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1. ADHD and depression go hand-in-hand. If your emotions are starting to get strained, consider talking to a therapist before things get worse.

[1] https://www.betterhelp.com

2. I wrote a script to run my life for me, you should consider doing the same.

[2] https://taylor.town/nowify

3. Find something to obsess over! Everything comes to a screeching halt when the spark of life eludes me.

4. Consider using a service like FocusMate to stay on task. It's a form of "body-doubling".

[3] https://www.focusmate.com

[4] https://chadd.org/adhd-news/adhd-news-adults/could-a-body-do...

4 comments

I'm especially intrigued by the prompts you have that direct you to reflect on the status of various aspects of your life. These questions reminded me a lot of a list that I started a while back of small inconveniences in my life that had been ignored long-term. I found that just by starting the list, I was instantly able to start recognizing all these little hurdles that I had just been quietly dealing with every day. For example, the knob on the lid of our pool pump was broken and it hurt my hand every time I had to unscrew it, but I would just deal with the pain. Once I made my list and identified that as a recurring inconvenience, it was clear that it was worth the effort to go to the pool store and buy a replacement. It was a cheap item and trivial to replace, both things I knew the whole time, but somehow did not really examine before the list.

I was happy with my little inconveniences list until now, but seeing all of the other various prompts that you've made for yourself, I'm thinking I should explore this strategy even further. Would you mind posting a link to the full text of the prompts? Some of them are cut off at the end from your screenshot. Thanks!

Here's my current list of routines: https://gist.github.com/surprisetalk/bc53ddd517c62ec7e98f2af...

On this list, you'll notice a lot of "never" routines. When I retire a routine, I change it to "never" so that it's easy to reenable it if I ever need it again. For example, I recently got laid off, so I'm allocating more time to personal projects than career stuff.

Training yourself to recognize things is difficult! Forcing yourself to look at something every hour or every day can force you to see the world differently within a matter of weeks.

Brains tend to tune things out, so nowify prints out randomized lists inline for many of these prompts. For instance, when I'm supposed to send memes to people, it prints 10 random memes and 3 random people to turn it into a little game.

I did a similar thing to nowify, but I have several multiple-times-per-day tasks (e.g. check inbox for new tasks), so I have time-slicing as well. It works very similar to an OS scheduler, where there are some high-priority low-timeslice activities and other lower-priority, high-timeslice activities. It won't preempt in the middle of a timeslice, so I don't get interrupted 30 minutes in to a one-hour activity to e.g. check my e-mail.

What do you use to make the beep sound? Is your computer always on?

Yep, computer is always on, and bluetooth headphones are connected when I'm elsewhere in the house.

At some point, I think this would actually work better as a phone/watch app.

Love the idea of the script. Is it open source?

Not open-source yet! It's very tailored to my personal workflow, but I'm planning on generalizing it soon.