I have ADHD. I think. Pretty sure. I have thoughts, ideas, projects, concepts, links, things to read... fired at my brain all day every day. I can go deep on a topic for hours, but then be hit by a barrage of micro ideas. I really struggle to stay on track and focus. Oh and I run a business, manage people, try to make a profit. It's hard. And kids. And life?
I think there is a founder/ADHD thing. Paul Graham thinks so. Maybe even a tech person angle. What have other people experienced?
And how do others cope? I don't really know this world. I do know that my old boss once called me a "flagitating laser beam". I think he meant distracted. I use a bunch of systems to cope. For a long time lists, and then Asana. Asana ruled my life. I just built my own thing to capture tasks, projects, but also knowlegde. Not sure if it will help we will see.
So tell me:
- Who else feels this way? - How do you manage? - Oh and how do you switch off? That is hard
The underlying problem is network regulation in the brain. Your Default Mode Network (the self-referential mind-wandering system) is supposed to quiet down when you engage in tasks. In ADHD, that toggle is unreliable — the DMN keeps intruding, which is why you get that "barrage of micro ideas" breaking through during focus.
A few things that work at the root:
Meditation — not as a relaxation tool, but as direct neuroplasticity training. Focused attention practice (noticing when your mind wandered, returning to object) is literally thousands of reps training that DMN/task-positive toggle. Long-term meditators show measurably better DMN suppression during tasks.
Sleep — DMN regulation degrades hard with poor sleep. Non-negotiable foundation.
The deeper move is changing your relationship to the thoughts themselves. The DMN will always generate ideas. The shift is recognizing them as arisings rather than commands. They still come — they just lose their grip.
Dead Comment
The reality is that there is no single thing that will help. You'll have to try shit and see what works for you. What one person swears "fixed" them might do nothing for you.
That said, the one thing that is the most likely to work out is medication. Get yourself a diagnosis, try the meds, see if it helps. Caffeine is fine, but it's no substitute for the real stuff.
Of course it won't help you just by itself, it's not the only trick you need, but please do try it.
> If someone neurotypical gives you advice, just smile and nod, and ignore it.
Neurotypicals gave me "do not sleep so much, go out in nature or do something". This advice is good for depression, not for ADHD.
> The reality is that there is no single thing that will help. You'll have to try shit and see what works for you. What one person swears "fixed" them might do nothing for you.
Yes, but you have to try different approaches. If you don't try all of them (including sleeping for a day) you won't know.
IME with the meds, the biggest benefit is not focus during its effective period, but the fact that I can still live my life properly afterwards. As in, I haven't had to spend all my day's willpower to stay on task with work, so I have more mental energy for the rest of my life.
Oh, how little I am learning to walk by myself. I would be running by now if I was unmedicated and about, the problem is that my mind is weak and I'm lazy. If only I had traded these woke mind virus pills for a stoicism book, or lifting metal, or 'detoxed', what a silly human I am. But I guess the weak and mentally strong, unlike yourself, can't do much about it but keep taking all this poison and remaining sheep. Please keep enlightening us with your knowledge and superiority.
This comment literally shows why you do not understand ADHD.
Reckon people haven’t TRIED?
And how dare you call someone lazy if they have ADHD?!?
I’m the hardest working person I know - but because of meds, I have been able to focus better. My long term planning is 0, and my executive function is low. But sure, I’ll just try a bit more.
Smh.
1) Good, regular sleep. ADHD symptoms are way more controllable when I'm well rested.
2) Stimulants: caffeine and Vyvanse. I also had a prescription for Adderall, but it has some nasty side effects for me so I rarely take it.
3) Accept that it's hard to focus on stuff that doesn't interest me, and plan accordingly. (Including career choices.)
4) Work in person, rather than remotely. I'm too tempted to screw around when I'm not around coworkers.
The first 30 minutes indeed got me very excited, but then I will fall asleep soon after.
The same thing happened to me right now with energy drink such as Redbull or Monster. Therefore I mostly drink them for some competitive activities that only last short hours
Im kinda the opposite, when im in an office, i somehow make sure no one else is getting work done
A former boss noticed this about me, years before I knew I had ADHD. It was pretty great. I tended to turn things around extremely quickly when I found them interesting. If he saw something was taking me a while or I wasn’t making progress after a couple days, he’d just give it to someone else. The net result was I got to pick my own projects, found the job much more interesting, and was significantly more productive. On the flip side of this, there were projects other people would struggle with for weeks that he’d give to me and I’d turn it around in a few hours.
These days I don’t find anything interesting and I’ve been trying to will myself to work on the same thing for 2 months (and another for 6+ months) and I can’t seem to do it. I really want to get past these things to find something new to do, but it’s been hard. The one project is massive as well. It had me looking at new career options yesterday.
But to give a real answer:
On workdays I have about 20-40 fl oz of coffee during the morning. I stop all stimulants at noon so I can sleep.
On non-workdays I have 1-3 normal sized mugs of coffee in the morning, just because I like it.
Really basic things that other people seem good at, I struggle. Taxes, finances, anything that requires ambient awareness of systems that have no clear feedback loops. Sometimes penalties for trivial things accumulate and it costs a lot of money. Goals, unless they're something like literally climbing a mountain, don't really motivate me. I don't have any financial or life goals at all, they seem artificial and silly.
Without stimulants, and a thankfully somewhat lenient company/client atm, I'd be screwed.
The positive is that I seem to be much better at making friends than most other people I know, and enjoy a variety of interesting hobbies. I'm also not that fearful or anxious about trying new things.
In terms of who I listen to about the topic, it's certainly not any entrepreneur types, it's mostly friends. Though Trevor Noah has a great podcast on the topic last April
https://pca.st/episode/19d903d2-bb2b-4213-837e-89a1af706ea0
Additionally, I cope by exclusion. I don't obligate myself to many things or events, and refuse to participate in group chats. I keep almost no notifications on, and people know that if they need my attention, they can just call me, otherwise I won't respond until I get around to it. I only buy gifts when I find inspiration to, and try not to spread myself too thin.
I also try to avoid easy things as much as possible. I failed at easy assignments, easy exams in school, why bother going through the rote motions for no other purpose than to be measured on my performance in doing them?
Especially the "easy things" bit. What an absolute waste of my time and focus to waste on trivial things that will just be measured against some standard, stale rubric.
Busy work for myself and the person receiving it.
But then, I tend to blow the scope of things I have to do in order to make it seem more important. And that means I extend "deadlines" or take longer to complete things. Oh well.
Part of accepting my ADHD is accepting that there is some truth to the feelings, that is, the notion of deadlines and urgency is usually so phony and unnecessary. My brain, my soul knows that something due at 5pm can absolutely be turned in the next day at 8am and nothing in the world will change.
Yep I do this too, in ways that would be absolutely comical to a normal person.
> Part of accepting my ADHD is accepting that there is some truth to the feelings, that is, the notion of deadlines and urgency is usually so phony and unnecessary. My brain, my soul knows that something due at 5pm can absolutely be turned in the next day at 8am and nothing in the world will change.
Yes, although it's helpful in some situations, most modern everyday systems have no intrinsically urgent or important timelines or consequences. The effect is hard to relate to anyone who panics for exams. There's been moments where my brain just knows the test I'm taking has no bearing on my future, and I'll just space out because it provokes no useful stress response.
People don't appreciate how much of their ability to be successful at work comes down to innate anxiety about what usually amounts to bullshit.
Dr. Russell Barkley's youtube videos and book and the How To ADHD youtube channel are other resource I like and refer to, because they've surfaced useful information and perspective to me. How To ADHD is especially nice to share with friends / family / dear ones who happen to be in one's (erratic, surprising, incredibly fun, incredibly annoying, seemingly lawless) orbit.
[0] It irks me how many people say "strategies for ... xyz" when they're talking about procedures, or tactics, or personal hacks.
(edit: fix formatting, typo)
Instead of having a million different tabs open, use a tab session manager, save the stuff you want to read later, and keep open only stuff pertinent to things you are working on.
Prioritize your projects to have actionable goals.
When you procrastinate, try to do so by being productive on smaller projects.
Be aware of your own nature, and try to exert control over it. Recognize that not every idea or desire is useful, and learn to discard the ones that are not and investigate or give more attention to the ones that are.
Organization, take notes and organize them. I often have a scratchpad textfile open, that I then organize into sections (e.g. app ideas, ideas for specific code projects, movie ideas, whatever), break these up further into project or topic files. The ones that grow and get fleshed out are the ones worth pursuing.
Have a healthy sleep and recreation routine to not get burned out.
Leaning a little into the the distractions, and building processes to quickly search and hop between things had made it better for me.
At the very least opening tabs with Ctrl+T, tab search with Ctrl+Shift+A, quickly closing them with Ctrl+W is my main workflow in Chrome-based browsers.
Once I get my speed up, I find distractions don't occur as often.
Emacs, org-mode, magit, and AI, combined with good sleep, weight lifting, stimulants, have almost completey nullified my ADHD problems.
It's been a hard slog to get here though.
When I break it up, I personally use latex files. I know everyone loves markdown, but I'm not a fan of Obsidian (closed source and electron, ugh), so I fell in love with TexStudio.
I have keybindings for simple macros to insert sections and subsections that I can quickly name, and these display in the navigation tree very well. TexStudio also allows multiple tex files open at once with a tabbedinterface, and allows saving sessions, so I can open one file to open all my, say, 'ai app ideas' notes. I've found this to work better for myself than any other available app or solution.
Eventually, I'd like to release a fork which would mainly be trimming stuff out rather than really adding anything in, but it's far from a priority for me at the moment.
I need two things: ubiquity, so that I can add ideas, todos, etc. wherever I am; and exaggerated simplicity so that I don't end up turning the note solution into its own project that's abandoned or exchanged in a year.
I got diagnosed at 29. Up until then I was very entrepreneurial and ambitious, constantly working on business ideas. Hell I taught myself software engineering because I had a single idea I hyper focused on lol.
The way I see it, lean into it. ADHD is a double edged sword - you get intrusive thoughts, some of them are bad, but some of them are ideas.
You can’t really change your brain, you can take medication and it might help you focus a bit more.
But I say lean into it. I’ve had several successful ventures from pure ADHD fuelled idea binges.
I don’t really switch off, but I make sure I work in the office every day because being around people helps.
But when I’m alone it’s a barrage of thoughts, some days more intense than others.
There are alot of ADHD founders and programmers
We really need novelty so you’ll excel in environments that can offer that (travel, anything fast paced, transport roles like trucking etc)
Embrace the chaos, don’t fight it
Now want a quick fix? If you can, get medication. It doesn't work for all people with ADHD but for those that it does it will give you the most bang for the buck.
Now there is coping strategies. Therapists can help a lot. There is also people offering ADHD coaching. This is great because the coaches tend to have ADHD themselves and understand you. It helped me personally a lot but be warned that everyone can offer coaching so quality may wary.
Last part is lifestyle. Sport. It is not optional. Running is amazing and will help you a lot but if you are not fit enough yet, walk. Walk every day for at least 30min. You need to. Also personally for me reading a physical book for at least 30min a day makes a huge, huge difference. Diet is important but what works varies from ADHD person to person. For me cutting out processed sugar was a good step.
Also no caffeine. This may also vary but completely cutting it helped me personally a lot. Yes, it helps somewhat with executive function but only in the short term and does more harm than good in the long term. Generally any form form of self medication be it alcohol, weed and so on, cut it out. Again get proper medication if you can.
Honestly accepting that you have ADHD or well at least some form of neurodivergency is already the biggest step. It gets so much easier once you learn how to properly manage it.
Came across this a few months ago on HN here and there’s a fair bit of exposition on things you’ve mentioned. My personal takeaway from it was to try Todoist, which has been a complete game changer in my life. I’ve used other systems before but something about Todoist worked better for my brain (plus the mobile integration is awesome… my second best over the years was org-mode but the mobile story is way too clunky)
I was diagnosed with ADHD a year and a half ago in my ~mid 30s. The meds (Vyvanse) help somewhat, but the real key to improvement for me has been using Todoist.
IME the real trick is using it consistently, and for everything. My routines (e.g. morning routine: meds, eat, coffee, brush teeth, brush the dog's teeth, etc etc) are all in Todoist, not because I struggle to focus on getting that stuff done in the morning (well, sometimes, perhaps) but because starting the day with do-easy-thing, mark-it-done, repeat, sets up the rest of the day to be run by Todoist instead of the bit of my brain that goes "I know we should be getting ready to leave but WHAT IF YOU WROTE AN APP TO DO THIS COOL THING, JUST QUICKLY TRY THAT NOW, YOU CAN LEAVE AFTER".
I had a similar experience with org-mode too. It was great at work where I'm at my desk all day, and made a huge difference, but not having a good mobile experience makes it impractical for day-to-day home use.