Twitter Didn’t Kill My Productivity, Ignoring Attention Deficits Did
It’s time for me to get to work.
But there’s a lot of work to do. I could pack up my apartment. Apply for more jobs. Try my hand at freelancing. Or write. I have enough projects to work on (seriously, there’re only two items in my completed folder out of the seven or eight novel projects I have started, not to mention the number of flash, novella, and short fiction pieces.)
Doesn’t matter though. All I have to do is buckle down and get started. Take the battery out of my Nokia 3310. Change my status on AOL Instant Messenger from Linkin Park lyrics that perfected captured last night’s mood to brb, gotta work lmao xD. Unplug my 56k modem. Tell Clippy to shove it. Spin Enya up on my minidisk player and oh bother this is the wrong decade.
I guess a more current example was a conversation from months back. About hiatuses from Twitter as it relates to writing productivity (hence the title.) But who cares what decade my brain’s in: These are all windows to look out at, to be distracted. But for those with attention deficits, garbage advice like limiting distractions has never worked. Stimuli sabbaticals miss the point when attention is a scarce commodity.
“Your daughter might be a tad ADHD,” a teacher might tell a mother in 1992. This is, of course, a vast understatement.
“What makes you think that?” she says, a heavy German accent. She’s struggling to keep that perfectly engineered posture, the sort that inflicts authority with undertones of contempt, in a seat sized for a third grader.
“Because she’s always distracted. I’m always catching her looking outside the window instead of focusing on the lesson.”
“I’m about to look out the window,” the Mama scoffs. She doesn’t let the teacher continue, to go on with the other criteria. The child is looking out the window.
It’s 1997 and the Mama goes off on an adventure to become a soldier. A Papa, a man of pressed shirts for a job outdoors, living a schedule that harbors jealousy from Mussolini’s trains, is this daughter’s sole caretaker for the school year. No one talks about her having ADHD.
Five years later, both parents take the hands-off approach to parenting and the child’s graduating high school. In the 50th percentile of her class. “You’re smart, you just don’t do your homework,” the Papa says. “You’re too smart for the lessons so you don’t care about them, they’re above you,” says Mama. The Papa piles on, “If you don’t get your grades up, we’re taking the computer out of your room.” Putting blinds down on the window, if you will.
Fast forward five years and the child-now-young-adult should already be graduating but all that independence and living alone, well, second verse same as the first. Except there’s no safety net for failure: Financial Aid Academic Appeal got adorned with a fancy red “DENIED” stamp. One can only appeal so many times before college gives up. The Papa says, “You’re too distracted.” Too many windows, Not enough blinds.
Okay, so maybe hands-off and independence didn’t work out for her. What about the military? Let’s go another five years in the future and she’s overseas and wearing a subdued American flag. Days are scheduled, blocked off if not color coded. Gym time, meal time, shower time, sleep time, down time, work time, crunch time. She got back into college, did it online. Earned a 4.0 GPA, but didn’t take enough classes to make Dean’s List. She earned her Associates in the sandbox. The window analogy is out the window here.
I’ll come back for my bachelors, she tells herself. She’s back in the states. The windows are back. A psychologist is sitting in front of her. “I think I might be a tad ADHD,” she tells him. This is, of course, a vast understatement.
“What makes you think that?” he asks. She takes a deep breath and starts talking about ’92.
“Mein Liebchen,” the Mama says. “You were a child. They were pushing pills, not trying to help. That’s not how we treat ADHD in Germany.”
Of course! It was the early ’90s and scripts for Ritalin were handed out like Smarties (veile veile bunte-kind, not flavored chalk like in the states.) There are strategies absent pharmaceuticals to help children with attention deficits. You might wonder why this child wasn’t offered it, but hey! The scope of this isn’t apathetic parenting.
And if you haven’t guessed it, this child is me. How Germans dealt with it during that decade was something that is left unanswered, probably because Mama didn’t know herself. And ADHD was otherwise ignored by her, cuz Big Pharma or something, and medicating was for serious issues, if you count recreation as a serious issue. The only time I heard Mama lament my lack of treatment when I was younger, it was only because she really, really, really, really wished I would have shared my script with her. (Again, out of the scope of this article… but what the hell, might as well show you what kind of parenting I was up against.)
This is all backstory though.
And I’m sorry it took so long to get here, I go on tangents.
Windows in this whole analogy of “looking out windows” is opportunities for distraction. But that’s a symptom of the bigger problem.
I tried to medicate it. Atomoxetine. Psychologist recommended it, GP filled it. It’s not a stimulant. Didn’t matter to my GP, who interrogated me: Am I going to abuse it? Sell it? Wasn’t even the kind of medicine you could abuse, unless you like drinking two gallons a day just to sweat it all out.
But hey, getting the stimulant kind is hard for adults. Probably because of people like Mama.
I tried recreating the structure of the military, to keep myself on task through sheer discipline. But that’s an issue all in its own, because not maintaining this is felt like a personal failure. It is, I guess, if you’re the the kind of person who thinks pathologies are hallmarks of failure. (Again, this out of the scope, but how can we talk about ADHD without mentioning that the relationship between capitalism and neurodivergence is antagonist at best?)
What I’m saying is I tried to manage it on my own. You know adult access to ADHD resources is non-existent. And sadly, the best I can do is talk about my own experiences and what I’ve learned.
Since I couldn’t find many ADHD resources for adult, I resorted to looking at strategies for managing symptoms. The advice, as far as I can tell, looped me back to third grade. If I can’t look out windows, then I’ll be forced to look forward. This is the common sense advice I found, the same one I’ve been hearing my entire life. Except, of course, managing distractions won’t negate deficits.
Individuals with attention deficits have difficulties directing their attention, which causes issues with initiating tasks, managing time, expectations, and deadlines. You’ll notice that “being distracted easily” is a pedestrian as fuck observation of this behavior. Because distractions are events or stimuli that influence attention. Having a distractible brain means that it doesn’t have a preference to the stimuli.
As a child, as an adult, failing to address the attention deficits didn’t hold me back. The days before doomscrolling social media on my phone, I still found ways to undermine my own productivity. Even as a third grader without computers and only a NES system that my brothers would hog (it wouldn’t be until fourth grade that we got a SNES), I still found cause to be distracted: A window.
So what works? It’s not an easy answer. If I could write an article that gives twelve tricks to circumvent attention deficits that psychologists don’t want you to read, well, I’d write that.
But I can’t. I lack the qualifications necessary, but also, if I found a way to make it work for myself I wouldn’t be struggling today with it. You’ll notice how long it took for me to get this point.
There was a period in my creative nonfiction timeline where I was productive. It was in the military. I succeeded in the environment because of how regimented my existence was, how pointed it was to a singular objective. It isn’t sustainable, of course. Civilian life isn’t missions, objections, goals with a chain of authority and accountability.
Trying it all on your own is hard. External influences can help, which is where things like combination of cognitive behavior therapy and medication can work. Keeping schedules printed, posted up everywhere is fine, but those blend into the scenery too easily. Alerts on my phone become background noise. It’s an active, everyday, sometimes insurmountable effort to keep up with it. It’s a struggle.
And I’m struggling still.
But let me assure you, looking out of windows isn’t part of that struggle.
