In the beginning of 2024, I have been diagnosed with ADHD. Since then, I started treatment with medicine and therapy. I have also written a 4-week update on my progress and I plan to continue documenting it.
Over time, I acquired a few technologies and developed a few strategies to cope with ADHD.
They are listed below, and I plan to keep updating them as I find new ways to deal with ADHD, mostly through therapy.
Multiple open projects
As counterintuitive as it may seem, I usually have multiple projects going on at the same time. The way this works is that when I’m working on a project and get distracted, the distraction usually comes from another project (like an email or a meeting), so I switch to that project. This way, I’m still being productive.
Log activities as I start them
I got the habit (or routine) of logging most activities as I start executing them. This helps me when I eventually get distracted, because I can go back to the log and see what I was doing before I got distracted. I use Siri and Microsoft To-Do to log activities, as described in the Coping Technologies section.
Plan activities I don’t want to start
I learned this technique recently. When I realize that I haven’t been productive and my day is a “bad day”, instead of trying to concentrate and do more, I go into planning mode. I essentially give up trying to do things, I start just planning and preparing things. If I’m trying to download 100 images and keep getting distracted, I would instead just list the websites that I want to download the images from, create the the Azure storage to receive it, etc. I may call this productive avoidance.