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.