A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
It's very hard. Typically it's because I'm understimulated, or I'm struggling with indecision paralysis. I can only combat the former, with caffeine, but the latter I sadly have no idea how to conquer.
Thanks for posting this question! I rarely see questions about ADHD on the Fediverse and they're refreshing when I find them here.
I primarily struggle with low working memory.
I'm struggling with indecision paralysis…I sadly have no idea how to conquer [indecision paralysis].
I relate to you; I also struggle with indecision paralysis. I want to do a programming project with Lisp; but I can't start a project; there's so many ideas to choose.
Thanks for posting this question! I rarely see questions about ADHD on the Fediverse and they're refreshing when I find them here.
You're welcome. It's also refreshing to find neurodivergent fediverse users.
I want to do a programming project with Lisp; but I can’t start a project; there’s so many ideas to choose.
I've dealt with this. The trick is to do one that you don't care too much about. You think of a crappy idea, and you start it. After a couple weeks of working on it in your free time, you might get bored and start some other idea and decide to come back to it later. It's okay—start the new thing. You may not ever come back to it (I almost never do) but it will break your block. Eventually you'll have a halfway decent idea that you'll keep working on for a longer period of time, and you'll be satisfied.
I just used this trick to render an X at any position; I just start to work on the idea until I got bored; but I managed to complete that idea before I got bored!
I didn't realize that I didn't have to complete an idea, until you said something about it.
That's great news. I'm glad I could help. I find that when you roll with your ADHD instead of against it, for certain problems like this, you can often find some peace and flow. Let yourself wander, and don't feel like your personal projects are obligations in some way; they're yours, so they can just be yours... unfinished or finished, good or bad.
I agree. I don't get why so many people with ADHD are trying to work against ADHD.
In my experience, I have only ever worked against my ADHD for the sake of relationships that I consider more important than my comfort/sanity. And I'd do it the same way, if I had to do it again. But it's not easy, and it's not ideal.
i don't usually try to work against my ADHD unless if the risk is worse than the discomfort.
Yeah low working memory is my biggest issue too.
I rely heavily on writing stuff down.
I have found that Kanban and the GTD method have helped me keep track of stuff.
I do find that my low working memory makes me more empathetic as a UX designer to people facing complicated user interfaces. And it forces me to thinking more abstractly, because the only way I can keep stuff in my head is through chunking it down into more bite sized parts, and being really rigorous about simplicity and parsimony.
I suffer from it too.
For programming I've found that the more strongly typed a language is, the less I have to worry about keeping in mind. Being able to offload a lot of basic soundness checks to the computer saves me when I lose track and allows me to focus on smaller components without having to worry about messing something else up elsewhere.
That's about it, though, in terms of life pro tips from me. I end up having to rely on others to complete some trains of thought as I seem to get stuck at an early stage of thinking something through. That means I often start a conversation with an impression or opinion that I'll have revised by the end of it due to factors I hadn't considered.
I feel a similar opinion; but I think I dislike typing in general.
I am trying to use LISP and I like the lack of syntactic difficulty
I sympathise with the syntax often getting in the way. On the flip side I find untyped languages opaque, leaving me to guess what code actually does. Lisps are a great offender because macros, syntactic primitives and functions look the same but behave differently, and without type signatures it becomes a mess.
The thing with type systems is that they only reveal the gestalt of something that's already there. All languages have types. It's just that many don't bother to correct you.
I tried to write a language parser in Guile, but when I couldn't figure out what the different data structures actually looked like I eventually gave up.
I see your viewpoint.
I ended up asking one of my ADHD IRL friends about the indecision paralysis issue, he said he'd follow up with me (we're busy college students lol)
I may circle back when I hear from him and tried out what he's suggested!