFH now and I may start the day with some CAD design, slap that part into the printer then start mirroring a customers VM to trouble shoot some janky java that’ll only fail on there eviroment. I won’t solve why that crap is flaking out but at the end of the day I’ll have a new part in my hand and a testing enviroment to begin with the next day. Time then for exercise/chill/motorcycle ride until the kids come home and the real work begins lol
PS some days I’ll be delighted to have sent an email, can’t win all the time.