To be completely fair it might not be exclusively ADHD.
Research is discovering that Autism and ADHD are both on the "same" spectrum, and ASD covers both. Meaning they are not necessarily separate things.
My ability to do bullshit work, is practically zero. If it isn't a task that I find challenging/interesting/important then there is negative motivation (or tolerance) to do that thing. I can and will find something else to do, forever putting off the BigBoringTask. Sometimes I can fool myself, and sometimes I work the fix into the project.
Example: I _HATE_ filling out timesheets. If the company wants anything more specific then "clock in/clock out"; too bad.
So, one place I worked I wrote up a bunch of script to scrape SSH logs to catch my login/logout, and would then calculate the "time spent on client". I also had it search emails based on that day and would pull the ticket number most likely related to why I was SSHing in. This challenge/solution consumed my entire interest for that day. My dopamine hit was because I wouldn't have to do the BigBoringTask ever again.
I love the fixing/solving, challenge/reward; I can't stand the tedium. And I just don't do it if I can't stand it.
I have had a clinical diagnosis for both ADHD & ASD. So it's no longer a mystery why I act/react the way I do. It also takes away the sting when somebody says "Everybody else has to do this, why is it so hard for you?"
> This challenge/solution consumed my entire interest for that day. My dopamine hit was because I wouldn't have to do the BigBoringTask ever again.
Yep. Occasionally I have to stop and remind myself that all I'm trying to do is rename 10 files (for example), and by the time I remember the {ba,z}sh-ism for parameter substitution, I could have probably manually renamed them. I usually tell myself that it's not nearly as fun, though.
This does occasionally present detrimental facets, though. I have a homelab, and as most people with one, its primary purpose is storing and serving media files (I promise I do other things too, but let's be honest – Plex is what people care about). I run apps in K3OS, which has been dead for quite some time. The NAS is in a VM under Proxmox, and I build images with Packer + Ansible. I've been wanting to shift K3OS over to Talos [1] for some time, but I had convinced myself that it was only worthwhile if all of it was in IaC, starting from PXE. I got most of the way there, and then stopped due to work taking more of my life than I wanted. Unfortunately, around this time the NAS broke (as in a hardware failure, not a software issue), and I was refusing to bring it back until the entire homelab was up to my absurd self-imposed standards. Eventually I convinced myself this was a ridiculous punishment, replaced the dead hardware, and brought it back.
My ability to do bullshit work, is practically zero. If it isn't a task that I find challenging/interesting/important then there is negative motivation (or tolerance) to do that thing. I can and will find something else to do, forever putting off the BigBoringTask. Sometimes I can fool myself, and sometimes I work the fix into the project.
Example: I _HATE_ filling out timesheets. If the company wants anything more specific then "clock in/clock out"; too bad. So, one place I worked I wrote up a bunch of script to scrape SSH logs to catch my login/logout, and would then calculate the "time spent on client". I also had it search emails based on that day and would pull the ticket number most likely related to why I was SSHing in. This challenge/solution consumed my entire interest for that day. My dopamine hit was because I wouldn't have to do the BigBoringTask ever again.
I love the fixing/solving, challenge/reward; I can't stand the tedium. And I just don't do it if I can't stand it.
I have had a clinical diagnosis for both ADHD & ASD. So it's no longer a mystery why I act/react the way I do. It also takes away the sting when somebody says "Everybody else has to do this, why is it so hard for you?"