The first-line treatment for ADHD is stimulants. Everything else in this post works best as a complement to, rather than as an alternative to, stimulant medication. In fact most of the strategies described here, I was only able to execute after starting stimulants. For me, chemistry is the critical node in the tech tree: the todo list, the pomodoro timers, etc., all of that was unlocked by the medication

Notes on Managing ADHD

And we all punish ourselves. That’s the real tragedy of this illness. We are our biggest detractors because we know what we’re capable of. Better than our teachers. Better than our parents. They always said that they could “see our potential,” but we saw ten times what they did. Every day. We saw the things we could do, in our heads, and hated ourselves for not doing them.

There are so many good lines in the article that I highlighted twelve whole paragraphs with many more deserving, and I struggled to pick one to quote here.

While technology has evolved in the last fifteen hundred years, the human brain has not. And few people in the ancient world cared as much about the challenges of attention and distraction as monks. Our reasons might differ today, but we have much to learn nonetheless.

The focus problem predates the advent of the modern age with all its continuous, unstoppable, but always alluring background noise. I wonder if ADHD was also a thing back then and how many were possibly affected. We will never know.