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I recently cast this on /okbanger. I'm re-casting here (comment if you're interested!) and I'm putting out a thread. If any of my fellow ADHDers sometimes struggle with motivation (and burnout), here are my own realizations...and perhaps find things that you can apply as well. 🧵 👇
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1/ It has only been within the past 2 weeks that I have learned about my ADHD diagnosis. Since then, my intentions were to understand more about it, learn about the coping mechanisms used, and how that aligned with what I already do. I have always struggled with burnout and motivation peaks and troughs. The peaks are pretty great - sustained excitement and interest, and the ability to hyper-focus on something for extended periods of time. The troughs, which were generally from the result of sustained hyper-focus eventually running into burnout, were always rough. ADHD is a dopamine deficiency. The baseline is significantly lower than a neurotypical. The effect of this is that we laser-focus on out what interests us, avoid tedium like the plague, and can chase dopamine hits to compensate.
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2/ Some describe ADHD as a superpower. There is some truth to that, I think. There seems to be a strong correlation between ADHD and high creativity, and we can also deliver high energy enthusiasm and be hyper-focused. The flip side is that we’re terrible at tasks we consider to be mundane. Projects can grind to a halt - we hyper-focus and plow through the parts that we find to be interesting, only to have smaller “uninteresting” parts drag on for eternity as we find other things to distract us and provide that dopamine that we crave. So, it is a superpower…but it is like Superman strutting around with kryptonite in his pocket.
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3/ I have a full-time job, a family, and a few side projects. My work day is generally a series of coping mechanisms (that I only recently realized were coping mechanisms) that keep me (generally) on-task and productive. I’m fond of lists, prioritizing, and organizing. The night before, I make a short list of what I plan to work on and accomplish. I create Trello cards to break it down into smaller steps with more granularity. I often will write down the top level items on a whiteboard, which keeps those items visible throughout the day. I time-block - outside of meetings, I schedule times of the day that I open and respond to emails (keeps it from being a weak dopamine distraction), and organize the other time slots around what I need to finish. I do keep Slack up constantly, but I consider this to be a (generally) positive dopamine hit, because most of the alerts are Trello card movement and comments, commits to the repo, etc.
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4/ Some days are better than others. Any time that there is room for creativity or problem solving, I’m excited and engaged. On others (which, if I’m honest, is a fair bit), it feels like I’m dragging myself through the day. Work can often get bogged down in tedium, which can make it more problematic for someone who is dopamine deficient. On its own, this isn’t unmanageable. Where I have been having trouble recently is how to maintain motivation after work, as I have side projects that I want to continue working on. It is disappointing that these activities have to be fit into the margins of my life, but I see no way around that.
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5/ Lately, I have been on the motivation struggle bus for something that I never expected - one of my favorite hobbies. I have been playing Dungeons & Dragons since I was 8 years old. I ran a weekly D&D campaign since I as 18….for 25 years. I have been struggling to finish my work on a new D&D campaign for a new group. It also happens to be one of the side projects I'm working on: https://paragraph.xyz/editor/oM1rtMkXNEJHKL6rmqmW
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6/ This isn't something I struggled with before, so I have now been asking myself "what was different". There were two things that are considering coping mechanisms - deadlines and body doubling (which equates to having someone with you, which can help to hold you accountable for producing something…strange concept, but it seems to work). 1. I was under a deadline. It sounds strange, but I was running a game every week without fail…and I didn’t want to disappoint the players (I like to come to game sessions prepared). This time, I'm under no deadline, as I currently don’t have a weekly D&D group. Apparently, deadlines work to keep the ADHD brain on-task. 2. body doubling - Body-doubling is a fairly new concept for me, but it boils down to working with someone else who can hold you accountable for productivity. In between game sessions, I would head to a coffee shop with my friend. We would bring our D&D stuff, get coffee, and I would work on campaign and adventure stuff.
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