| I'm not formally diagnosed with ADHD, but I find myself able to relate with the struggles. There's this place at the back of my university's library in the silent section, I think it's below a large HVAC fan motor or something. There's always a deep 'brrrrrrrrrr' sound going, and it is an absolutely sublime place to work. (https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/whiteNoiseGenerator.php?l=... this sounds pretty close to it). Earplugs help, but for some reason the deep 'brrrrrrrrrrr' is very relaxing. A quiet environment with the 'brrrrrr' is preferable to pure silence (though I'll still take ear plugs over one of those horrific open office environments). Moving off topic a bit, but other things I do to help focus: - Redirect bad habit sites (like HN tbh) in the `hosts` file to 127.0.0.1 as a site blocker - Turn off cell phone, and place well out of arms reach - Kill & block discord, telegram, ect (Fortunately, I'm at a place in life where no one really needs to contact me on short notice) ---> The goal being to give my brain literally nothing else to do besides the work <---- (Not perfect since I tend to daydream a lot, but I'm almost graduated uni, so I guess it's working well enough) If I'm really struggling to get work done, I'll set a countdown timer to create artificial external pressure. During my internships, and side gigs, I find myself setting up "real work" periods where I (try to) block the world out, and communication periods. (I get along with people too well and chit chat too much otherwise). In general, if the day-to-day work environment requires just a whole lot of "raw willpower" it's not going to work out. Willpower is for losers anyways, better to remove the distractions / change the environment. (Also fuck MS for constantly trying to weasel more ads into its OS, their new widgets panel in Win11 is literally useless to me for mandatory news ads) Oh, but MS Edge's read aloud is a god send, it has the best text to speech voices I have access to, and I can use it on any html or pdf article easily. MS giveth, and MS taketh ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Unfortunate that zlib died. MS Edge TTS only works with html and pdf, zlib basically let me have any textbook I needed in school read aloud to me as a pdf (janky, but it gets the job done). In particular it really falls apart with math textbooks, but eh. ~ I've rambled too much, back to homework now ~ |
I found that's a good compromise to outright blocking things, because in reality you do need stimulation, but setting limits to the sources you usually get it from can be very helpful.
Instead of spending 3 hours on a clicker app (so evil) I've allowed myself 5 minutes a day, which means whenever I open it I'm going to do the most important things then close the app as soon as possible, whilst still getting the stimulation I was seeking in the first place.