I’ll check it out, I had it bad this weekend.

This was the one that made me think, oh, I might have ADHD!

Huh, I’ve always been a tea drinker rather than coffee, and I’ve always found tea more calming that coffee or caffeinated sodas. This could be why.

It could also help explain why my mother, who I’ve suspected for a while was undiagnosed, favored tea over coffee all her life and really went off the rails once she developed a caffeine allergy and stopped drinking it.

If I know long long it takes to get somewhere, I will somehow find myself leaving the house with exactly that amount of time, leaving no space for delays. This is bad. So instead I’ve started saying “I’m going to leave at this time, which is definitely more time than I need” and then not looking at a clock when I get there so I never find out how much closer I could cut it.

The other strategy is to plan to eat when I get there, before whatever it is starts. I will be motivated to get there with enough time to eat.

take a nap, me

I’ve had chronic intermittent tinnitus my whole life, can’t really say it helps me concentrate when it’s flaring up.

Edit: I went looking for samples of pink and brown noise, and the brown sample I found claims to help relieve tinnitus. Since my flare-ups are sometimes accompanied by headaches or vertigo, I’ll check it out and see if it helps me at all.

What about New Wave?

In a familiar situation (at work, getting my kids ready for school) I just look around for all the things I can see need doing and do whatever is highest priority.

In an unfamiliar situation (eg. trying to schedule back-to-school checkups) I flounder. I still look around for all the things I can see need doing, but;

• I don’t always know what needs doing

• I don’t always know how to do it

• I tend to do not the highest-priority task but the one with the lowest cost / barrier-to-entry

• I will be fighting my anxiety, related to the first two points, the whole time

I have found no software solution, premade or coded by myself personally, that beats a pen & paper bullet journal.

I recently tried one that boasted about how it used AI to help organize your tasks, but it didn’t and couldn’t do the one thing I needed it to, which is automatically populate a daily to-do list with suggested tasks.

I’m a waitress. A lot of bartenders and waitresses have ADHD or are undiagnosed but share symptoms.

Previously I’ve been a teacher and worked in childcare.

Caveat: The ones that are still around “just work”. The ones that were overconstructed or relied on now-deprecated elements broke and aren’t still around.

Remember flash-only websites? I do. How about “Best viewed in Netscape Navigator”?

I was going to say the same thing. Doing it with her, and at the same time every day (or every other day) would be the most helpful if she’s like me. Even better is getting her to join a study group with others taking the same exam; it’s a lot easier to do things for others who depend on me than for myself alone.

I wrote mine before reading yours, but vision zone and talk zone are exactly like my description.

The fantastic mind: This is what’s active when I read books, examine memories, do mathematics, and dream. Vision, sound, smell, texture, emotion, and kinaesthesia simulated and under some amount of control.

The word mind: Text and inflection and sound and meaning. This is what’s active when I speak or sing, whether internally or aloud (and I’m more or less constantly doing one or the other when awake, usually aloud but not always).

The reactive mind: Processing inputs, forming connections, and responding to them. This is what activates during empathic conversation, when making jokes, and during most kinds of problem-solving. Mostly below the conscious level, and the responses are left to the word mind to use or not use (in conversation), or the fantastic mind to visualize and examine (in problem-solving).

The guts: Some might call this “the intuitive mind” but mine is full of crap. It gives me anxiety about things for no good reason. It also tells me to stop what I’m doing and check on time-sensitive agenda needing my attention, so I do attend when it flares up, but it’s not great about giving direction to do something, just to stop or avoid things. It’s like a smoke detector that goes off randomly, but also when there’s smoke. No false negatives, so you keep using it, but lots of false positives.

Generally, as an introvert, the fantastic mind is active best when I’m alone or at least in calm, familiar surroundings.

The reactive mind I find somewhat draining to use but usually that’s compensated for by the results: emotional connections, jokes, problems solved, recognition at work. But I don’t really control its outputs, only whether or not I use them; if a task goes in and nothing comes out, that’s the ballgame; I might not even remember there’s a task anymore until something reminds me.

The word mind is closest to the decision-making process, and so I tend to think of it as the most “me” even though it’s not fully under my control.

And the guts, well, you know how I feel about that. It may be that the guts are the same thing as the reactive mind but acting on subconscious inputs rather than conscious ones, I suppose.

Obviously a little simplistic, but those are the four primary mental modes for me.

I love the sticky note idea! I’m going to try it as soon as I remember to buy sticky notes in four months.

Yep. Whatever project seems more interesting than what I’m doing at work, but less interesting once I get home and have options.

That’s why I turn off the oven at the same time. Even if I forget the food in there for a few minutes or a weekend or whatever, at least it’s not making the house smell bad.

I can’t see without my glasses anyway, why bother with lights?

Other people definitely feel like you do. Not me, I view texting as asynchronous, but a lot of people have expressed to me that they get frustrated when I don’t text back promptly.

Just because you get a diagnosis doesn’t mean you need to tell anyone about it, if you’re worried about being judged. That can stay between you and your doctor and maybe your pharmacist.