This could be overgeneralising a bit... but I see a lot of people with ADHD (on- and offline) who tend to make it an essential part of their identity. I realise it's a very impactful thing to have to deal with (I have ADHD too) but I feel like a lot of the time it's brought up for no real reason. E.g. you started daydreaming when reading a book? Forgot something to do when you walked through a doorway? Got angry? You lost track of what you were thinking about? Must be the ADHD. There are YouTube channels whose whole gimmick is that they're run by and for people with ADHD. And guess what kind of content you'll see there: "Why cooking with ADHD is hell", "How ADHD can make you lie", "Music for people with ADHD". What happened to "music for concentration"? HN is a place where I see this play out a lot.

I think it's particularly common to see that with people who discover their ADHD in adulthood, and there are a lot of us now that awareness has been raised in recent years.

I went my whole life thinking that I was broken. I had intense anxiety surrounding social interaction, was horribly depressed, got terrible grades through high school, and just generally did not enjoy most of life. I eventually learned how to cope and function normally to an outside observer, but still would go through cycles of intense anxiety and depression that I didn't know how to explain.

A few years ago I finally was diagnosed with ADHD and suddenly everything clicked. My anxiety, my depression, my grades, my intense hyperfocus on one thing at a time but also inability to keep consistently focused on one thing for more than a few weeks. All of that suddenly made sense, and there were people in the world who knew exactly how I felt. And the thing is, the anxiety and depression have largely gone away. Now that I know what's going on inside my brain I don't have to beat myself up about it, instead I can learn from and lean on hundreds of thousands of other people who have to cope with the same thing.

So yeah, today I will often notice "oh, that's an ADHD thing" at random times in my life. But it's not so much that it's an essential part of my identity as it is that it's enormously comforting to finally have an explanation for all of the weird quirks that I have, and it's a huge relief to have a community of people who experience the same things that I do. When I say "that's my ADHD", it's me reminding myself that I am not broken, just different, and different is okay.

Russel Barkley, in his book “Leading With ADHD,” actually suggested mentioning or “blaming” your ADHD after a mistake as a way to foster empathy for your personal challenges. It’s not intended to be an excuse, but rather a means for the other person, who assumes XYZ is effortless, to comprehend better/gain empathy.

Update: The title of the book should have been “Taking Charge of Adult ADHD.” It’s a great book; my psychiatrist recommended it, and I’m grateful for it. Full of actionable ideas and suggestions.

And then after a while the energy fades..you get distracted again. You get both over stimulated and understimulated and the quest for another thing that gives you the feeling of the world finally clicking into place begins.. And each of these fixes (brain.fm, nootropics, adhd-planner-apps etcetc) give you that feeling just for a little while… That’s why we crave it..and because we (can) have more energy we talk about those (a lot!!). But in the end most of us just go from one fix to another..some of us are just really loud about it..

To be honest, I thought exactly like you for years. I still benefit from society choosing to label me with something, and that I do not choose to fight. For a while my diagnoses provided so many explanations to my problems and I could live with new purpose.

But a while later, I found it was not enough. I hadn't reached "true happiness" or at least whatever I can call my current state of being. I took a different path, shed all my labels, self-prescribed or otherwise, and am happier than I was before.

I still think I am "different" and have quirks, etc. So in practice, not a whole lot different than before. I just don't use the labels to describe these differences that others might use instead.

I think this only emphasizes that one approach does not necessarily apply when generalized to all people. In my case it only served as one step towards a greater solution, and hopefully even more effective solutions I can build on top of that later.

The same goes for heightened awareness for ADHD. More knowledge can be a blessing (as in your case). At the same time, the population such awareness can serve is shaped like a very complex blob, the form of which nobody truly knows, but I believe some clinicians/promoters see the "blast radius" of promoting awareness as a perfectly round circle overlaid directly onto the population.

My experience also made me realize what one can term "ADHD" may change with overarching cultural shifts or personal growth. I think ADHD should be seen closer to a symptom of a constellation of any number of potentially unrelated causes than a "disorder" to be focused on alone. Unfortunately the established terminology seems to have won out there.

The way we see health conditions and the words we choose to describe them can have profound effects on our understanding of ourselves.

I was going to reply to the same post with similar. If just having a label to apply alleviates the negative emotion, isn't it a placebo?

I think a far far greater number of people experience the exact same problems of focus and distress, and learn to cope effectively in their own deeply personal way. I identify strongly with all the symptoms stated. A label feels useless, or worse - constraining, as it becomes your identity. I still have to drag my ass out of bed, do enough good work everyday next to colleagues who figuratively lap me every day, make a to-do list to remember to buy soap, go without soap for a week, .. etc lol.

I call it being me.

I'm not the author of the post you critique.

I suspect if you just have a "label" it doesn't do much. But the label now makes information a keyword search away. Hence their commentary:

instead I can learn from and lean on hundreds of thousands of other people who have to cope with the same thing.

Which would lead to learning strategies to deal with the day to day rather than struggling to find your own way.

Knowledge is power. But power still has to be used to mean anything.

Once you've learned the strategies that work for you. Then I guess the label loses it's power.

> the label now makes information a keyword search away

I think this can become a double-edged sword in some cases. When applied to certain problems, especially ones with no clear-cut solution, additional knowledge can end up being misleading. (Disclaimer: this is only my experience, and I do not intend to speak for others!)

Example, I always used to frame issues I worked with in the language of ADHD, because I believed that was what best described my pathology. My lack of efficiency at work was an issue of a faulty "executive function". My ability to work uninterrupted for extended periods of time was "hyperfocus". My inability to accept criticism without feeling dejected is an indicator of "rejection sensitive dysphoria".

Yet, after I got therapy that worked for me, I realized three things in short order:

- In my own view, there were no deficits in my executive function. It had been intact the entire time. It was actually uncontrolled stress that was causing my executive function not to operate at its maximum capacity. Hence my problem had not been one of executive function, but of stress relief.

- "Hyperfocus" was merely another way for me of saying "putting sustained attention on an activity to cope with unchecked stress." I no longer consider myself to hyperfocus (which I define as working 3+ hours straight at a time, only stopping for food in between), but at the same time I don't perceive I've lost any of my abilities. On the contrary, I gained the ability to participate in and actually enjoy a wider variety of activities more consistently (cooking, cleaning, socialization, exercise, reading, and many others), as well as start and stop each activity when I please, without losing too much time to activities I only used as a coping mechanism for stress (doomscrolling, social media, etc.). In a sense, my interests became more balanced, even though I still carry the same level of passion for a few niche activities (arguably even stronger for some).

- Criticism does not hurt me as strongly as it did before, when I am aware the criticism is coming from a constructive place and is not merely the feelings of the other party making themselves clear in dramatic fashion. If it's the latter, I now have the ability to ignore the other party and move on. I am now also motivated to avoid going to places where people are likely to criticize me unconstructively. I understood that this was the way to deal with criticism in the past, but I was unable to internalize how to act and feel about criticism until now. Hence, I am no longer dysphoric in this way, if I ever was.

So at least in my view, after I gained a sense of inner peace not having to deal with runaway stress anymore, several problems that I used to see as pathological - having terms such as "executive function" and "dysphoria" - turned out not to be any kind of pathology at all. They were only the aftereffects of excessive daily stress.

In my case, these terms weren't the most helpful for me to understand and work on the real issues underlying my core self, and thus get back a much greater return for the effort I expended - which was much less effort than spending months, years and a lot of money on recurring therapies tailored towards framing my problems in an ADHD-centric way.

It would be a placebo if it was intended to do nothing, but it's not, it's intended to help explain what's going on. It's not just a label, it's got meaning, and it's a way to find out more and find other people dealing with similar things.

> If just having a label to apply alleviates the negative emotion, isn't it a placebo?

You could use the exact same line of reasoning to ask "if just talking about an issue with a professional alleviates an issue, isn't that a placebo?"

And the answer is obviously, "No, talk therapy is an extremely well-known mental health intervention with an extremely high effect size on average"

Anxiety and depression are disorders in the way you think about things. If you provide someone with a different and effective way of thinking about things, your are directly treating the disorder. The "maladaptive pattern" flowchart[1] might be a meme, but it's also a very real concept in psychology.

From a more personal point of view: while a label can defining be used in a confining way where it serves as an excuse to not "have to" do a thing (and I certainly know people like that), I find it's very useful to have something concrete to point at and say "this method that other people claim works great won't work for me because my brain doesn't work like that, I need to find a way to alter the method to make myself successful".

[1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/maladaptive-pattern

Yea placebo is probably the wrong word here. And I agree with you. Often just recognizing something removes it's power. I'm glad the commenter experienced the change they did. Just makes me wonder in this case, the root of it seems like self acceptance - a major theme in (at least my own) therapy. Perhaps a label is a powerful shortcut.

>my intense hyperfocus on one thing at a time but also inability to keep consistently focused on one thing for more than a few weeks

Sounds extremely normal to me. I wonder what I'm missing.

For example, suppose a typical person decides to learn a new language.

At the beginning, they are very excited and enthusiastic about it. They might buy a textbook, download an app or sign up for language classes, and spend lots of time on it for a couple of days.

After a week or two, as the tediousness sets in and the goal seems farther off than they expected, they start to shift their focus to something else. After a month, there's a 50/50 chance they completely forget about language study and stop doing it. Only a very small minority will last more than a year.

That's what I'd consider normal. How is ADHD different?

Another example: meditation. A new meditation practitioner may try to focus on their breathing, but then find they usually get distracted and start thinking about something else within 10 seconds.

I have a feeling that if I were to say "I find it difficult to focus my attention on something for 10 seconds without getting distracted", many would reply "that sounds like ADHD." But this is, in fact, quite normal.

> That's what I'd consider normal. How is ADHD different?

ADHD is different in that sustained focus takes a ton more of energy than for non-ADHD folks - if you're high functioning. And is almost impossible if you're not high-functioning.

Totally agreed that "can't focus on my breath for 10 seconds today" isn't ADHD. "I have repeatably sub-par executive function" very much is, though.

For your language learning example, it's more that somebody can't stay focused on the learning, even if they want to/have to and are aware their focus is sliding away.

There's a reason ADHD diagnosis is technically a process that's a bit involved, you're trying to test for both sub-par function, and for the repeatable part. I'd take self-diagnosis with a bit more salt, especially it's of the "I often forget my car keys" kind.

> I have a feeling that if I were to say "I find it difficult to focus my attention on something for 10 seconds without getting distracted", many would reply "that sounds like ADHD." But this is, in fact, quite normal.

That would be quite normal. A determination of ADHD is made based upon the severity of impact. Everyone gets distracted to some extent, but is it significant enough to be destroying your life, Y/N?

That's the determining factor.

How did the diagnosis help you cope? Did you seek some kind of treatment as a result? Did it help you change your behavior? You are describing a lot of what I experience but having someone say "me too" doesn't help me personally with overcoming these challenges.

I have ADHD and while you're right that everyone experiences some of these things occasionally, for those with ADHD our emotion regulation system is fundamentally different.

As a kid, you build your identity and coping mechanisms through emotional experiences, but when your emotion engine is 'broken' or works differently, you develop differently.

The intensity, frequency, and impact of these experiences for someone with ADHD is far beyond what neurotypical people experience.

It's not about occasional forgetfulness or distraction - it's about a brain that's structurally and functionally different, affecting every aspect of daily functioning.

Getting diagnosed isn't about finding an excuse, it's about finally understanding why basic things others find easy have always been so much harder for you.

I was diagnosed with ADHD because I scored in the 10th percentile for some totally normal use cases of the human brain. You know, normal “being human” stuff. Evidently I can’t do normal human stuff.

I think getting ADHD isn’t special or interesting at the population level—when you aren’t face to face with it—but it certainly matters to individuals. I wanted to believe I was just being a human, but the reality is that I don’t have a typical human experience. I have a lot of overlap with everyone I know, but most people I meet genuinely can’t understand the experience at all. However, they are often confident that they get it. Meanwhile, they would not qualify as disabled on cognitive assessments.

To me that’s the big difference. People with ADHD often carry around legitimate, often hidden disabilities. Usually more than one.

For what it's worth, I was using the tenth as a category of 0–10. I actually scored lower (3rd and 7th). Kind of giving myself a nominal leg up here, haha. My brain is running on half a cylinder sometimes, I guess.

A couple scores were still quite low at the 15th and 22nd. Those are clearly issues for me as well, though nowhere near as much. I don't know, I think this stuff makes a meaningful difference. For the cognitive attributes I scored far higher in (high 90s in some cases), it's abundantly clear what a disadvantage many people are at in that regard. Even someone scoring closer to the 50th.

You could say it all balances out, but it doesn't seem to. The high scores I get are all undermined significantly outside of test settings. Major deficits have a serious toll on you. I'm not complaining at all, though. To me it's a fact of life, something to accept and address (with behavioural interventions as you mentioned), and try to find strategies to move forward. You get what life gives you. Generally speaking, it could be a lot worse. I'm very grateful for the parts of my brain that work well.

It's estimated that 11.6% of the US population has diabetes. Is that not a disease?

Except that isn't how neurodivergence works. Yes, everything that the commenter originally posted are things that happen to normal people as well. The difference is in the intensity and duration of these symptoms.

Your comment is overly idealistic about neurodivergent people dealing with their problems. If it was a simple as accepting that our symptoms are normal, don't you think that we would gladly take that as an option? Psychologically, it just isn't a very effective tactic for dealing with our symptoms.

Yes. Identifying it as just part of being human doesn't explain at all why I, in particular, am regularly incapacitated by these things, and it's the sense of incapacity that causes the shame.

You can absolutely rephrase "that's my ADHD" to "that's within the range of normal after all", but having a proper label for a cluster of people who stand out as a clearly distinct normal curve from the rest of the population is helpful.

I like to frame it as a disability. I fought it for ages and wanted to believe I was normal.

This is like trying to climb a tree with one arm. It won’t work. You need to take a step back, look at the problem, and develop systems which accommodate the missing arm.

ADHD only works well for us when we involve ourselves in activities which benefit from having one, extremely well-practiced arm. That’s usually our happy place. The world typically asks for all limbs in tact, though. We inevitably hit those walls.

If we pretend we won’t hit those walls and we don’t prepare ourselves, life is disproportionately hard.

We also need to ensure we accept the disability such that when we do our best to be prepared, but we fail to be, we recognize that it’s a fact of life and we do our best with what we’ve got.

I’m not a fan of the super power framing. I’m a fan of looking at it as a disability with positive, optimistic framing. When we get it right, life can work really well for us. We will always be at a disadvantage in some ways, but the skills and experiences we get because of that can be invaluable.

I most likely would be diagnosed with ADHD if I sought a formal diagnosis (my ex, who I was with for over a decade is a clinical psychologist and said I most likely have ADHD; my brother is diagnosed with it and my mom's ADHD traits make the both of us look tame). The thing is, I just don't buy into the rampant pathologizing that's so prevalent these days.

It's really a societal problem, and is being treated as a human failing. I contend that it's society that's expecting humans to behave in a way we haven't needed for most of our evolution.

These include: having exacting time standards disconnected from seasons and day/night cycles, having to juggle many more cognitively intense tasks that we need to quickly switch amongst, being exposed to media and technology specifically designed to capture your attention for as long as possible, etc.

It's not "a societal problem" if I forget, for a week, that I've left out a yogurt on the counter, and it spreads mold.

It's not "a societal problem" if I fail to notice my body getting hungry for 6 hours as I try to work out a particularly enticing programming problem, and end up irritable and headachy.

It's not "a societal problem" if I blow up at a friend (or partner, or coworker, etc) because I have trouble regulating emotions, and trouble recognizing what's happening inside until it's too late.

There are certainly some symptoms of ADHD, and some ways that they manifest, that are, indeed, only a problem (or vastly exacerbated) by current societal expectations. But many of the symptoms just make life harder no matter what society is like.

ADHD is a disability, and should be treated as such.

Unfortunately, it's the kind of disability whose most common manifestations mostly make even very well-meaning people think that those who suffer from it are lazy, immature, or lacking in willpower.

As the parent of a teen with ADHD, I find myself comparing my growing-up experiences and anxieties with his. I'm confident that if I were coming of age today, I would probably have been diagnosed with something because I was firmly a couple standard deviations away from the societal mean.

Because we didn't have as extensive diagnoses or therapies back in the 80s compared to now, I had my own phase of wondering what was wrong with me. There weren't any peer or adult role models available to me that really related to my experiences. As a result, there were some difficult years in there...but also, I had to find my own resiliency and ways of mapping my worldview to other people.

Fast forward 40 years. I am conflicted about which is better: to be left to figure it out on your own, or to have a support system that is (at times) overly biased towards leaning on the diagnosis as the explanation. But I can say with high confidence that at least for the coming-of-age years of my child, I am far more thankful that his experiences are different than mine.

"Being a human" is grossly inadequate as a lowest common denominator definition of the needs and experiences of children. Even as broadly discussed as it is, it's still only ~11% of US children and that's still a challenging hill to climb if their peer culture doesn't provide some sort of explanation or incentives for understanding each other.

11% is cited as the percentage that have been diagnosed, so ostensibly the 'true' percentage is even higher. i feel that if such a huge proportion of people (let's say somewhere between 1 in 5 ~ 1 in 10) have an attribute, we shouldn't be treating it as some exceptional thing that requires special care but rather a normal part of what it means to be a human.

it's crazy that there's so much focus on adhd but comparitively little on dyslexia, which by most estimations has similar prevalence but arguably even more child impact. i'm sure there's many more of disadvantages all across the spectrum that we haven't even classified / become aware of.

If ADHD-oriented media and discussions provide neurodivergent adults a means to work through decades of internalized shame and anxiety, why get in the way of that?

I have ADHD. Here's my story:

1. I can focus and solve hard problems, but you’ll notice my legs swinging restlessly, hand gestures, or me suddenly typing a completely unrelated web address.

2. I was always a great student, but I was also the most restless; making jokes and talking constantly, no matter how hard I was punished for my behavior.

3. The toughest part of my ADHD is inconsistency. My performance can fluctuate a lot, and it takes tremendous effort to stay consistent. I get bored quickly with easy tasks, so I rely on alarms, calendar events, and other reminders to help me stay on track.

4. People like me are prime targets for distraction businesses, whether it’s social media, gambling, or other addictive behaviors. And a lot of my energy goes to resist them.

All in all, even for a functioning person like myself - managing ADHD takes a lot of effort. In my late 30s, I’m finally feeling a bit more in control. I’ve accepted that this is part of who I am, and while I can’t fix it completely, I’m doing my best to avoid letting it impact the people around me.

I would recommend you pay careful attention to your diet

- get the proper amount of essential fatty acids

- experiment with vitamins, especially magnesium

- green, leafy vegetables

- minimal processed sugar & zero alcohol

And exercise. Get some cardio, even if it's just walking for a half-hour to an hour.

It's a struggle, but learning your body will help you optimize your performance and consistency.

Peace be with you, and I wish you the best of luck.

Further, asking adhd folk to "pay careful attention" is like asking a paraplegic to mind where he steps. Just FYI.

You're not wrong—but its not impossible—and it really helps! Having followed a lot of that advice in the past, and currently being in a slump; I can say it really it matters. Medication increases your chances of following through and the rewards compound.

I was referred to a school counselor in high school because I couldn't sit still, my behavior was inconsistent and I had a hard time focusing.

If that person had caught it, and referred me on to get an ADHD assessment, I would be miles better off.

Instead he gave me exactly the advice you just did, and it achieved nothing. Guy actually owned the whole food / wellness / woo store he referred me to which makes it worse.

Now I have my medication I look back on shit like this with absolute scorn. I know you probably intend the advice in good faith but its absolutely not a replacement for medicine.

On the one hand, it's true that these things are very important. I (as another diagnosed with ADHD) definitely do worst when I don't get proper nutrients.

But it's very, very important to remember and understand that these things don't make it go away.

I'm not saying you're suggesting that doing these things will make ADHD go away—but your comment is ambiguous as to whether that's where you're going with it, and there's definitely a lot of people who don't really believe that ADHD is a "real" disorder, many of whom give advice just like yours and end with something like "...and if you do all of this right, you'll be perfectly normal!"

So I want to both heartily endorse your recommendations (both the general "eat well," and these specific items), and also caution strongly against expecting miracle results.

Imagine if someone had a broken arm and you told them to focus on their calcium intake. I mean, yeah, for sure, but it's kind of primarily important to put the arm in a sling before we discuss the finer points of mineral uptake efficiency. This may not be your intention but this post reeks of crunchy granola holistic fluff woo.

Labels in public health are absolutely problematic for exactly that reason.

But I will also say that ADHD, if you have it, is an essential part of your identity regardless of your awareness of the label.

I tend to find it's causing things even if I'm trying to avoid essentializing it, and this also goes for side effects of medications for it.

eg relationship advice says you shouldn't "change your personality" for your partner, but in my last relationship both of ours changed quite a lot when our medication changed or even if we hadn't taken it that day, so I don't really feel attached to it.

Yeah making it a focal point of identity seems to be very popular online and I find it extremely offputting. For myself, medication helped little if at all and sometimes made me feel worse. Although I do notice a difference in my ability to focus with good diet and exercise, the biggest positive changes come from better sleep habits and nearly eliminating unnecessary tech use. ADHD is a dopamine disorder and our smartphones are little slot machines.

There’s so much survivor bias in these comments.

We know what happens when ADHD is underdiagnosed and not recognized in society (which requires it to be labeled appropriately). You have scores of children who get labeled as “problematic” or “bad students” ans suffer from that discrimination for the rest of their lives.

Labeling may not help a particular individual but helps all in society as a whole

By "a lot of people with ADHD" do you include people who are also self-diagnosed?

I ask because my experience is similar to yours (I also have ADHD). Anecdotal so take it with a grain of salt: I work in software engineering, know and have worked with a lot of self-diagnosed ADHDs who make it part of their identity, while some of them probably do have ADHD, the vast majority of them feel like perfectly normal people who would latch onto any opportunity to prove that they have ADHD. (e.g. people who have a single habit that could be stimming but otherwise don't exhibit and ADHD traits saying stuff like "sorry I can't help myself because of my ADHD brain").

In contrast those I know who have been properly diagnosed don't behave like they constantly need to tell people they have ADHD. They are usually deeply interested in the condition but you probably wouldn't know unless there is a proper setting for them to disclose it (invited to talk to an audience about their experience) or if you're someone they trust.

It feels like people who have the tendency to make ADHD part of their identity just want to been seen as special and important in some way (I don't mean this negatively) perhaps because that's how they see their genuinely neurodivergent peers. They tend to have many excuses for not getting a diagnosis because they won't risk the chance of finding out that they don't have ADHD as they have already made it part of their identity.

On the uglier side, there is also no shortage of people lying about having medical conditions for clout and money on the Internet.

My life got infinitely better when I stopped believing in any of that. It feels more like a spiritually bereft western pseudo-religion and I resent anyone parading around these titles.

If your life improved when you stopped believing in the symptoms that's a good thing for you but it also means you probably didn't actually have symptoms.

I disagree with that assessment. I have autism, which is much more dysfunctional than ADHD in statistical terms, and I also saw a dramatic mental health improvement when I disengaged from popular autism culture. It's become a space that implicitly preaches helplessness and reacts to notions of personal accountability (i.e. receiving behavioral therapy) with hostility.

Somewhere along the way, the mission moved away from the aspirational culture of identifying problem areas and addressing them, to a more stagnant culture that only goes so far as to validate your present behavior and mindset. It feels good and positive on the surface, but it lacks productivity over the long term.

Definitely agree there. There seems like there is a label for EVERYTHING these days. Coincidentally there was an article in the paper I saw just today about how destructive self diagnosis can be (and how many gen z / alpha are doing that via tiktok) I rememeber when some first tried to explain ADHD to me... and I was like... "what? elementary school kids dont like sitting in a classroom for 6 hours a day? so like, being NORMAL?"

Source: I had / (have?) ADHD, don't think about it at all anymore, just keep working hard, stick with hobbies and you can do great things regardless of what "labels" society has assigned you.

I think what's incredibly important to remember is that ADHD is not a binary thing. It's not even a single spectrum.

It's a cluster of executive-function-related symptoms, any number of which a given person with the disorder can have a little, a lot, or even not at all. (I forget what all of them are offhand, but I have about a half-dozen of them in noticeable amounts, and several others that seriously debilitate many people with ADHD I've never had problems with.)

So while you may be able to "[not] think about it...just keep working hard...and do great things regardless", that's guaranteed not to be true of everyone with ADHD.

The worst advice anyone with ADHD can give someone else with it is "just do exactly what I did, and you'll never have problems again". That goes triple when "what you did" is ignore it.

The best advice I know of is to learn and understand what having ADHD means to you. Then use that knowledge to figure out how best to mitigate the problems it causes. For some, that will be medication. For others (like me), it may mean finding specific interventions for individual symptoms, and learning to live with some of the others.

I used to look at ADHD with scepticism until I met someone who it to a debilitating level. Shared a room with them once at a conference and seeing them in the morning before taking their pills was eye-opening. They were trying to have about 10 conversations at once, switching between them from sentence-to-sentence, every time they sat down to do something they instantly sprang up and started doing something else before springing up and switching yet again to something else, it was exhausting for me and I was just watching.

Whether I believe that the number of people who actually get diagnosed with ADHD is correct, especially in places that have medical systems and cultures like the USA, I’m not sure, but certainly I now see how for some people it can be completely disabling.

During COVID, the amount of people diagnosed skyrocketed. I was one, and I was putting it off for a long time. I think you see it a lot because of this; If I'm a content creator, tagging it with ADHD puts it on the feed of a lot of people that are newly-diagnosed/self-diagnosed.

I completely agree with you though, I don't mention it to people generally. I may be quirky and might have some weird rigid rules about how I work personally, but I hate the idea of sharing it publicly.

Final note: I think it's a good marketing tool for productivity tools. "It's such a good to-do list that people with ADHD can find success with it! That implies that if you don't have ADHD, you will be a superhero when you use it!"

Considering ADHD is poorly understood, historically highly underdiagnosed and significantly prevalent it’s not surprising there’s a lot of content about trying to to understand it for both people with and without ADHD.

It's likely a definitive example of selection bias, you won't hear people not talking about having it, but ADHD affects (approximately) 30% of the population.

Assuming even a tiny amount of those are loud when exploring their discovery would mean a lot of people talking about it online.

This is likely also combined with Millennials (my cohort at least) being one of the most self-aware generational cohorts in history (while also being a tad self-centered).

I have my own journey with ADHD ("many markers" but no official diagnosis, as that could negatively affect my life in Sweden) and it was really liberating to learn that, no, I wasn't just lazy, that I may have an issue with executive function and if I work around it I can at least partially tackle it.

The amount of stress that gets applied by society for people who are "not performing up to their potential" or slacking off or what-have-you is actually quite immense when you cannot force yourself to work, so I understand people who feel liberated in the moment and who seek solutions, loudly.

My understanding is that ADHD prevalence is closer to 5-10%. That's the number I've seen most by reputable sources.

Nonetheless, the rest of your post resonates with me and and your points stand on their own :)

I think its unknowable, but I definitely read 30% expected undiagnosed in the population.

Here is a reputable source that claims 25%

https://wexnermedical.osu.edu/mediaroom/pressreleaselisting/...

Once it's at this level of prevalence, can it really be considered neurologically atypical?

The broader point that's often missed is that this is a naturally occurring and common phenotype that doesn't gel well with office-work culture and the modern regimented schooling system, forcing people to sit for unnaturally long times focusing on anxiety-inducing problem solving all day. It's not normal, and it's a recipe for burnout, and our only answer, is not to change the system, but to try and medicate it away, with sometimes devastating consequences.

It seems odd that as a society it's been deemed a-okay to pathologize a cluster of traits shared by 30% of the population.

neurotypes exist in an n-dimensional space with loose clusterings, making binary attributes at best vague and clumsy.

i hope we move away from pathologizing and toward making social and economic structures adaptive for people that are currently challenged by them, and likewise find better ways for people to adapt their lives to fit how their minds work

Not necessarily pathologize – just structure society in a way that doesn't quite work for them (me included.)

We as a society seem to enjoy doing that.

Half of the population are provably on a different circadian rhythm than the other half, but we force everyone to function only one way.

There’s a dozen more examples, related to psychiatry and medicine.

So if 30% of people develop high blood pressure should be pretend that doesn't exist anymore as well?

I also feel like A LOT of people have ADHD (a lot more than it was initially estimated). I think like 50% or more of the population is neurodivergent (or maybe it's because neurodivergent people tend to group together, so everyone around you seems neurodivergent too).

If the majority are divergent, then what are they divergent from?

> What happened to "music for concentration"?

ADHD is a structural brain difference that results in different and in some cases paradoxical responses to various things that affect alertness, attention, etc. Which makes a very good reason to distinguishing between things “for concentration” (presumably targeting neurotypical audiences) and things “for ADHD”.

I have symptoms. My only approach is to mitigate through diet, exercise, sleep, and a small dose of caffeine and nicotine. Oh, and limiting decision making (automate, defer, or grease the rails), avoid attention traps (endless scrolling). And so on.

In my mind, ADHD and identification with ADHD (self labeling, medical system labels, etc.) is only a liability.

> I see a lot of people with ADHD (on- and offline) who tend to make it an essential part of their identity

Honest question: why is this an issue? If someone makes it part of their identity its because they feel its important for others to know, and that can be for a variety of reasons.

Is there a reason we shouldn't make it part of our identity, if we so choose?

You should choose what is right for you and accept that others won't like it, like anything else in life

Because they want to gatekeep it and how you are supposed to act with it.

Boy, the unsubstantiated claims in this thread are really ramping up. Who's the 'they' in this case? You saw a person gatekeeping something one time so now it's some kind of problem to discuss real symptoms that impact people's lives in a very tangible way?

I have ADHD and I've decided that it's part of my identity.

I was diagnosed late at 28. When I got diagnosed, my psychologist told me that I had to reassess my life. Many behaviors that people had misinterpreted as laziness, carelessness, or lack of commitment were actually manifestations of my ADHD.

Friends who thought I didn't care when I forgot plans, teachers who believed I wasn't trying hard enough, and colleagues who saw me as disorganized - they were all seeing untreated ADHD symptoms, not character flaws.

Understanding this was liberating because it meant I wasn't fundamentally flawed as a person. I had to rebuild myself, my confidence - it was a new start in life.

It's a process to relearn and teach yourself that you can do it now. Labeling publicly, saying to your friends and family that you are ADHD makes it so that you OWN your change, you OWN your disability.

tldr, ADHD as an IDENTIY is for me : Reclaim control over your narrative instead of letting others define your behaviors

Create accountability for yourself and set realistic expectations with others

Remove shame from the equation by openly acknowledging your challenges

Enable yourself to access appropriate accommodations and support systems

The problem with ADHD is, that the symptoms are very common and it is mostly the degree to which an actual case of ADHD is different from the neurotypical person. So, a big portion of the overall population feels like they might have it and many of them are willing to put in whatever work it takes to find a doctor that confirms their diagnosis.

Underdiagnosis is a much bigger issue. There are millions who are dealing with this alone and without awareness that can help them.

Sincerely, person diagnosed at age 35

> who tend to make it an essential part of their identity.

I tend to notice that more with younger people who find out earlier and get it treated.

Finding out in your 30's because you realize things shouldn't be going so inexplicably wrong is different.

I think people in their 20s find it easier to make group identities, and being in a group that tends to be disadvantaged is a uniting force. This is true whether or not you actually have ADHD, which is a problem for sure.

fwiw I see more posts like yours than I see posts that your post describes.

I'm in the middle of pursuing an autism diagnosis as an adult, and despite the obvious manifold benefits it would bring to my family's life, judgment from people like you is the #1 reason I'm hesitating going through with it.

Similar things exist for dyslexia, introverts, etc

What exactly is the point you are making?

That ADHD is over diagnosed?

That it doesn’t require tailored interventions or advice?

That social media is exploiting interest in ADHD to provide low quality advice?

Or something else? Can you clarify your point?

I've ADHD and I'm on the spectrum. Others may differ - it's a spectrum after all- but I feel no list-only app will ever silence the drunk baboon on my shoulder constantly pulling my attention from what I'm doing.

I'd advise goblin.tools to market itself differently and aim for the neurotypical market as well.

#my2cents

Yeah, no gameification or breaking down can make doing the dishes or writing documentation more interesting than whatever my interest of the month is, unfortunately. I'd be beyond cooked without medication

I'm not diagnosed anything, but I'm a paid user because of Magic ToDo -- and I don't even use it that often. It really is magic, and I use it most often as a demonstration of what LLMs are capable of in somewhat unusual use cases.

I’m quite NT and I tried Magic Todo and was impressed. This is really a great application of the tech.

ADHD + spectrum as well. I couldn't agree with this more.

I have to say my neurotypical family members love goblin chef tool as well as the spectrum individual.

I second that, I saw a lot, I tried some... most of them are just task planners, but I was always missing same basic features.

what is that same basic feature they are all missing?

There are other tools in the menu.

As another AuDHD Iwish it was so.

Then I could just blink them and get benefits.

Instead I sometimes can't follow a book that is both engaging and interesting to read because 3 pages in my brain will throw at me at least one novel story plot bunny, musing on alternative solutions to whatever is the problem in the book, musing on implementing things from the book, possibly multiple software project ideas, etc.

And all of the above can happen for both fiction and non fiction.

And then come the interrupts while trying to focus, which quickly lead to situations where I can't focus due to expectation of interrupt, which only then leads to doom scrolling because it both fills a need to do something and is worthless enough to not care about being interrupted

Backing this one up with my own experience of ADD (I was never hyperactive):

I've tried all the distraction reducing techniques, and the distraction reducing techniques have been tried on me.

In school, I was, at least 70 percent of the time, sent to the isolation desk, facing a wall, only a pencil. This didn't help.

I've tried going to remote cabins, no internet. I've tried no devices. This did not help.

The problem (so far as I've come to understand) is not that I am unusually susceptible to distractions, it's that it's unusually difficult to convert 'needing to do something' into 'focus'.

The problem is not that something derails the train, but that there's no tracks. Starting something does not make it more likely that I'll continue it. Going in a direction doesn't have 'momentum'.

This is very difficult to understand, since it's not really 'a tendency that everyone has but more', it's a different brain. You aren't going to understand it by going 'oh like when I'm distracted', you have to try and create a picture from scratch, not based on your experience, but by listening to people.

Not that what people tell you should be just immediately imported into your worldview, people sure can be wrong about themselves. But you can't necessarily check other people's experiences against your own.

(The word "you" in this comment is referring to the general non-ADHD person)

Yeah, just when people who have never experienced depression, anxiety, and panic attacks tell me to "think about something else"...

I can't focus either especially if there are any sounds, for possibly different reasons than ADD/ADHD, but Lord knows, I am full of psychiatric co-morbidities.

I feel that reading example in my bones.

I *can not* count the number of times I've been reading something I want to be reading in a perfect environment, only to have to re-read pages because while I was mechanically reading, my brain was somewhere else entirely. It's usually when I go to turn/click to the next page that I realize I have no idea what I just read.

As a diagnosed ADHD. Nope. I found them boring and I used none of them except Instagram but I use it to dump some photos and contact friends only (Less than 1hr per week). It is not YouTube or Netflix or you name it either. It is about the executive function. Even if I sit in front of the work my brain will not do it. For example when I watch a lecture or read a book, knowledge just cant get into my brain. But sometimes they do, and when they do, I cannot stop it either. There are numerous times I kept coding until my blood sugar was too low that I almost passed out because I counldnt stop to grab some food. For me, ADHD symptoms are that I have no control over my attention.

Not the parent, but I'm also AuDHD. My current drunk baboon is named OOH LOOK, SHINY but sometimes it's named THIS IS BORING LETS GO DO SOMETHING ELSE.

A sufficient dose of a medically prescribed stimulant medication quiets him down enough to usually ignore him, for me. It's been literally life changing. My lack of concrete executive function cost me the job of a lifetime.

Same here. I went through college and grad school by sheer will over sleep. Once I allowed myself to think that maybe it was ADD I got a prescription and now I get twice as much done with half the effort. It's frustrating as hell, all that time I spent...when I could have done more while also invested more time into my family.

With all the disclaimers of talk to your own psychiatrist noted, I’m curious what specific medication is helping you. I went through a similar process and some of the side effects were too much to balance.

Vyvanse here. Very "soft" compared to other ADHD meds.

Thank you!

Grandparent commenter here.

I'm on the Oregon state health plan, which requires you to cycle through any of the standard ADHD drugs before they'll let you prescribe the long term versions.

The lowest dose of adderall (sp idk) didn't do much for me, but the next level up silenced the distraction demon pretty well. I ended up trying ritalin next, and am currently on the second highest dose of the long term extended release version.

I was able to notice adderall's stimulant effects, but I didn't notice ritalin's. That got me in trouble on the second day of taking the high dose long term one, or should I say it got me in trouble at 5 AM the next morning. Folks, always modify your full screen games to include a real time clock. It's important.

For now I find it to be acceptable. I've adjusted my schedule to make sure I take the meds on time and go to bed on time. Additionally, thanks to it I now have enough executive function to not only make a schedule but actually be able to mostly stick to it.

Again, this stuff can be life changing. If you have the opportunity, go a month or two with all of the major drugs to see what they do for you. I'm 44 and could have been diagnosed and on meds at 11. Don't wait.

Fair warning, what will write only applies to my circumstance and I have no intention to denigrate the life experiences of others.

I used to prescribe myself labels like ADHD. In fact I probably got into this habit at a very young age since people around me were already talking about labels and how they did or didn't apply to me, and I soaked all this up as children are wont to do.

I no longer abide by such labels anymore and still live comfortably. I discovered that what I called "ADHD" and motivated me to get on the Ritalin/TODO list/5-alarms-a-day train was my method of relieving myself from stress. Distracting myself was my way of coping with stress I found impossible to deal with or even approach at a lower level.

And historically, I had experienced the consequences of not distracting myself firsthand. In the past, when I forced myself take breaks and do literally nothing for a week at a time, I was stressed for what seemed like no reason for every waking hour. The stress would only be relieved when I went back to distracting myself with something (on my computer, at work, etc.). The difference was I was previously unable to recognize the cause of this stress and this address it effectively.

When I was able to address the underlying cause of stress (and this lurked in the background for years or even decades and would not have appeared consciously without heavy-duty and sustained focus), my desire for Facebook-Twitter-HN disappeared overnight. So did my stimulant prescription.

With that, the label "ADHD" disappeared as well. I called myself that a lot over the years. It turns out I was just fighting myself the whole time for seeing myself as "too weak" to deal with being unable to sustain "attention", and targeting my distraction as if it were the ultimate cause, not the symptom it really was. The stress was the real problem, and it remained latent for years without me so much as thinking of it.

On top of being distracted all the time from stress, my belief was if I couldn't stick to a stringent schedule with every minute detail mapped out for each day, I was a failure. Because my impression was that that's the standard you needed to set for yourself to address "ADHD", and if you weren't putting in your reps, your condition would dominate you and you'd live a miserable existence... which made miserable, which only made me believe more strongly in this narrative, and so on in an endless spiral.

I should mention everyone around me also believed in the "disease model" of psychology, so they only served to reinforce these beliefs. I think I renounced this model a bit too strongly in hindsight, as a few of my relationships have been left permanently altered as a result.

Now I don't bother to follow a strict schedule except for work things. I clean my place on Sunday. That's my only real obligation I've set for myself. Things that "need to be" done somehow get done automatically - because I don't need to pressure myself into doing them, I just want to, and they don't take much time. I no longer feel the need to sweat any of those details or micromanage my own life anymore, and instead just take life as it comes.

It shouldn't come as a surprise that I've never been happier with myself living this way.

> Now I don't bother to follow a strict schedule except for work things.

Huh, "just" that? If I could do that I'd feel like I'm on the freaking top of the world.

Yeah, I get it. It really is exactly how you describe, compared to how I lived before at least - like being on top of the world all the time. No organizational tools or anything required, except maybe a couple calendar reminders for big events each month. No alarm either, now I wake up naturally each day and still get enough time to prepare for work each morning and maybe even watch a bit of TV. (To be fair, I'd probably want to schedule things more often if I had more social obligations to fulfill, but I'm relatively alright working on things by myself right now.)

I did purchase a fitness monitor though, which I found an excellent investment since it provides me with ideas as to how I should spend my energy (exercising or recovery). But it doesn't really impose any "must-do" activities; it only reflects the state of your body day-to-day and leaves the rest to you. I'm already motivated enough to hit the gym for 30 minutes whenever I feel up to it, so it's just an extra thing on top to track my progress.

It's not like every single day is perfect or anything - example, today I fumbled my sleep schedule and couldn't as get much done - but even the off days I can accept with a feeling of grace knowing they're only temporary, and even times like these are necessary in reaching happier places.

I'm glad you worked it out!

Yeah so that's the thing. In my case, I'll call what I received from my therapy "a self-goodness". I think others may term this nebulous quality "self-esteem", "a deeper understanding of the universe/cosmos/God", "motivation", "confidence", and so on. But "self-goodness" is something I came up with so it resonates with me personally.

In my case, "solving stress" (or perhaps "reaching inner peace" in my own words) meant being capable of enjoying whichever activity I put my mind to, success or failure, and being able to look forward to the future in a generally positive light.

But hold on. This sort of thing I had already read in probably dozens of pithy self-help books for years in the past. It is not knowledge that I nor I'm sure many other people don't already know. And it is repeated in places like here and elsewhere ad infinitum.

What I accomplished was not being made aware of what the solutions out there are, but becoming able to enact such solutions I had heard over and over and over again for years for my benefit, but couldn't, because of what most people would call depression.

But this is only a surface-level answer. Allow me to go deeper still:

The main lesson I learned, and try to put into practice each day now, was that a fulfilling life needs to be experienced, not taught. Basically, it's the difference between watching a video of someone bungee-jumping, and actually bungee-jumping yourself. I think concepts like "qualia" and the "Mary's room" thought experiment are relevant here. A good example of this is talk therapy. In my case at least, talk therapy was ineffective because my therapist had all the experience and was eager to tell me all about it, but because of the limitations of words, she could only impart knowledge to me, and prod me in directions I was unwilling to go in to begin with. That leads to guilt and shame for not living up to the expectations or suggestions of others, and led nowhere.

So beyond an issue as simple as "being depressed" and "going to therapy" to try to solve it, my issue was this: due to limitations of my experience (commonly termed "depression" by most people), I was unable to impart any meaning to the knowledge I did have so that I could put it into practice, and thus gain experience in a way that brought me satisfaction. And I had a lot of knowledge, through endless rumination about how best to deal with my situation that didn't lead to a conclusive answer for a long time. None of that knowledge made me happy or brought results. And with no way to enjoy experience, I had no force driving me to get it for myself.

Okay, so what is to be done about these problems?

That's the thing. Literally nothing I've just told you in the paragraphs above would have put me even one step closer to solving my issues - because I'd heard it all before, for years. In fact, there are entire systems like the authors of self-help books that basically rehash versions of the above treatises in endless different flavours - all of them having little effect except imparting knowledge when the optimal solution would be to impart experience.

This limitation is not the fault of those self-help authors. Because they're only using the tools they know how to use - words. And mere words have their limits. In fact, since my psylocibin therapy I've opened quite a few self-help books and remarked just how much I agree with pretty much everything the authors say - because I have enough experience and knowledge to just agree with them and learn nothing profound. The difference between now and then was my willingness to put such knowledge to use. I am convinced that none of those very self-help books would have ever taught me how to cultivate that willingness with any amount of hard work. My belief is that it is extremely hard or impossible to discipline yourself into gaining this willingness with effort, especially if you are already depressed.

(Aside, this is why I find Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus so fascinating - it mirrors the way I see the world now, by building up an extremely complex system of interlocking rules only to declare all of it nonsense in the end, stating that there are certain things beyond mere words that still hold importance to philosophy.)

No, more fundamentally, what I lacked was this willingness to experience things in life - a sense of "self-goodness". This is the thing that lets one convert knowledge to experience. It's motivation, focus, confidence, ability to just get-up-and-go without being prompted, and so on. I know what this is now, and I didn't have it before. I can now engage it at will pretty much every day and get good results. I did not understand (experientially) such a thing existed before my therapy. It was all new experience to me, even if I had knowledge of what it was supposed to be like by reading books, watching romantic comedies, etc.

So how did I obtain this "self-goodness"?

My whole life, society had told me that reward only comes with hard work. If you don't put in hard work, you don't get results, and are screwed. This reflects poorly on yourself, and you need to try harder. Going to talk therapy was one way of "putting in the hard work", and yet I never got results. It was clear that this way of viewing the world was not helping me.

Instead, what I needed to be taught was that this fundamental "self-goodness" is not an experience that can be earned, or transmitted via talking about what it is logically - it must be given, and for free. Most people I suspect receive this self-goodness in childhood by parents that give unconditional love to them, and there aren't as many problems. I was not so lucky, so I had to obtain this sense elsewhere. In order to gain this sense, I needed an experience that I did not have to work for. I had worked as hard as I could my whole life and it did not amount to inner peace.

So where is this experience to be found?

That's the tricky thing. I can only speak for what worked for me, which is psylocibin therapy with a licensed therapist. Some people have religious awakenings. Some people build networks of friends and gain experience that way. In my own experience, nothing other than the correct drug would have done any good. I had several prescriptions for things like stimulants and SSRIs at the time. I tossed them all away the day after. I say this, but ultimately I do believe the "chemical imbalance" theory of depression carried some validity in my circumstance - insofar as it allowed me to get over what seemed like the impossible hurdle of gaining self-goodness, after which I no longer had to bicker about such theories anymore. There are too many more important things to focus on. Psylocibin promotes neuroplasticity in the correct circumstances, so it may have just been a matter of the proper neurons not being linked up in just the right ways. Sometimes (but not always), I reflect and think that's really all it came down to in the end.

But I can rest assured that such an experience took barely any effort to gain, even though I was trapped in my own web of rules and logic. That was the whole point. There is no virtue in fighting so hard for something you were supposed to have been given for free. That sort of effort makes you look at the people who do have self-goodness act so effortlessly and wonder why they deserve that automatic self-goodness and you don't. I think feelings like those drive a lot of sadness between people in the modern world.

Coming back to "stress", I stopped worrying about it so much once I became occupied so much with fascination with the world around me. In fact, stress stops being something to be "solved", but to be tuned up and down according to one's desires. If I relax too much, I wonder what I'm making of myself and strive to work on a skill or two to fill the time. If I work too hard, I desire more time to myself. So stress becomes a sort of neutral force in the world that accompanies your travels. It reemphasizes how a balance in all things is important to keep in mind, even for issues that you may at first desire to "solve" somehow.

In the end, even my rumination served a purpose. I can now put the sizeable stock of knowledge I gained to good use in earning experience. But now my quantity of knowledge looks so small in hindsight, and makes me realize I have a lot to learn. I am quite excited to learn about new things each day.

Ironically, nowadays I end up agreeing with the self-help authors that "effort is rewarding", with regards to things like exercise, cooking, my job, creative pursuits - in every circumstance except gaining a sense of self-goodness. I think many of those authors never had to deal with trying to cultivate self-goodness from absolute nothingness, and thus have no words to describe what such a process is like, so all they can say is things like "you can do it, I believe in you" and "I don't have anything else to tell you". It is my belief that this single idea is one of the most misunderstood self-help mantras in existence. The people who need to hear it the most are the ones who are served by it the least. And some of those who speak about it at length, even with the best of intentions, will end up talking past a lot of desperate people who need to feel an inner peace for themselves to be able to have any chance at understanding it at all.

I really appreciate you taking the time to write this all out for me. I’ve read through it several times now with a couple breaks between.

If I were to summarize, it’s about enjoying the process rather than the result. Much easier said than done, but the ideal goal. The thing that keeps me and people like me from enjoying the process is the constant background of “is this going to be worth it”. Perhaps just the awareness of seeing this happening in real time could help in cutting short that enjoyment-blocker. To call it out and label it as such.

I’m not looking for a response from you, but wanted to take the time to thank you for writing this all out.

No problem! Even if I understand that, in a way, everything I wrote is just nonsense if kept as a jumble of words and not put into practice, I wrote it in such a way that perhaps someone like past me could see relatively easily that there are still solutions out there within reach, even for someone like them. :)

Thanks for sharing.

Interesting. If it's not too personal, would you mind sharing what the "cause" turned out to be, and how you were able to discover it?

Bit too personal for me to talk about sorry, but the therapy that worked was psybocilin (magic mushrooms) with a licensed counselor. Specifically a dosage of 5g taken in intervals + intensive guidance.

I can say that if I chose to remain too squeamish to ever try the "scheduled drugs" route, my life would have marched onward in an alternate timeline with little to no hope for recovery.

> goblin.tools is written and maintained by Bram De Buyser, an AI, software and data engineer.

I'm not saying that a semicolon and an Oxford comma are _necessary_, here - but I am saying that I did a double-take at my first interpretation that we are now naming and personifying AIs.

I am neurodivergent. Yet, this website (while well-intentioned) feels chaotic, offering too many things (I bet the author is neurodivergent as well :)). So, instead of doing something from the TODO, I want to give the professor mode a try.

In any case, I saw quite a few time something "expanding the list". Usually it works less than anything that actually asks you on the next step - in this case, my go-to are recent LLM models. For example, it split "take out the trash" into 8 steps - quite a lot of detail, even for an autist.

I asked it to break down eating a pie, this is what I got:

Choose a pie

Gather necessary utensils (fork, plate, napkin)

Place the pie on the plate

Cut a slice of the pie

Pick up the slice with the fork

Bring the slice to your mouth

Take a bite of the pie

Chew and savor the flavor

Repeat until finished

Dispose of any leftovers responsibly

Clean up the utensils and plate

Maybe an absurd example but I feel like something like this makes it seem even more intimidating to do basic tasks

You can adjust the spiciness level (level of detail) to the right of the prompt.

At the lowest you get

    - Select a pie
    - Grab a fork or your hands
    - Take a piece of the pie
    - Bring it to your mouth
    - Chew and swallow the pie

Still probably a bit much, but I think using a to-do list for eating a pie is also a bit much.

I did "get a haircut" and it was a pretty good breakdown. Same with "Paint a room in my house". I think these types of tasks are more suitable for step-by-step breakdowns than "eat a pie".

> still probably a bit much

I think what's worse is that it still over detailed the steps but left out the actually additive steps of the OP's list which I would say is the bit about the getting/cleaning the dishes and trash

That sounds perfect to me. Often on low-spoons days, I'll ask ChatGPT to do exactly this, break down a task or recipe into the simplest, concrete steps to be taken. It's meant to be used when your mental energy is low enough that "obvious" things don't seem obvious anymore, and you need them broken down into a form that doesn't assume or ask anything of you.

It's like taking an old school BASIC program and modularising it into small self-contained functions. That may increase the lines of code by a lot, but it still makes it simpler and easier to process because you only need to keep one function in mind at a time.

Vaguely related: Julio Cortázar’s “Instructions on How to Climb a Staircase” – https://doarchstairs2016.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/20...

If you want to see a really intimidating breakdown, check out Carl Sagan's approach to baking an apple pie from scratch.

Hm, these instructions are interesting -- is it suggesting I repeatedly pick up an entire slice of pie with a fork and take bites out of it?

It sounds like eating a pie will be a huge pain and I’ll give up halfway through it, assuming that I don’t get distracted even before.

This is a great use for LLMs because anywhere that they can get someone over the activation energy requirement of the blank page effect, it's okay if they're wrong – it's much easier to correct a wrong broken-down list than start it oneself.

One of the bigger uses of Llama I found for myself is throwing a description of email to write, having them generate a skeleton for me, this kickstart enough that I can do a rewrite even when I totally lack the energy to start one.

Sometimes also making them rewrite it in a different style then rewriting that manually again

I cautiously like this. I asked it to break down “clean the bathroom” and it gave me a reasonable series of steps.

It then gave a time estimate of 3 hours 25 minutes, but I know from my own time tracking that doing a similar series of steps takes me 40 minutes on average.

It seems to overestimate the time taken to do very simple tasks, so if you break the task down too far then it will always wildly overestimate. Perhaps a fix would be to ask the LLM to make one estimate for the overall task, make separate estimates for each subtask, and then ask it to reconcile the two? Something like chain-of-thought/reasoning.

Oh hey! I made something like this that integrates with TickTick

https://github.com/Podginator/TickGPTick

It needs updating, but basically you set a tag that let’s you expand tasks out much in the way goblin tools does.

I just recently started heavily using TickTick, and my first thought on seeing this was that it would be cool to be able to integrate this into it. Very cool to see someone has done it, thank you!

If I might ask, how was your experience working with the TickTick API? I've been waffling on whether my frustration with some of the pain points I have with it (e.g. no way to hide recurring daily tasks that you've already completed today but aren't actionable for tomorrow from cluttering the "tomorrow" heading in every smart list) justify building my own dashboards for it.

Nice. AI-powered replacement for my missing executive function. Now I just have to remember to use it…

Diversity makes teams stronger but makes clear communication harder. 20% of the population aren't neurotypical... they're simply not wired the same way. Throw in cultural differences.

I was so excited when I found The Judge: Am I misreading the tone of this?

What a wonderful tool to have at hand when things go awry in email threads, chat rooms etc.

Curiously, or not, I'm not sure what the expectation is, it seemed to quickly enter somewhat of an infinite loop then I started with "What is the meaning of life?". Around level 3 or 4 each simplification is essentially what was presented for that item in the prior list. Maybe some hidden meaning there ...

Pretty neat. The automatic breakdowns are cool, but you absolutely need to move the delete button inline. Confirm dialog if there are items beneath it, otherwise just delete.

Generated like 10 sub-items for me, 5 of which were relevant. But to remove the 5 junk ones, you have to open the dropdown for each and hit delete.

With the Estimator I asked...

How long to build a Space Shuttle? "5 to 10 years"

How long to build a Time Machine? "5 to 50 years"

Tearing down the governance systems of the United States of America and replacing them with a dictatorship? "Several months to several years"

Democracy is just a handful of key people following some norms. This can change very quickly once the wrong people are in power. See the timeline of the downfall of the Weimar republic.

What used to work for me is to build a single list every morning (based on yesterdays list) and then just do it one after another without allowing myself to prioritise after that point.

My largest executive function issue is the guilt of not doing some other thing.

If I have a very stressful situation, I can easily organise my thoughts and ruthlessly prioritise what is important from what is not important.

In "peace" times, this doesn't work at all, and instead if I have something that I know will take half a day (say, for example, fixing a subtle bug in the email system) then I will feel guilty about doing that over something else (say: doing paperwork for the worked hours that month).

Thus, I do neither. Until one becomes critical.

It's fucking stupid, but I can't fix it.

I'm very similar to you and going through similar issues.

I've also started to write a to-do list on paper and keep it always open in front of me on my desk. This is the only thing that seems to work for me. If I keep a virtual to-do list, I lose track of it, forget to check/update it and it eventually becomes useless.

You're not alone, hope you find something that works for you!

Nice! Great idea and focus.

I have a similar function built into my app, which takes the proposed name for a checklist and description and uses it to generate steps. Have heard many use it for executive function management: https://steplist.app

In the age of AI, human-written instructions are not only intriguing and valuable but also more dependable and meaningful than those created by AI.

Took a look. So annoying that you can't delete any of those lists. What happens if I don't like/drink coffee?

When you log in you can create your own lists, bookmark ones you might like, and only see the ones you want.

Okay, I wasted a few minutes in The Judge. It's too damn hilarious giving it a passage that insults the reader's mother in fine detail and then having the AI explain very politely and patiently why someone might take offense to that.

I'd really love a voice based AI tool that will follow up with me on projects and next steps.

So like I'm renovating a house and I've got to find someone to help with drywall, get a new top of the septic, get quotes on the driveway, etc. Multiply this a few times with my job and side project and so on.

It would be great if it would just ask me what's new with each thing and update tasks and remind me to follow up with the person not calling me back etc. Of course, all this can be done in your mind or with Todo apps but just something to talk to and nudge would be great.

I’m on the same boat as you. Had this idea some time ago and I feel that this should be doable with today’s LLMs tooling. On the coming weeks I’ll be trying to hook something up and see how far can I get, with the extra requirement from my side that everything should run locally.

I use ChatGPT almost exclusively for this today due to quite extreme ADHD that even when treated, leaves me weaker than most in the executive department. My therapists have always advised that I have some kind of "second brain" where things live, otherwise they just vanish into the ether.

Why use "AI" at all? Because now I have something to yell at me and ask if I actually finished the thing I said I would before jumping into some new thing. If I have not, it can give me a concrete next step to help me overcome the analysis paralaysis that may be preventing completion.

I've worked hard to configure the thing so that it won't tolerate my bullshit. It is entirely structured around pushing me to function as a normal adult should. Yes its sad and pathetic I can not do this alone, how broken must I be that an "AI" is any level of assistance in this area etc. The idea I am sure seems ludicrous to 'normal people' who would never even remotely consider using it for such a thing. However it is what it is, and I would prefer the shame that comes with the extreme benefit I have received as opposed to the opposite.

When I open the app and am greeted by a mostly blank screen with an empty todo list, the first thing I think is "How is this different from any other task manager app? How do use it in a way that would help me?".

And then I close the tab! (naturally, ofc)

A little bit of onboarding / guidance on how neurodiverge peeps can get the most out of it would go a long way.

adhd here. bad enough to not graduate from high school on time. I have been medicated for a decade now and I dream of finally having built my systems around life up to the degree that I feel good about discontinuing them. It's not good for you to be on stimulants every day like I am. If your flavor of adhd is mild and the functional impairment you have doesn't literally ruin your life, consider working your way up the theraputic ladder from therapy with an ADHD specialized therapist, starting meds only if necessary. Consider your goals wrt your brain stuff and measure your results against that. Don't get on the meds unless you have to.

> bad enough to not graduate from high school on time.

This is a good example of how wide the ADHD spectrum can be. From my perspective, I’d actually call this mild, not because it is, but because I never finished high school at all. My parents bought into stigma and refused meds against medical advice, and the fallout ruined both my childhood and much of my adult life.

I get you're aiming for a cautious take, but I’d urge anyone reading this to think hard before following it. If you do have more than mild ADHD, this kind of “avoid meds” advice can be genuinely harmful, it’s the kind of thinking that keeps people suffering for years when they don’t have to.

As an adult, I refused meds while my life continued to fall apart. Convinced by stigma and those that constantly shouted "MEDICATION BAD." So as my life spiraled ever downwards, I increased the rate at which I beat my self up telling myself constantly I just needed more willpower, better systems, or the right therapist and it would all change. Spoiler alert: none of it worked without the baseline support stimulants gave me and refusing to medicate was one of the biggest mistakes I have ever made. It did such a degree of damage to my life it's not even possible to begin to describe it.

Stimulants aren’t inherently dangerous when used properly. What is dangerous is untreated or mistreated ADHD and the damage it causes, to you the individual and those around you. The therapeutic ladder should start with what works, framing meds as a “last resort” is unhelpful and rooted in stigma, not reality.

If you think you have ADHD, get off the internet and see a real doctor. Work with them to figure out what actually helps you without assumption or expectation and don’t let other people’s experiences or stigma decide your treatment for you.

I largely agree with you. I do think that for the people with ADHD who graduated college and got advanced degrees, who held down jobs in industry for years before getting an inkling they had ADHD - they should indeed use the theraputic ladder, starting with therapy first.

I don't say that because I think medication is inherently evil, but because I believe the therapy actually worked quite well in my case. If other people can get the step change in their quality of life for the cost of relatively short term, and avoid a lifetime of medication, why would they not? I want people to consider this option.

And yes, see a real doctor - and not one who, like mine, heard my story and said "OK you've probably got it, here's a prescription for adderall".

Edit to add: I feel you wrt to the parental stigma. It burned me as well. My parents took me to some lab visit where they hooked me up to an EEG and made me press buttons when lights went on. Weirdly enough, the novel situation was quite stimulating for me, and I was given a clear negative diagnosis. Any time the topic came up again after that I was shut down. Took until my 20s to get any help for it, and another 5 years to seek therapy, which has been great.

So how many neuro-divergent people did you test this on before you made the claim that it would help them?

Haha Magic ToDo is fun. I got a reasonable set of steps for a project and when I'm in the "whatever, just tell me what to do" overwhelmed/surrender mode this would be great. Also love that subtasks can be easily broken down into subsubtasks with a click.

Would love this as a todoist extension for brainstorming subtasks.

One of the best tools I've seen this year!

I'm not sure about "neurodivergent people" part though. I don't think I'd call myself neurodivergent or anything close. Pretty sure the app will be useful for anyone.

i can imagine a tool where you take a picture of a cluttered desk or closet, and it produces a list of all the objects and then comes up with a plausible organization plan.

that's a little more complicated than these tools, but it seems within reach given publicly available technology. image segmentation models are really good now, the list of objects would be pretty reliable at least.

This is very cool.

Needs a bit of UI love for mobile. If you break down tasks 3 levels deep in becomes unusable.

This is neat. I wish I could self host it, I wouldn't use it otherwise.

This should make it easier for people to adapt when their job adopts Manna™.

one of the greatest ai idea on 2025, although the product has its own issues

AI backend.

Hacker News Comment.

Niche meta deep cut quip

vibe coding? nope. 100% vibe life

whats the product here exactly? 8 llm prompts? at least, according to the about page, they're using "Ethical" ai models. lol

I tried 'Clean home' and it gave me:

Gather cleaning supplies (broom, mop, vacuum, cleaning solutions, cloths)

Declutter each room by picking up items that don’t belong

Dust surfaces such as shelves, tables, and electronics

Wipe down surfaces with appropriate cleaning solutions

Clean glass surfaces and mirrors

Sweep or vacuum all floors

Mop hard floor surfaces

Clean carpets (vacuum or spot clean if necessary)

Freshen up the bathroom (clean toilet, sink, and shower)

Organize items back to their designated places

Take out the trash and recycling

Final walk-through to ensure everything is tidy

Seems perfectly reasonable, given the prompt.

I think most people would consider that launching a website is a separate task from viewing a website.

Most computer people, perhaps. For the average user the difference between an app and a website (especially an app-like website) is much fuzzier, and “launching” an app sounds more technical (and thus more appropriate for an operation that they don’t entirely understand) than “opening” it, so that’s the word they use.

I expect an LLM to be smarter than that, particularly for an audience that frequently works in the technology industry.

“Launching” an application (browser) has been a common phrase for as long as I can remember.

You are the only person discussing “launching an application” in this thread.

I suspect this tool is probably tuned to help with “14-step coffee days”[1] rather than big projects; the list you got is genuinely the more plausibly helpful one for that situation.

[1] https://crafty-butch.tumblr.com/post/638122754578726912/by-w...

I mean, yeah, that makes sense given that you used a 3 word prompt. It doesn't use real magic, despite having "magic" in the name. You should probably give it some more context.

I typed in "get a haircut" and it worked great.

In reply to your edit:

>I think most people understand there is a difference between launching a website and viewing a website.

I don't think so, at all. Non-tech people at my work come to me and say "I couldn't launch Outlook this morning", or "Google won't launch". They don't mean that they are building an email client or search engine. Most people use "launch" in the non-entrepreneurial way.

Try "ask a question unambiguously", haha!

I mean this could've happened with a human counterpart too (although, I know, less likely, but still). You probably gotta be at least a little more descriptive and specific about the task.

I tend to think that a better treatment for these kinds of issues is biological, rather than prescriptive. If one has issues with thinking in a productive way, a new mode of thinking (i.e., "step-by-step") can be only somewhat therapeutic. It fits in the same box. I think this applies to very many different kinds of brain issues.

Obviously, the foremost treatment today is various stimulants. But other, more healthful ways of increasing brain energy, such as nailing down blood sugar management, lowering inflammation, and reducing environmental irritants, are probably also helpful. These interventions need not even be expensive or dramatic. Using lower glycemic index carbohydrate sources (i.e., fructose vs starches), consuming Thiamine (Vitamin B1) to improve glucose metabolism in cells, alongside taking in adequate cholesterol for the production of stabilizing neurosteroids such as progesterone, is a more specific description.

Quotation from Mind and Tissue, by Ray Peat:

``` The brain, with its extremely high energy requirements, is usually the first to suffer from energy deprivation. At slight levels of deprivation, the brain will simply lose functional efficiency, but more serious or prolonged deprivation can produce lingering modification, or even structural damage which is relatively permanent (and may even have transgenerational effects).' Just as the skin (or muscle) has a lower energy requirement than the brain, the various parts of the brain have different requirements. The parts which are most resistant to damage are the "lowest" and "oldest" parts of the brain, the parts we have in common with frogs. These parts regulate physiological processes, such as breathing, and so it is biologically useful that they should be most resistant to damage. When a person is given an anesthetic, the first parts to stop functioning, or to go to sleep, seem to be just those parts that have the highest energy requirements, and which are least resistant to damage. The anesthetized person keeps breathing, for example, until very high doses of anesthetic are given, but other functions disappear one by one as the dose increases. The front part of the brain, which is most uniquely human (and "newest) but which doesn't have "specific" function, in the usual sense, is one of the most sensitive parts of the brain. It is a very large piece of tissue, and it seems to be involved in planning and choosing, in governing the other more specific functions (This part of the brain, as well as the cerebral cortex in general, gives us the ability to "disregard" stimuli, to use Lendon Smith's term.) The famous Russian neuro-psychologist, A.R. Luria, has described the behavior of dogs when this tissue is damaged or removed:

..destruction of the frontal lobes leads, not so much to a disturbance of memory as to a disturbance of the ability to inhibit orienting reflexes to distracting stimuli: ..such an animal cannot perform tasks involving delayed responses under ordinary conditions, but can do so provided that irrelevant, distracting stimuli are removed (if the animal is kept in total darkness, if tranquilizers are administered, and so on). The role of the prefrontal cortex in the synthesis of systems of stimuli and the creation of a plan of action is manifested not only in relation to currently acting stimuli, but also in the formation of active behavior directed towards the future? Various theories of what causes hyperactivity, e.g., low blood sugar, weak radiation from fluorescent lights and TV. 3 or food additives, 4 and the observation that drugs which stimulate the sympathetic or adrenergic nerves (ephedrine or caffeine, for example will relieve the symptoms, are all consistent with the idea that not enough energy is being supplied to permit this tissue to function properly. Low blood sugar will starve the nerves; food additives or any low-level poison can serve as a stressor of nerve tissue, leading to increased energy requirements;

many forms of very weak radiation' can lower the efficiency of metabolism, increasing the tissue's energy requirement, and brain tissue is the most sensitive to at least some kinds of radiation.

Intestinal irritation can cause disturbances of the nervous system, and should be considered as a possibility in "disorders of attention." Toxins produced by intestinal bacteria can affect the brain directly, but more often act by damaging the liver's ability to regulate blood glucose. The commonest cause of hypoglycemia is hypothyroidism, and a thyroid deficiency increases the tendency toward a high-adrenaline state, but more importantly, thyroid hormone is the basic regulator of efficient energy production. Memory and attention are impaired by even a slight thyroid deficiency. The Russian paradigm, with its emphasis on energy and inhibition, suggests that thyroid function should be carefully examined in cases of hyperactivity. Too often, western physicians think only about hyperthyroidism in hyperactivity. ```

The more recent book "Brain Energy" by Chris Palmer offers similar perspectives in terms of dysfunctional mitochondria as a fundamental causative factor in just about every mental illness.

The way it breaks down tasks quickly gets into a rut. If a certain item or context is not available there is no way to suggest that it pop up a level and say how to synthesize it or get to an alternative plan.

Once again, we see that AI stands for automated irresponsibility, not artificial intelligence.

Abstract it more.

This is essentially a thin wrapper around an LLM. Hardcoded prompt templates. The value isnt in the template itself, but more-so the curation of the template. So curate better.

Instead of hardcoding the prompt template, allow people to create/share/vote on arbitrary templates. A prompt library of sorts.

Open-ended prompting seems to go against your prescription of more curation. Also, I don't think most people want to think about LLM prompting. The tool should be prompting for me. I think they are going towards the right direction of how to use LLMs, not away from it.

A "break down task into steps" would be a great feature for every todolist app.

A problem is that the proposed audience are individuals who struggle with options. Giving them more options doesn't help them. Enabling a power user mode with user creation, voting, etc. would be valuable for others. I suspect template sharing in some situations is problematic because getting great results for an audience can have text which some will find objectionable.

It did not want to assist with cooking desoxyephedrine, but help with dumping a large garbage bag in a body of water without being seen was okay!