As an example of this: yesterday I sat down just to add a “testimonials” section to one of my websites. By the end of the work day, I’d redesigned the entire site (which I’d just done back in January), something I had no inclination of doing when I first sat down.
I got nothing else done that day, all because I got a whiff of inspiration, causing me to lose all sense of time and place in an obsessive pursuit of bringing a fleeting vision to life. I didn’t eat breakfast, and I didn’t stop to eat lunch until
my stomach hurt. There were several times during the day where I got caught myself forgetting to breathe.
But I’m mostly happy with how the website turned out, so there’s that. There’s some things that need to be done still, and it’s really, really hard for me to put the brakes on it over the weekend. Hell, here I am talking about it on Saturday morning.
Come Monday, maybe I’ll unravel a clumsily packaged mental model of what needs to be finished up in a whirlwind of keystrokes.
Or, just as likely, I’ll get annoyed by some trivial problem with a piece of code I’ve written, and go down a rabbit hole of studying alternative approaches until I find something I’m happy with, at which point I’m already waist-deep in the middle of some new project that may or may not ever see the light of day.
Equally likely is the possibility that too many sleepless nights will have sapped any semblance of focus and I’ll find myself just mindlessly going through the motions of being a semi-functional adult, forgetting all about finishing up this redesign.
Or, maybe I’ll get frustrated by a bug and decide to take a break from software development and come back to it later, like the time in 2012 when I realized that I’d accidentally trashed the source control on a project that I wanted to roll back a crappy refactoring job I’d just done on it, resulting in a five year gap on my resume and Github commits.
Thankfully, I’m self-employed and married to an incredibly understanding woman. ADHD is a hell of a disorder.
I got nothing else done that day, all because I got a whiff of inspiration, causing me to lose all sense of time and place in an obsessive pursuit of bringing a fleeting vision to life. I didn’t eat breakfast, and I didn’t stop to eat lunch until my stomach hurt. There were several times during the day where I got caught myself forgetting to breathe.
But I’m mostly happy with how the website turned out, so there’s that. There’s some things that need to be done still, and it’s really, really hard for me to put the brakes on it over the weekend. Hell, here I am talking about it on Saturday morning.
Come Monday, maybe I’ll unravel a clumsily packaged mental model of what needs to be finished up in a whirlwind of keystrokes.
Or, just as likely, I’ll get annoyed by some trivial problem with a piece of code I’ve written, and go down a rabbit hole of studying alternative approaches until I find something I’m happy with, at which point I’m already waist-deep in the middle of some new project that may or may not ever see the light of day.
Equally likely is the possibility that too many sleepless nights will have sapped any semblance of focus and I’ll find myself just mindlessly going through the motions of being a semi-functional adult, forgetting all about finishing up this redesign.
Or, maybe I’ll get frustrated by a bug and decide to take a break from software development and come back to it later, like the time in 2012 when I realized that I’d accidentally trashed the source control on a project that I wanted to roll back a crappy refactoring job I’d just done on it, resulting in a five year gap on my resume and Github commits.
Thankfully, I’m self-employed and married to an incredibly understanding woman. ADHD is a hell of a disorder.