I relate strongly to a lot of this! For me, ADHD mostly results in the accumulation of a lot of unfinished projects that never really got past the starting stage, but I also tend to enjoy writing long-form content more than I enjoy writing short-form content, so it's a constant struggle.
I bet! I've gotten a bit better at continuing with work I start since university, but there's a veritable graveyard of abandoned beginnings in there too... Keeping up the motivation for a longer-term project must be a challenge! What works for you?
Honestly, I'm still trying to figure out what works for longer-term projects, but in the meantime I've been trying to get more comfortable with the fact that I often start projects and don't finish them. I do end up coming back to some projects over time and slowly working more on them, which is slower progress than I'd like but still progress, and sometimes it comes in handy to have these unfinished projects laying around because I've already done the work of starting. If a year later, I decide I want to continue with that project, that's some work that's already been done for me. I do also try to remind myself frequently of projects that I really want to continue working on but haven't got enough motivation for, and I've found that having other people know of my progress on the project helps too (I found this website for sharing my word count with others a while ago called myWriteClub and that seems neat, so I made my word count on a fiction project I've been working on publicly visible - it did get me to write a couple hundred words before forgetting about it again, so there's that!). Also, setting very small, regular goals, like say a 100 words per day or something. The easier it is for me to do regularly without getting bored with it, the more likely it is that I'll actually end up doing more work on the project.
Those all sound like helpful strategies! Being able to set a project aside and come back to it later can be really useful for letting your brain refresh itself on the ideas. That myWriteClub thing sounds interesting, I'll have a look into it!
How old were you when you were diagnosed, out of interest, Jojo? I was very late diagnosed. It would have been massively helpful, and saved me a lot of self judgement, had I known sooner! I was instead, as a teen, misdiagnosed with Borderline Personalty Disorder (a common misdiagnosis for ADHDers, apparently), and in my earlier years received a diagnosis of “receptive dysphasia” because I was very slow learning to speak (which, again, is apparently not uncommon among ADHDers).
Right around my 25th birthday, so also a relatively late diagnosis. I didn't have any misdiagnoses to deal with, but adolescence was still pretty isolating because I didn't understand most of my peers and couldn't figure out why.
Then I got diagnosed and learned that most of my friends were ADHD too!
I relate strongly to a lot of this! For me, ADHD mostly results in the accumulation of a lot of unfinished projects that never really got past the starting stage, but I also tend to enjoy writing long-form content more than I enjoy writing short-form content, so it's a constant struggle.
I bet! I've gotten a bit better at continuing with work I start since university, but there's a veritable graveyard of abandoned beginnings in there too... Keeping up the motivation for a longer-term project must be a challenge! What works for you?
Honestly, I'm still trying to figure out what works for longer-term projects, but in the meantime I've been trying to get more comfortable with the fact that I often start projects and don't finish them. I do end up coming back to some projects over time and slowly working more on them, which is slower progress than I'd like but still progress, and sometimes it comes in handy to have these unfinished projects laying around because I've already done the work of starting. If a year later, I decide I want to continue with that project, that's some work that's already been done for me. I do also try to remind myself frequently of projects that I really want to continue working on but haven't got enough motivation for, and I've found that having other people know of my progress on the project helps too (I found this website for sharing my word count with others a while ago called myWriteClub and that seems neat, so I made my word count on a fiction project I've been working on publicly visible - it did get me to write a couple hundred words before forgetting about it again, so there's that!). Also, setting very small, regular goals, like say a 100 words per day or something. The easier it is for me to do regularly without getting bored with it, the more likely it is that I'll actually end up doing more work on the project.
Those all sound like helpful strategies! Being able to set a project aside and come back to it later can be really useful for letting your brain refresh itself on the ideas. That myWriteClub thing sounds interesting, I'll have a look into it!
How old were you when you were diagnosed, out of interest, Jojo? I was very late diagnosed. It would have been massively helpful, and saved me a lot of self judgement, had I known sooner! I was instead, as a teen, misdiagnosed with Borderline Personalty Disorder (a common misdiagnosis for ADHDers, apparently), and in my earlier years received a diagnosis of “receptive dysphasia” because I was very slow learning to speak (which, again, is apparently not uncommon among ADHDers).
Right around my 25th birthday, so also a relatively late diagnosis. I didn't have any misdiagnoses to deal with, but adolescence was still pretty isolating because I didn't understand most of my peers and couldn't figure out why.
Then I got diagnosed and learned that most of my friends were ADHD too!