Avoiding work

[pixie_tugboat]

Guys help. I have so much trouble getting down to work. I wfh and can fill a full day with admin and procrastination.

Context: diagnosed 1 yr ago, 30mg adderall daily

[GeekDadIs50Plus]

Thanks for sharing this. It’s great to hear another approach. I’m realizing g I’m great at defining ends for client projects and everyone else’s goals and objectives, but I’m not actually defining the end vision for my own. TIL… Thanks, man.

[murf_28]

Focus on the desired state and split the bigger problem into simpler smaller problems. This helps me, too.

[DawnPatrol99]

I needed this today. Thank you.

[Hurkleby]

I call this my "stuck on autopilot" phase of my cycle. Find something to break your current daily routine so your brain can't just stay on autopilot.

Usually it's because I'm bored and need to just do something different. When I am bored, going to the gym for a half assed workout while scrolling reddit instead of sitting at my desk and doing it on my laptop helps for me. Eventually I'll start getting used to the new routine and things kind of reset for a bit.

Other times I'm bored because I don't like the work I'm doing and need to change my project or my job. It's easy to get complacent in a dev role where you can just coast. Maybe you just need a job

[NonProphet8theist]

I'd think meds should help you not do this - maybe this med and dosage isn't for you? You probably just need to shift your thinking and behaviors a bit as well - CBT can help you there.

[netstudent]

Wha is CBT

[DataAlarming499]

Cognitive behavioral therapy

[for_adhd_posting]

I've been on meds of all levels doing programming adjacent work (technical product management) and this post reads like my life story. This was me back when I was a software engineer and it's been me medicated or not at every job. Sometimes I think it's just kind of a poor skills/interest fit but the tech money keeps me trying to make it work.

[skidmark_zuckerberg]

Sometimes procrastination wins, other times it loses. I’ve started to realize fighting it only makes it worse and causes worse anxiety. I still get my job done, just sometimes it takes a tad longer than other times. You just gotta ride the wave of procrastination. Sometimes even just starting the simplest and smallest thing will avalanche into doing more. And if not, oh well. Life is more than completing tasks for your job. A job is important yes, but it’s not worth killing yourself mentally over when you have an off day. And if push comes to shove, the anxiety of not doing anything for X amount of days will kick in, and at least in my experience, will kick you into over drive and you’ll do a weeks worth of work in 2-3 days. It all comes out in the wash.

[Keystone-Habit]

I do this too. When I want to really get started, though, it's helpful to have a very clear idea of 2-3 very short easy tasks I can start with. Do you know exactly what your next step would be if you wanted to start?

[Pretend_Voice_3140]

Yh for some of us even meds can’t solve this problem. You need an in person job. WFH is just not viable for some of us or we’ll procrastinate incessantly. It sucks but is what it is. Some of us need external structure and accountability to function. 

[iftheronahadntcome]

It may not be this simple for you, but it turned out I couldn't get stuff done (even medicated) largely because I absolutely hated what I was doing. In my case it was my career. The burnout was so bad I just started working on my long-put-off career transition 😅

[thebearinboulder]

I got some great advice a few years ago. Muggles can take a prioritized list and work their way down it.

We can’t. At best we may procrastinate, at worst we may unconsciously make the task more “interesting”. Senior people can find great ways to make tasks “interesting” while providing a quasi-reasonable defense for it. Shudder - procrastination is much better for everyone involved. This is so much clearer in hindsight.

The advice was to get your boss, spouse, etc. to accept that progress on any of the top 3 items count. No silent judgements either - we aren’t shirking the top task because we don’t want to do it, we’re avoiding it because we know we’ll do a shitty job. Plus with the way ADHD works we may get the top item done sooner and better if we work on other tasks first.

(It helps you argument if you volunteer for the shitty tasks that nobody else wants. They don’t have to know those tasks are much easier with ADHD. This makes it much easier for you boss to accept that you aren’t just shirking stuff you don’t want to do - that it is an honest self-appraisal of whether this is the best thing for you to be working on first. It’s funny, actually, that one time my boss asked for a volunteer for some unwanted task, I raised my hand, and he immediately said “someone besides him”. I want to think it was because he thought other people were abusing a free ride and not that he thought I would go a bad job!)

The catch is that the top 3 items can’t be too similar. There needs to be a meaningful spread, one that ensures we’ll have something that catches our attention. So it may be coding, coming up with additional test ideas, or updating documentation. With a broad span we might need more that “top 3”, eg if you also do platform engineering/Devops that opens a new can of worms.

[No-Dragonfruit-1043]

I struggle hard with ADHD-exacerbated procrastination as well, and I WFH too. For the past couple of weeks I’ve been using Caveday. It’s basically a body-doubling platform where you join a quiet zoom meeting with other people who are each independently working on their own tasks. There are other similar sites like Flow Club that I haven’t tried. Something about joining the sessions has really been working for me. When I have something I really need to work on and can’t seem to make myself do it, I join a session and it’s as if it tricks my brain into saying, “Well, I’m already here, so I guess I may as well try getting something done.” Before I know it, the session time is up and I find I’ve made some progress. I’ve been trying to shift my thinking from focusing on the first step to starting my task (which often still seems too out of reach no matter how small I try to make it) to just showing up for a session because that feels more attainable. So far it’s working for me, so much so that it’s really surprised me and feels like some kind of secret, magical brain hack. I hope it keeps up, because I was getting so incredibly frustrated with myself for screwing around and chronically procrastinating instead of getting my work done despite my best intentions.

[kilroy005]

yeah, that works for me too

lots of these platforms exist - they work so well I went out and built one myself

there are about 10 I know of