This sounds similar but not quite the same. Specifically:
> I experienced this quite a bit earlier on in my career (and still do, to a certain degree), but I eventually arrived at the realization that this had a lot more to do with anxiety for me than with ADHD.
I was pretty anxious about work, the quality of work I was doing, etc. As I've been improving at execution of the boring parts, this anxiety has evaporated for me. My psychiatrist touched on this briefly - it can be tricky diagnosing people who have characteristics of ADHD and anxiety, because ADHD medication can exacerbate anxiety. You have to try to understand if anxiety is the root of the problem (your anxiety is preventing you from being effective day to day, which sounds like might have been your case) or ancillary (being ineffective day to day is a problem for you, which is also causing you anxiety).
> With the latter, I used to be a lot worse at asking for help. I found it embarrassing and seemingly a tacit admission of my incompetence. I've also gotten better at that by understanding that productivity gets done through teams, and the more that I ask for help, the more the team is growing and that I'm increasing my own context on all the things I otherwise wouldn't know.
This is a good lesson to learn. I tend too much toward trying to understand everything in a system and preferring to understand it from first principles rather than blackboxing it and being satisfied with a high level explanation from someone else. What you say about low trust environments also resonates for some roles I've had in the past, but isn't core to my case imo.
My downfall has usually been stuff like this:
- receive client ticket on thing I know. Work on more interesting tasks until SLA period is almost over, then look into client issue too quickly and give first plausible answer which later comes back wrong (and trivially so)
- rush through a modification to the system I made because it's the end of the sprint and I spent the whole time noodling around with interesting, low priority thing <x> instead. See bug occur in testing on client site, dismiss it as "it's a really bad site though, probably unrelated" because I see it isn't everywhere on their site and I don't take the time to try to understand what is happening. Bug is real, client fires us for money the bug causes them to lose.
"Bad at the boring stuff" isn't the assessment I've been given from HR people or bosses. It's me looking back on where I make mistakes, acknowledging that I have a tendency to be sloppy on the grind work that everybody on a team needs to do but that nobody wants to, and that the extent to which I was sloppy on these sorts of tasks has had serious effects on my career.
I'm a mid-30s engineer in a tech hub and am ~45 days into my Adderall prescription.
I decided to seek treatment for ADHD because my inability to focus was having a negative impact on my career and, indirectly, my well being. For context, I've lost more than one job where I've done good work on the interesting parts, but failed to carry my weight on the boring parts to the point where I simply wore out my welcome. I'm trying to start a family and I felt I was beginning to tread a familiar path with my otherwise very understanding and welcoming new boss.
This probably varies per provider, per locale, etc, but for me the process was:
- Used my insurers website to look up psychiatrists in my area. Had issues with less than great data here also and long appointment waiting times for some, just kept calling around
- called and scheduled an appointment
- told the psychiatrist that I believed I had ADHD
- went through a verbal assessment with the psychiatrist
- got blood work and an EKG done
- had my psychiatrist look over these results
- picked up prescription for first 30 days
- come back in for assessments at 3 weeks, 7 weeks, 11 weeks. Can get prescriptions over the phone afterwards
For me it has been life changing. There's a stigma within my family about mental health so for a long time I've suspected I had this problem but just tried to discipline myself and stick to a system instead of asking for help. AIUI I use a relatively small amount (10mg in the morning, then either 5mg or 10mg in the afternoon). The biggest differences for me have been a) I start the work that sounds boring in a timely manner instead of putting it off to the last minute, b) when I dig into these boring items, I find that the stuff I considered boring before actually can be interesting too sometimes - and at the very least solving them correctly gives me a little rush of dopamine, and c) I make fewer mistakes on the boring stuff because I'm not rushing through it under self-induced time pressure just trying to accept the first "looks right" explanation.
> I experienced this quite a bit earlier on in my career (and still do, to a certain degree), but I eventually arrived at the realization that this had a lot more to do with anxiety for me than with ADHD.
I was pretty anxious about work, the quality of work I was doing, etc. As I've been improving at execution of the boring parts, this anxiety has evaporated for me. My psychiatrist touched on this briefly - it can be tricky diagnosing people who have characteristics of ADHD and anxiety, because ADHD medication can exacerbate anxiety. You have to try to understand if anxiety is the root of the problem (your anxiety is preventing you from being effective day to day, which sounds like might have been your case) or ancillary (being ineffective day to day is a problem for you, which is also causing you anxiety).
> With the latter, I used to be a lot worse at asking for help. I found it embarrassing and seemingly a tacit admission of my incompetence. I've also gotten better at that by understanding that productivity gets done through teams, and the more that I ask for help, the more the team is growing and that I'm increasing my own context on all the things I otherwise wouldn't know.
This is a good lesson to learn. I tend too much toward trying to understand everything in a system and preferring to understand it from first principles rather than blackboxing it and being satisfied with a high level explanation from someone else. What you say about low trust environments also resonates for some roles I've had in the past, but isn't core to my case imo.
My downfall has usually been stuff like this:
- receive client ticket on thing I know. Work on more interesting tasks until SLA period is almost over, then look into client issue too quickly and give first plausible answer which later comes back wrong (and trivially so)
- rush through a modification to the system I made because it's the end of the sprint and I spent the whole time noodling around with interesting, low priority thing <x> instead. See bug occur in testing on client site, dismiss it as "it's a really bad site though, probably unrelated" because I see it isn't everywhere on their site and I don't take the time to try to understand what is happening. Bug is real, client fires us for money the bug causes them to lose.
"Bad at the boring stuff" isn't the assessment I've been given from HR people or bosses. It's me looking back on where I make mistakes, acknowledging that I have a tendency to be sloppy on the grind work that everybody on a team needs to do but that nobody wants to, and that the extent to which I was sloppy on these sorts of tasks has had serious effects on my career.