Why do I need motivation?

To be honest, I think motivation is an interesting and very faulty thing when you have adhd. Just as a preface, I am not a medical professional nor am I qualified to give you advice. I am just explaining my experiences with what is very likely to be some kind of attention defecit disorder.

Motivation for me is often fleeting and very difficult to replicate. I have months, weeks, days, or hours of intense drive and motivation to accomplish things, or even just be interested in things. There will be times where the only thing I want to do is program, and then in a while, I can only just barely fantasize about programming. I can never seem to truly force myself to do things that don't (for whatever reason) seem appealing in the moment. For the most part I've learned to just live with the fact that one part of the month I will be completely hyperfocused on achieving something within a hobby and the next 3 months I won't even really think about it very much. And when I do, the moment I begin to engage with it I can't stay focused for more than five minutes. What gives?

And even with all this, I believe one of the major culprits is my major tendancy to procrastinate. When in school I would always wait until the last possible deadline, because nothing bad really would happen if I did. Unfortunately this leads to me spending most of the day feeling like I can't do something productive, as I should be doing the most important upcoming assignment or thing with higher priority. This puts basic chores, and sometimes even hygine at risk to not getting done, since I have to finish the more important thing first; which I won't complete until the last possible minute, leading to nothing else being done that day.

What's interesting about this, is this behavior doesn't seem to apply while I am at work. When I'm at a job, the social pressure and expectation to achieve things and make sure tasks are complete override my procrastination. This also is because I was conditioned at a young age to worry greatly about the thoughts, feelings, and pressures of others before my own. Social pressure gets me to do things, and when there is the complete absence of this pressure, it becomes impossible for me to complete things. This issue with hygine was not typically a problem while I was in middle and high school because there was the pressure that someone would point out I looked or smelled gross.

An alternative to motivation

Honestly, this shouldn't be much of a shock to many, but I found after watching an Andreas Kling Car talk video I heard him talking about how in order to control things, he needs to condition himself to the point where it is a habit to do programming. This way his goals are basically the unskippable tasks that are things that must just get done. For me, as described above I have an extreme difficulty making some things into habit.

Finding some form of accountability is important for me doing and accomplishing tasks, but I am trying very hard to avoid this. By making things habits, and as high priority as tasks like work or homework, it makes them much easier to achieve. I need to basically create and emulate the effect of social pressure. Doing things like writing the tasks down, or using pomodoro timers

#!/usr/bin/bash
sleep $(($1*60))
notify-send -u critical Pomodoro "Timer is done!"

Like this super simple script. There are also several really great websites that operate in a similar way, but I also really like having something tactile that I manually have to use, like a kitchen timer.

Setting up this kind of accountability with both my friends, and also myself through some form of physical reminder to get a task done, I find myself being able to complete things at least kind of more regularly.

Thanks for reading, Isaiah