An MDs Guide to Super-Charging Your ADHD

A series of shorts, so you don’t get distracted and wander off.

People love reading about ADHD, it’s why the WSJ has bet the farm on *&$^posting its care. I had to be physically restrained from using the word Cerebral in the title of this article! If you have ADHD, starting an article and and then getting distracted and wandering off when you get a text message and then some other something and… where was I going?

This is the paradox. ADHD allows for remarkable feats of hyper-focus, and also predisposes people living with the condition to wildly inefficient and frustrating experiences if they don’t take their ADHD into account.

In my prior article on ADHD, I focused on biology.

He's never going to get it done. It's just not realistic. Thank you, AI algorithm, for generating that picture.

Ironically, in the Alanis Morissette sense

¹

of the term, ADHD makes it hard to plan things.

Optimize Your ADHD Brain for the Tasks at Hand: The Timer Cube Hack

This is a timer cube. It is the lowest tech timer of all time. It’s also less capable of distracting you.

This is a timer you can buy on Amazon. Use the link above. Aren't I nice? No, don't just use your phone, you'll get distracted by the other things on your phone.

The steps to be more efficient:

1. Set a timer for five minutes, and try to do something boring. See if you get through it.

2. Set a timer for the next increment up, and try to do some thing boring, and see if you get through it.

3. At the duration at which you can’t get through it without getting distracted, you have a quantitative measure of your own distractibility time limit.

Next, if you’re using stimulant medication for treatment, take that stimulant medication.

Repeat the above steps.

Now you have a sense of how long you can reasonably focus on a boring task. Just like you can vary the stimulant medication in the above study on yourself, you can vary the task.

“I can read boring book on economics for 10 minutes. On my medicine, I can do it for 20 minutes.”

As a child and adult psychiatrist, I’ve used this approach to titrate stimulants to different tasks my patients need to do. Yes, I will adjust the dosage and instructions as to when to take a medicine based on the task. And I will use the above approach to determine the dosage and timing of that dosage for that particular difficult task. Particularly for people who don't benefit from stimulant treatment most of the time, but do need it on a task by task basis.

Next, the Revolution

Stop trying to work longer.

Set the timer for the maximum amount of time you can focus. When that timer goes off, stop doing whatever it was you were doing. Get up, jump around, do anything other than that thing. Preferably, wiggle, jump, or run for 5 or 10 minutes, and then you can sit down, and set the timer again.

Force yourself to take breaks. Take those brakes at empirically determined intervals, using the above approach. And when your energy and attention starts to fade so that you can’t keep it up, stop.

Don’t do wildly ineffective work. It makes you feel bad, it drains you, and it’s not actually very good or a productive. It feels like working hard, but it’s only unpleasant, not effective.

This has been a brief ADHD super-tip, in a format short enough to be appealing to people with ADHD.

—O. Scott Muir, M.D.

1. There are those who have argued that the song “isn’t it ironic” includes no actual irony. It’s just stuff that sucks.