ADHD Rabbit Holes

My wife has started using the expression, “down that rabbit hole,” as a way to say, getting sidetracked by something that could take a long amount of time to get all the way to the end of. One of the keys to managing ADHD is seeing ADD rabbit holes before you venture too far down the path.

ADD Rabbit Holes

Examples are often better than descriptions, and considering this particular article is actually one of my ADD rabbit holes (I’m supposed to be writing about IOT security), I figured I would minimize this particular distraction by trying to quickly document the rabbit holes my ADHD mind tries to send me on as I work.

• Writing an article about ADHD rabbit holes
  • I prefer ADD to ADHD, but ADHD is the official acronym and ADD can be confused with add — like in math– so I should really just embrace the whole ADHD thing
  • Do I really not have an ADD vs ADHD article on this website to link to? — You know what I should write?
  • (OK, I’m back. I started a draft, wrote 383 words, and picked stock photography before I was able to pull myself back to THIS article, which is already a rabbit hole!)
• I bet I could make better stock photography for rabbit holes…
• Figuring out if my SSL WordPress plugin is really doing what it is supposed to
• Figuring out why my AMP plugin throws off so many errors
  • Is it the Genesis WordPress theme?
  • If so, should I find a new WordPress theme
  • What about that webhost that does WordPress specifically…
• Are my free SSL certificates still working
  • Does it matter
• I like this song. Maybe I would like this band… the Banners… or is it just this song? “Someone To You” — I should Sticky Note the name and listen to them later… or I could add them to a playlist…
• Why does my PC STILL have Runtime Broker using up so much memory all the time… does it actually matter now that I’ve upgrade to SSD and my computer is plenty fast enough…
• How to save an email to OneNote — just copy and paste it. You already know how to do that, and you can keep going…
• I should add an ADHD Life category to this website…
• I wonder if my opening a 529 article is updated for the new year…
  • Geez. Nerdwallet really crushes the search rankings for finance terms… I should check out their site and see what they are doing…
• WAIT! Where is that list of rabbit holes I was logging?

How about this tweet from 3 days later?

When your ‘What Is Bitcoin’ article was written in 2015, and sorely needs updated, but that isn’t what you are doing today. NO DISTRACTIONS! (Wait, capital or not… let’s check the AP Stylebook…) -> What Is Bitcoin Is It Worth It? https://financegourmet.com/blog/personal-finance/bitcoin-worth/

twitter.com/ArcticLlama

You can be that I’ll come back and add more to this… probably when I’m on an important deadline and am supposed to be working on paying projects for a freelance client.

What are your rabbit holes? Do you have a better term for those distractions where the bottom seems to fall away from you?

(This article really needs a how to snap out of ADHD rabbit holes section, but I just snapped out of this rabbit hole after seeing the clock and panicking… I’ll be back…)