I understand some will find this hard though, and am not suggesting it's a fix if you have ADHD.

File and forget is incredibly effective when you have ADHD. There are just too many things that are "interesting" that you'll never have time to do anything about.

Just write it down (or an equivalent) so your brain can stop worrying about it. You'll find in a few weeks time the things that didn't actually matter are gone.

When I was having anxiety problems it was also an extremely effective way of getting out of the circular thinking loop. Write down all your worries on a new tab in Notepad++. All the worries stopped circulating. When I might occasionally look at that tab in a month or two's time. usually I didn't even care about any of those things anymore. Even though they'd all been thought obsessing distractions a couple of months earlier.

And lists, lists, lists. I'm at my most happiest when every day I create a short-ish to-do list for work and a list for home and throw it away at the start of the next day. I try and keep it below 7-8 things, in reality I often get 3-5 done. I fall out of the habit fairly frequently, and that's often when I start feeling overwhelmed.

Plus exercise, exercise, exercise. If I haven't exercised for more than about 5 days, I start becoming a right asshole who gets anxious about the most ridiculous things.

What gets me mad sometimes is that when I work on something and hit a road block, then I remember I found an article about it a year or so ago and I definitely saved it. I just have no idea how to find it.

I have not looked, but I wonder if there is an indexing tool that would also do an OCR on screenshots, PDFs etc. in the local filesystem and then had some advanced querying.

Daily, all links are fetched (as part of a larger web search product I'm working on). I can search this, but mostly i don't bother.

I will soon add semantic search and see if there's any magic to be found in my data exhaust.

Truth is I'm forced to spend my days googling dull problems and reading vaguely interesting articles.

No deep work for me at the moment

  # summarize yesterday
  python summarize_day.py
  # summarize a day (3 month chrome history limit)
  python summarize_day.py --date 2023-01-12
  # summarize the last 90 days
  python summarize_day.py --days 90

I have recently started using Zotero, which can create offline copies of saved webpages and papers. You can then search their contents.

Last week I bookmarked Yacy, which is a search engine and which seems to allow you to define your own web index. However, I haven't gotten around to seeing how it really works...

That's really the essence of what there is to it, in my opinion and experience at least. But: I only could start doing that when I was in my thirties. Before that my brain just wasn't up for it. Whereas when I now think about many of the things I did back then, especially the clinging to objects/bookmarks, I can fully see how useless and even ridiculous they were. Life is really better when you can just stop caring. Though it is also pretty hard to do. I know still sometimes feel pain about things I intentionally got rid of even though I know if I'd have them I would not actually use them. Goes to show the kind of tricks a brain can play.

could be an ADHD-anonymous meeting slogan. I can definitely commiserate with this notion.

For me it's not so much about the infinite list, because I've always had many thousands of tabs open and surf so much that there's no way I could ever bookmark everything (since the mid-90s).

It's actually about the opportunity cost of distraction and finally work itself. Beyond a certain level of experience and mastery (perhaps 10 years), no job has enough variety to satisfy the ADHD mind. We all become Mike Ehrmantraut from Breaking Bad: manning a parking booth that could be fully automated while we secretly plot ways to escape and "get real work done". Which is the central theme of movies like The Matrix.

The only thing that finally brought me out of burnout back to living was to realize that life is both a pointless game and the most sacred thing there is. Meaning that once I turned off my inner monologue completely and finally just observed, I found gratitude for all of creation through non-attachment.

Applied to HN specifically, it might help to step back from the rational and look at it holistically. You and I might be missing out, but the whole world is learning and growing together. We're part of a higher consciousness now, a virtual mind overlaid on us that will transcend us before 20 years is out and we enter the New Age. These are the memoirs of Gaia (insert deity of choice here).

Laughed so hard reading that. I should one day write the browser self destruct count down extension. Crashes as a service You can delay the shut down by describing what you think you are doing. This makes for a wonderful journal worth of stupid most embarrassing shit mixed with lies. Remember to use a strong password.

I currently have it set to 24 hours. It has been game changing for me.

Wha?!

I download every movie and book I can. The more rare the better. I know, deep in my heart, they must be saved from dead torrent links.

Even deeper nestled in the depths of my endlessly deep heart, I know that if there is a disaster, that government agency which tracks all, knows this, and I am on a list.

A list to be saved!

"Grab that guy and his raids", and so on. If nuclear war happens, save the leaders, the scientists, and that damned geek.

Sure, they could break that triple ciphered encryption, even with the custom callback to a helmet + a reading of my tranquil brainwaves, but why risk a bazillion hours of video, text, and OSS source code on that?

Instead, snag me and my stuff they will, plague, zombies, war, etc.

But if I stop collecting, if I stop organizing!? I hear the conversation.

"Who's on the media snag list", but as my name is to be spoken, "Oh.. he stopped downloading" and No!, I am left to burn and die.

How do you stand it?

I wish you abundant storage redundancy.

I literally feel a weight lift off my shoulders when I do this. It's become a joyous event. Though it only takes a few weeks before I have to do it again, it's ok.

I can look up closed tabs in the files, though I've rarely needed to do that.

One day, when I have a bit of time, and a kind soul on HN suggests a docker repo to me that provides a good endpoint for relating/clustering documents, I can put together a way to navigate all these tabs that over time were considered important to me.

Sure, there are websites that do this, but this way, I don't have to worry about being profiled, sites going down, etc.

I can really vouch for this approach, at least for the never-ending list of things I want to do.

I should disclaimer this by stating that I have been diagnosed with ADHD but people around me and myself have been doubting it since. (My doctor has also questioned their judgement on many occations but hasn't backpedaled just yet). What I'm trying to say is YMMV.

On Android, a simple app which helps me tons is Linkbox (find it in F-Droid), its basically a fancy database (+ search) with 3 attributes: Name, URL and Category. I wish it had more attention as I really love it and I find that, even if I don't completely read an item (or even just completely blindly), I add it to the app and its there forever. I've actually come back to ideas on many occasions and never felt that feeling of regret, if anything its actually empowered me!

Writing a summary of whatever I read helps a lot. It's handy to reference it later, it's more searchable, and connecting with whatever I read/watched makes it easier to put it down for now. It's especially useful if I do it while I'm reading/watching, because it helps to focus. Duh :)

I deliberately saved myself using the baby as a “mental excuse” to be ok with “clearing my list” completely. I then put therapy at the top of my new list.

Now I have a much more solid handle on my ADHD (which is important when you have a kiddo).

I can also highly recommend a clipboard manager (I use Paste with a high history limit), which is kinda like a second short term memory. The most profound effect this has for me is lowered stress. Once I‘ve committed something to the clipboard, I know that I‘ll be able to recover it. I think that it also makes me more productive.

I also have a script[1] for cleaning up my Desktop (which gets filled by various files I download). It puts all the contents into a date-named folder, in subfolders based on file extension.

[1] https://gist.github.com/ivanistheone/9daa23ae2a7abb472cb2

Also the write it down is so amazing. In meetings and while doing research I keep notes and lists for days, that I may never return to. But it’s active listening and studying even at a (seemingly) slow pace that keeps me going.

If you, dear reader, have ADHD that presents like mine does, try to find peace in that you'll never ever be bored. Nah, we'll never see all of these wonderful ideas to completion, but the ones that stick are the most important anyways.

That's what I do too and it works well. I've changed the system I use to track the content (currently I'm storing interesting things I may want to read later in Zotero, and some also in Safari's Reading List).

What I like about this is that I can save something for later even if, despite finding it interesting, I either don't have the time or the mental energy to read it now, and also that I have a nearly-endless list of things to go through if I'm ever bored, stuck, etc.

A few years ago I wrote a simple bookmarking service for personal use, and I don't know if it's the (barebone) tagging system, or the fact that it's not bound to a particular device or account, but since then the HN-induced FOMO I have when there is an interesting article or discussion is dispelled the moment I save it using that particular service.

It doesn't of course have to be self-made or even self-hosted, but your bookmarking service just need to be trustworthy enough (as in, you know you'll be able to quickly find an article again in the future, even on another device) for the stress-relieving magic to actually happen.

(Disclaimer: I only suspect I have ADHD, I don't have a formal diagnostic)