Thread by @spacetwinks

adhd status: might end up diving deeper into talking about 'good distractions' in the update with a focus on rain sounds and why - for me at least - it has such a good batting average in keeping the brain busy while you work

there's a lot of stuff in the adhd twine i'm proud of but i think "good distractions" is one of the best succinct ways i've come across for the ways my brain works around things. there are distractions that help you work, and distractions that derail work

w/r/t my adhd it's like

rain noises, tv show you've watched a million times so you don't have to think about it, song on a loop: good distraction

instant feedback stuff that requires active focus and input, like twitter, gacha games, etc: bad distraction

you want your brain to be occupied *just enough*. too much and it slips from 'passive occupation' to 'active occupation'

i legit don't play gacha games and it's not because of gambling worries: it's because 'the numbers keep going up' factor occupies my focus too much. it's instant feedback in a way that is a bullseye for my adhd and is hard to pull away from

when you think of your adhd and think of things that do manage to grab your focus and *hold it*, and wonder why that is, i say look for the 'instant feedback' factor. do your actions have a direct, even immediate, result, shown back to you as soon as you engage?

if what you're doing has a result very, very quickly after putting in your input, that can hook the focus of people with adhd fast. you can even use this knowledge for positive ends, and to also be aware of when it'll negatively impact you.

so things like numbers going up, bars filling up, quantified and visible data directly and quickly reacting to our actions, that tends to put whatever is trying to grab our focus and give it a turbo boost.

but, again - this can actually be used positively!

for the twine update i'm adding a section about writing with adhd and what tools i use and a big thing here is employing this knowledge positively. i really started honing into it when i found scrivener's project target tool, which changes how wordcounts can be displayed.

when, instead of checking wordcount obsessively and going 'how much did i write since last time', and being pleased or more frequently disappointed with the answer, the project target tool makes it into a bar that fills as i write, so i get the 'instant feedback' focus boost.

this helps turn a lot of the work of writing from something more ethereal and hard to gauge progress and achievement in to something that makes me feel like i'm really moving ahead and amplifies focus because "the numbers keep going up".

while not as potent as the scrivener tool in my experience, using 'show wordcount as you write' in google docs can produce a similar effect.