Okay, trying out a new methodology for “ADHD” management, but it’s really slow and arduous. For the last two days I’ve been making it a point to type every single step I take in any multi-step process. At work for example, “User name” “Tab” “Press Enter”, etc. When cooking, type out the exact process, “turn left front burner to medium”, “get eggs”, “crack eggs”, etc. This has really shitcanned my productivity overall the last two days, but I’m starting to feel the difference a bit now (maybe still placebo).
The idea is that by taking the time to actively write out every single step I’m allowing my brain more time to synchronize with the ventral stream, which should make it easier for objects to bind in the local pool with ventral context. It also gives me a quick “undo” and “where am I” option. Under the general theory lesion mechanics, it should also give me the ability to process the tasks more heavily with more dorsal stream, since I’m externalizing my internal processes which doesn’t happen normally.
Over time, I think this will train my brain into understanding how long it needs to wait for synchronization before dumping the local pool, increasing “executive function”. I’m wondering if this would also work for “OCD” types as well, despite the synchronization issue being the slow dorsal instead of ventral stream.
I will keep monitoring this over the next two weeks to see if my performance of these tasks improves. The breakeven for this method is if the time spent logging is less than the time spent dealing with confused context and dropped tasks.
One interesting side effect so far is I had NO IDEA exactly how much stuff I do in a day. It’s not something I would intuitively pay attention to, but holy cow it’s a lot. I think in the course of day to day life we’re so acclimated to the level of activity that it doesn’t seem strange to us, but I completely have a new context for understanding why so many people are feeling overwhelmed in this modern world. The demands both in depth of processing and duration of processing would be something completely foreign even 50 years ago. We built machines to help them keep up with our needs, now we are racing trying to keep up with the machines.
Edit: Okay, day 3 of this so far and I’m getting slightly faster as I get into the rhythm of how to do this mechanically, but still significantly slower than winging it. I wish I’d thought up a better metric for time lost due to “symptoms” and started this without stimulants to get a better baseline. Oh well, this is all anecdotal anyway. An aspect of this I really appreciate is that it almost creates a time sheet for me automatically, which is some of the busy work I’d be doing anyway. Having an external undo button of sort has been really helpful more than a handful of times already.
I’ve had a few instances where something went really wrong and I broke discipline chasing down the issues, but doing this seems to make those broken discipline instances stand out a lot more and easier to adjust to. It’s interesting just how uncomfortable it feels, that’s an indication of high novelty and learning, so I might leverage this to start exploring a few areas I’ve been reticent about for other projects. In summary, so far so okay. I see clear benefits but it still feels significantly slower than my normal methods.
Edit 2: I just didn’t have the discipline to keep this up. Every time I got into a spot where things got a little frustrating I tended to abandon the process because it slowed down trying to find a solution. Stepping back from it, it wouldn’t be “ADHD” if it was that easy to address right?
I think this method may be valuable going forward, but I definitely need to have some type of extra-physical help to implement it. Next step is start working on the EEG/Neurofeedback based tone system and seeing how that goes.