ADHD and deadline

I echo with Alex on the point of having deeper introspect on your mind. It's difficult to gauge what exactly is going on with the deadline situation. Maybe the deadline is set too impractically. [1] Maybe you set too high of a standard for yourself that your deadline only covers the happy path.

For many people (including me), deep introspect is not inside comfort zone and I'd encourage you to try psychotherapy. For treating ADHD, psychotherapy works as well as medication and have lasting effects after people stop therapy thanks to the skills learned in the sessions.

I learned a lot from my therapy sessions and I want to share how I would approach myself when I'm thinking "things like set timer, break big tasks to small tasks, use calendar all those ... doesn't help me". How do I feel when I'm thinking this? [2] When it doesn't help, how it fails to help? Did the technique ever work in the past, even for once? If it worked in the past, can we use some learnings from it? Is there anything that I do when I don't experience the dreading / procrastination? Usually there's something and then you can try transfer the feeling from that thing to the thing you procrastinate on.

Also note that true changes need to come from within and by asking the question, you are already making a huge step! We are rooting for you!

[1] For example, in Amazon, almost no projects finish on time and new project launch is always like a death march. Some management think that's one way to extract as much work from people as possible. I don't know if that's the situation with your team. Maybe it is, maybe it's not. If it is, you can learn to come peace with it.

[2] Speaking out your mind is powerful. By speaking it out, you are more aware of your emotion state and in control of it. Emotion regulation is a skill too.

I see the term ADHD and I want to specifically make sure that I’m on the same page !

• If the challenge is arising from an official diagnosis of ADHD, then the targeted advice or support could be different

• If not, then there could be other causes, few of which Alex has already touched upon. The advice or support could be different

I think the main thing you need to figure out here is why you're missing the deadline. Given that tactical solutions like decomposition and timeboxing aren't working (they often don't), is it one of these 2 more fundamental problems?

1. You don't like the tasks - The work you get is simply not fun as it's not a good fit for your strengths and interests. Maybe your entire team/company isn't fun for whatever reason (in this case, you might want to switch). This is a very common culprit for lack of productivity.
2. You're in a funk - In other words, your mental is just not in a good state. You know you can accomplish things on time, but your mind and body just won't go through the motions. Everything just feels sad and kind of pointless. This is a much deeper issue that's harder to correct.

If you provide more signal on which one of these is the root cause (or maybe it's something else entirely), I'm happy to share more targeted advice on what helped me.

@Raghu Kalyan its both actually