Still feeling low energy, good thing is I think that it’s not entirely just a sickness or something like that. I think it also comes down to my own personal circumstances, that’s leaving me feel like I’m in a state of statis. I’m waiting for my son to be born in the next 2 weeks and so feeling like I can’t do much while we wait is probably contributing to my overall lack of energy.
What I learnt
Learnt a lot yesterday, but overall I think I finally had a mental breakthrough of what it meant for me to have ADHD-i (Inattentive ADHD — what people usually think of when you have no ability to focus), this were my notes:
I have a bad working memory, if I were a computer, I might have two slots for memory, and everyone else has ten slots.
This explains a lot of things including:
Why maintaining a system, or someone interrupting me while I’m focused is so painful and irritating because it’s fighting for critical space in my working memory.
Why I’ve got an increased mental cost to switching tasks, and contexts. Which is endemic to most office based jobs, and this is something that I cannot stand. It just kills me if someone messages, emails, calls me to make me switch to their context. Forget it, I’m exhausted before lunchtime.
Why I’m obsessed with efficiency, not because it’s nice to have, but it’s a necessity if I am to keep pace with others and their ability to multi-task.
Why I’m great at building, but you might as well throw me on the trash heap if you want me to continue to maintaining it. I will happily spent prolonged amounts of time (week, months even) on building something that requires the minimum amount of maintenance.
When I say minimum, I really mean minimal. I can’t remember all of the details, and forget it if you expect me to maintain it to the level of a neurotypical. Like once a month at the most, and even then that’s pushing it.
That when it comes to any “touching” (e.g. if I thought there’s a rule to each action), then thinking about what the resulting action is, is in of itself maintenance.
Why I’m good at explaining, and teaching because it requires an intense focus on the student, and being only able to give them probably … two things at a time. But I can do that really well, because that’s all I’ve ever known!
Why I generally have more energy in the morning, so I want to do the most energy intensive work first. This is in stark contrast to most people who want to do some low priority work first, and that helps them with increasing motivation throughout the day. Yeah I’m the opposite.
Why I’m ok with doing low priority tasks when I feel like there’s already a sunk cost in being forced to do something else low priority. This does not mean that I like spending 30 minutes doing low priority tasks, one after the other. I mean that if I can multi-task on low priority tasks then I’m ok with that. I think this is called “Task Stacking”.
Why I can really only focus intensely for about 30 minutes at a time, but when I have focus, it’s laser-focused, and nothing can break it.
Why low priority tasks like admin work I find absolutely debilitating. Because it’s a fundamental mismatch of expensive and precious resources and using it on something that’s as basic as admin work.
Why low priority tasks (like a 30 second task!) will spent literal weeks on my whiteboard, when neurotypical people would be able to rub it off within a couple of hours at the most.
Why I’m bad at prioritising in general, or tasks that are “out of sight” are really “out of mind”,
Why even a tiny amount of exercise can help massively during the day, as it helps open up more memory, and also has the added bonus of getting my mood back on track if it’s been a bad day!
What I did
I had a bunch of tasks that I had to do outside of coding today, but I mostly did a lot of work on my own business so it’s not much to describe on here.
This was during when I was creating my mobile app, and I was trying to understand the architecture layers. It was really basic stuff because I was learning a lot of that from the beginning.