As an engineer with ADHD and an affinity to design and build stuff for fun halfway… I feel seen.
Yeah same. I have a box full of filament just sitting unopened by my printer.
My printer works non-stop for 2 months then is completely abandoned for 3 more months, then the cycle repeats.
Unless I really need something printed, then the periods get messed up.
Thankfully as a software engineer, Claude Code is helping me catch up on a lot of my unfinished projects, especially ones with tedious amounts of integration.
I’m sorry for your loss
Okay look, I have a large piece of old leather I’ve been meaning to make into pieces for my Renfaire outfit, I have dozens of pieces of steel that are waiting to become knives and other tools, there’s 20-something 3d projects in various states of
unfinished on my laptop, and I’ve got 3 large woodworking projects on hold.Of course I can start hyperfixating on a new project!
It took over 30 years, but I’ve finally gotten good at avoiding feature creep. The trick is to tell yourself “I’m just looking to get it working for now - I can upgrade when I know more about what it needs,” then never upgrade anything.
Oh, my fancy headphones are just plugged into a normal headphone jack instead of that DAC and amp I was going to get? Whatever, they still sound pretty good. Oh, I got that fancy graphics card but never got a 4k monitor to make use of it? Whatever, I play more Minecraft than anything else anyway.
Better to have something that works well enough than leave everything half-assembled because I lost motivation before I figured out what all I needed to finish it.
Never mind elaborate projects. I have many thousands of hours in some Bethesda game I never even finished. I can be hundreds of hours into a playthrough then not play for a week. When I pick it up again I lost track of what I was doing, so I have to make a new character and start from scratch again.
I’ve been working on 100%ing Pokémon Legends: Z-A (and the DLC). I put in a couple hundred hours and probably got to 95%+, and then felt my brain flick the “you are no longer interested in this” switch. 😬
I’m currently stuck in a game where I don’t want to start over because I remember what happened in the beginning too well to want to slog through getting back to where I am now, but I don’t want to keep playing because I don’t remember what happened recently well enough to continue from where I left off, but I don’t want to play a new game because I told myself I was going to finish this one first…
Oof
Unpopular opinion, but with the last step change in the robots’ capabilities this past winter, I have finally gotten more projects across the finish line in the past couple of months than I have in the last five years. The claude code max sub has been worth every penny. Sorry for the people in the US suffering because of all those data centers y’all got. But my projects will be completed - ADHD be damned. Maybe my water/petrol guzzling prompts will convince your government it should transition to renewables.
Same, I pay for basic ChatGPT and use free Claude. So many things I would start, get overwhelmed by, and never go back to left sitting. Now “hey AI I have this thing, help me with it” and I’m done with it. I set up a project just for my homelab and having that has helped sooo much, it remembers my setup and tells me how to do what I ask it within my infrastructure, saves so much time. Not to mention the proposal for work that I was struggling with, had it help with the research and give me an outline to follow and I had that thing written in a weekend.
I honestly think everyone with ADHD should learn to use AI, it’s a no judgement productivity game changer.
I actually just finished one, a big one too. It took years, but it’s… done. I feel like someone else, you know like in Quantum Leap. I look in the mirror and I see… a finisher
SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP!
*cries in a corner while rocking and hugging herself
I’ve trained myself to be constantly plagued by the thoughts without ever even starting them…
Still looking at all those repos with just a Readme that I don’t even remember what I was rambling about… 🫣









