ADH- Shiny Thing: How to Focus with an Active Mind

Uncontrolled ADD/ADHD Takes a Toll

For as long as I can remember, I have had an active mind, and for as long as I can remember, it has been both my greatest strength and most annoying weakness. It wasn’t until the past few years that I learned to harness control over my “rate of thought” and to keep myself completing one task before jumping to the next.

Is being able to quickly think, speak, and act a gift or curse?

That’s something we’ll be talking about today, and it’s my hope to help my fellow active-minded friends learn some of the tips and tricks I’ve learned over the years to assist in turning this perceived flaw into a personal feature.

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ADHD Is A Complicated B*tch

When people speak of ADHD, they think of someone cracked out on caffeine, tweaking like a meth head needing a hit. The aim here is for us to reach Ed Latimore’s Crack Head Hustle work ethic concept and not succumb to Tazmanian Devil spinning without going anywhere release of energy.

Having ADHD is like running 100 tabs open on a computer and bouncing between each every 2 minutes while simultaneously knowing you have work needing to be done, but you can’t mentally start that work until it’s the day (realistically a few hours before) it’s due, which is when you’re able to muster super-human productivity to knock it out on time.

It’s a fucked up cycle and one which has plagued me for many years, to the point where I am only functional when I can literally get all of my thoughts out of my head and onto a whiteboard or stickies, and from there, I have to literally not force myself to sit and review what needs to be done but rather remove the pressure of having to do the tasks and convince myself that I want to do these things because doing them will make me feel good and not having the massive pile of things to do will be an awesome future I want to live in.

If I try to force myself to sit and work, I’ll literally end up doing 1,000 things besides the single thing needing to be done.

It’s hard to explain, and I’ve yet to see anyone capture it as accurately as this Twitter account:

ADHD Jesse @adhdjesse

Sometimes my brain is thinking too loud, which makes it hard to hear when other people are talking to me.

One of the wildest things I’ve learned about myself over the years is to not resist the urge to get away from the thing I have to do. When I’m locked in, I’ve locked myself the fuck in; when my mind starts to drift, the sooner I break away and give myself a break - the sooner I can return to productive mode.