I mean, what honestly worked was going and getting medicated.

I built a pretty good life for myself by working extra hard. With ADD I didn't ever really know when I would be able to be productive, so I'd just always be ready, always plugged in waiting for lightening to strike. And then once I get going, I'm afraid to stop, so I'd get rolling and stay up all night and into the morning and basically do 20-30 hours of work all at once, but then the next day is a write off, and really the whole rest of the week.

This is great for ops work, the stress/intrigue of production systems that needed to be diagnosed and fixed always got my brain going but at some point, I need to be working on building stuff and delivering on a schedule and not just being on 24/7 oncall. As I started to move into those types of roles, I really hit a wall and that's when I realized I needed to go back and get medicated. (I was diagnosed as a teen and was on meds until my insurance dropped in my 20s)

It started to take a toll on me and my family. There are a lot of feelings of depression on days when I wasn't able to focus entirely and anxiety that I won't be able to focus enough to get things done. Oscillating between those feelings constantly makes it difficult to be functioning part of a family, not to mention keeping your schedule clear or breaking promises because things are finally clicking and I felt like I needed to skip on some activity to get enough done to keep my job. Always working, never getting anything done.

I finally decided that I needed to be able to focus my mind on demand so I can do family stuff during family time and work stuff during work time. I can sleep in and know that I can just get up and start working when I'm ready. I can watch a dumb movie with my kids for the 100th time without it feeling like a wasted opportunity. I can work and just do the things I need to do and at the end of the day, I know I've made that 8+ hours of progress toward my deliverables (generally, we all have trouble with this from time to time because of unexpected complexities and unknowns but I don't feel bad that I wasted a bunch of time). And then I can relax, and just do other things, like hobbies and family time.

There's lots of ways to help mitigate your ADD symptoms, there's counselors out there that can help with behavioral techniques to help increase your ability to focus. If that's what you want find one of them and they can help quite a bit. The danger there was that I still had problems focusing on demand and then I felt even worse about myself because I knew I had this problem and I knew things to do to fix it and I still couldn't get it done. Add a dash of meds in there and everything is clicking. And I can take all that extra hard work that I used to use to try to focus and turn it into real output.

I think everyone is different for sure so if this is something you're struggling with, then get help, get a coach or mental health counselor to help you build strategies to focus at the right times. Talk to a dr or see if your counselor will recommend someone who works specifically with ADD meds.

The best thing you can do here if you realize this is becoming unsustainable is to start getting help from people who work with this stuff.