ADHD

What ADHD means to me · Jake Levi · 2025-02-09 · [ Back to home ]

This blog post was originally a section on the home page of my website, that first appeared on 2025-02-09. On 2025-10-21, after making my first official blog post, I decided to convert this into a blog post as well.

In July 2024 I found out I have ADHD. ADHD has affected me significantly at some times in my life, and less so at other times. I am typically orders-of-magnitude more productive when I'm doing the work I want to be doing, compared with when I'm doing what I've been told to do/know I should be doing but don't find interesting. I'm also frequently late (not because I don't care - it actually really bothers me), spend a lot of time yak shaving, and sometimes struggle with deadlines (for example, staying up all night before a presentation in order to finish making the slides, even though I was planning to make them a week in advance).

But there are advantages of having ADHD. For example, in order to complete tasks that other people find easy, I often have to find a different way of doing things that works for me. This is often slower/more difficult in the short-term, but can put me at a big advantage in the long-term (a bit like training with a weight vest and then removing it). The dependence of my productivity on my interests also forces me into positions where I am pursuing my interests, which often seems to be opposed to my short-term incentives (a nice salary, an easy life) and aligned with my long-term incentives (not wasting my time pursuing anything that doesn't interest me). I love doing a PhD because I have a lot of freedom to pursue the ideas I am most passionate about, and to think differently.

In machine learning terminology, ADHD for me is a bit like regularisation. It sometimes nudges me away from easy short-term solutions, and (hopefully) guides me towards "better" long-term solutions. But sometimes the road can be bumpy.

A while ago I wrote an analogy about ADHD, cars, and steering wheels. You can read that analogy here.