My feelings are mixed on such. I was on Ritalin as a teenager and I felt like it stripped me of my creativity and started refusing to take it. I had trouble focusing a lot of the time (though I also have the ability to hyper-focus). I've taken a few times illicitly since just to have a reference point, and I still find that the mental gymnastics that I've had to develop as an adult (I'm 28) to try to get myself to hyper-focus on the whole are a better coping mechanism than taking amphetamines on a regular basis.
I feel like scatter-brained-ness is a dual-edged sword. On the one hand, it contributes to difficulty in staying "on-topic" on a regular basis; on the other hand, I feel like it's been the mechanism that's allowed me to broaden my interests and to absorb a lot of information in usually disconnected areas and sometimes connect pieces that might be less natural for others without this "affliction".
This is of course an anecdote, and I believe as others have pointed out concentration is spectrum and there are extreme poles where medication may be the only option, but I'm leery of it becoming a catch all solution as it has become in the US (but not in other developed countries).
Does alcohol help with the ADD? I remember around that age that moderate drinking would dampen some of my scattering and made me feel as though I could focus more.
Not predictably. Right now often jumping into a debugging session I'll have a glass of wine or so, but historically if I look back over the most productive phases of my life they've varied between times where I didn't drink at all to where I drank too much.
The most effective coping mechanisms have been combinations of removing distractions and sometimes short meditation. More recently I find if I'm distracted that going running for 15 minutes will help clear my head. If I find myself procrastinating too much I often run Freedom.app for an hour or two at a stretch to help drop me into the zone. When I'm working in an office I tend to start extremely early or extremely late so that I'm alone at the office for long stretches. When I'm working from home (I live with my co-founder) I tend to shut the door for long stretches and occasionally notice that I shift my sleeping schedule so that a large block of the time where we're awake is mutually exclusive.
It's mostly the stuff I mentioned in the comment below (or above, depending on how the voting goes).
For those not familiar with hyper-focusing, it's a trait that's been observed in a significant minority of ADD cases where the person has the ability to focus extremely closely on a task for an extended period of time (for me often 12-16 hours). I get most of my code written in those blocks, which happen on average 3-ish times a week.
The ground rules for me are that it has to be something that I can really get into. Today I'm writing docs, so that's a no-go (hence the proliferation of news.yc comments). Code will do, hard debugging will do, reading research, writing essays will do. Catching up on email, writing docs -- really a good half of startup-y tasks -- won't.
Sometimes it comes naturally and I can start as soon as I wake up, especially if I just slept because I was too exhausted to continue and am still in the middle of a problem. Every once in a while, this will last for periods even up to two weeks.
The trick is building up momentum. It's easy to get distracted at the beginning, almost impossible once I'm "in".
So I open up my to-do list. Pick a problem. Turn off the internet. Close my door. Usually it takes about half an hour. If it doesn't work in the first half hour, I can try a couple of things to jump-start the process: 10-15 minutes of meditation or running will work probably half of the time.
From there I'm usually good until a problem is solved. There are some activities that won't snap me out of it -- cooking, playing bass a bit (often I do that when thinking through a problem), but I can't, for instance, talk to people. Sometimes the problem lasts an hour; sometimes it's a week. Since there's momentum already built up, I usually have a quick break of doing administrativa and maybe 30-50% of the time can jump right into the next problem.
Naturally most people that know me never see me in those blocks, so I often come off as scatter-brained or generally laid-back, but that's because my largest bursts of productivity are partitioned off into those blocks.
I've always been puzzled. Is ADD an actual disorder? Or is it the normal state of most humans? I have never been diagnosed with ADD. Nor have I ever thought of trying to get diagnosed. But I identify with your comment. In fact, your work habits actually seem pretty normal. I think a lot of people get most of their work done when they are "in the zone" and then spend the other rest of the time procrastinating and wasting time.
I don't think it's the normal state for most humans, but it is descriptive of one end of the spectrum of normality, when testing for a limited set of properties.
That's why I'm opposed to people medicating for it generally.
Basically it's "people who have trouble motivating themselves to do things they don't really want to" (though may think they should). It can be inconvenient if your view of society is that smart people should be interchangeable. My personal belief is that this is just friction between relatively recently evolved (post-industrialization) social norms and the way that people actually work, and those two pieces not fitting together all the way down has been labeled ADD (among other things).
To put a very fine point on things: what some people call ADD is why I am a founder. I could probably medicate myself into being a contented employee of a "good" company and stay there forever. But honestly, fuck that. I don't feel like getting shifty when things start boring me -- usually every 3 to 4 years -- and needing to do something else is a disorder.
My best friend on the other hand lives in the US and takes amphetamines for her ADD. I hear her describe what she struggles with and can relate to it, but what I hear is, "Wow, she really hates her job," rather than, "Wow, she has a hard time focusing." American psychiatrists apparently disagree.
Don't know about most humans but it's probably the base state for pre-agriculatural humanity, so any ancestry group without long experience of agriculture will probably have higher levels of ADD.
The reason I am asking is, I am having problems with ADHD but I haven't tried any medication yet. What you said sounds very promising.
I cannot ever imagine myself planning for the next day and being able to follow that plan. I sometimes am just like as you described, cannot even take the trash out, because I have so many things in my mind, confused.
The first time I took Adderall I was angry and upset that I'd missed years of my life because I couldn't piece fragmented moments together into a cohesive whole identity. It was like waking up from a long sleep. I was 18.
I have recently begun experimenting with Adderall (under dr. supervision of course). My symptoms don't seem to be as bad as others' but I do have problems with planning and problems with executing a plan without getting distracted once I've made it. The distractibility makes programming difficult because I tend to want to take a short break before tackling a difficult design or debugging problem but then end up surfing the internet for 30 minutes before I can get back "in the mood" to move forward again. Adderall seems to take care of these problems and keep me focused on the work even when it gets difficult. At this point I look on it as a performance enhancing drug.
I've been using Ritalin, not Adderall. Here's my experience:
I started on Ritalin 15 years ago or so. At first, I found myself oddly calm and rational, even at what struck me as really inappropriate times (such as during an emotional conversation with my wife). Like I became Mr. Spock.
Then I noticed that my personal soundtrack disappeared. There was always music running though my head. Assorted, pop-ish, catchy melodies. And they were gone. Sadness.
I think I stopped taken it then, but shortly later went back on it. The effects were not as striking. (The soundtrack returned, hooray! and has not left again since then.)
Nowadays, I find hard to say how well it works. I more or less take it when I feel like it, and I think it helps, but it seems I've acclimated. (Side note: I'm pretty sure the Ritalin, plus Wellbutrin, were key to my quitting smoking. Take note, all you stimulant-chasing dopamine-deprived chain smokers.)
On the other hand, years ago I felt as though there was a TV in my head and someone was changing the channel every second. That's gotten much better. But on-demand focus, still not so good.
Now I wonder if I should try Adderall. I did a stint with Strattera, but it didn't seem to do much.
Meanwhile, I'm writing possibly commercial apps to help me stay organized, so maybe there's an upside. :)
