Note: After receiving some feedback from - yes - a teacher, about this post I decided to put this little note here. I’m not going to remove this post, because I really did mean to post it, but please check out my disclaimer, “nothing here is true.” Additionally, I have ADD.

“Oh no, I have an essay tomorrow… and then I have my math homework… and then <something else>”. I hear that every now and then. No, sorry. All the time. People keep telling me just how “stressed” they are. They complain, whine, tell me how miserable they are. O NOEZ IM STRESSED.

Me, personally, I’m subjected to more or less the same amount of work. Am I stressed? Not really. How come? Easy:

I don’t let it disrupt other areas of my life.

If “stress” going to make me even more suicidal than now, maybe I should do less work. Yep, I do that.

I have hobbies, sure, and I don’t want to give up on them, and I don’t. On Xfire it says I played about 30 hours of World of Warcraft in the past 7 days. Note, I don’t feel stressed and I get about as much work as anyone else around here. How come I’m not feeling any stress, let’s see.

I’m naturally calm, I’d say. My cousin has this really awful dog, still does probably, and I remember how I was pretty much the only person around who’d get the damn thing to calm down. This anti-stress energy is just radiating from me. Yes, you could say I’m hypoactive. Note: Nowadays I try not to think about this dog, her hair is amazingly similar to that of an ex of mine (whom I had previously mentioned in the blog)

Tip 1: Skip the fucking readings

Nobody, nobody cares if you read the stuff you’re supposed to. Sure, it’s generally a good idea, but my social anthropology and English teachers talk about the material so much that there’s no real use in actually reading it. They’ll talk about it anyway, so you don’t have to read it.

Tip 2: Audiobooks

Me personally, I have a serious problem. Even if I did read something, I would very often not understand it, not be able to spit out raw facts from the text, not be able to process it, etc. It happens very often, don’t even know why. Audio seems to work much better with me. So what I do is pirate audiobooks and “read” those instead. And that works for me.

Tip 3: If it’s “good enough”, it really is, good enough

Don’t perfect everything! What are you, a Chinese sweatshop worker? Just do something rough that gets you an acceptable grade. Perfection is too much for anyone. No, don’t do a half assed job, just do something acceptable.

Tip 4: Ungraded homework = unimportant

Just in case you didn’t realize it yet, you are at university/school for one reason: a number (or letter in some places). Don’t do ungraded homework! What’s the point?

I hope this guide helps you accomplish the minimum possible. Have fun, take some ritalin, and just really, do the minimum. It’s better for your mental health, I guess.

Tagged as: add, annoying, ib, productivity, ritalin, school, waste-of-time

Introduction

For a while now, I’ve been complaining about my attention span slowly shortening and trapping me inside myself. In previous blog posts, I think I made that point very clear.

The trouble I was having recently prompted me to considering giving Ritalin a try. And so this fine morning I decided to do just that. Getting hold of it was easy, as my brother has a prescription.

I took a single 10mg Ritalin dose at around 08:30 shortly after waking up. What mostly scared me was having read that Ritalin might cause psychosis in some individuals. Those claims were probably bogus. And at any rate, no psychosis here.

Since I had today off, and I need to study for my exams, today was the natural choice.

Every few minutes, whenever I was doing something significant or changing tasks or so on, I made a note of it including a time stamp.

The experiment

08:34 - I took 10mg of Ritalin. The minimum I have around the house. My brother takes 10mg every day 20mg slow-release every schoolday, and so I realized that it can’t be that bad if I took one on this specific occasion. (Health-wise.)

08:43 - So far I don’t believe the effects have kicked in. I feel just about the same.

09:10 - I realized that there’s no way the pill hasn’t kicked in yet, and so I’m going to try to sit down and read a book and see what my experience is.

09:50 - I came back from reading for a straight 40 minutes. I could have even went on for another 40 minutes, but eventually gave up. It seems like the pill is definitely affecting me and I certainly feel less restless. I would however like to check my brother’s complaints regarding not being able to laugh, a certain numbness. [note: I stopped because I reached the end of the chapter.]

I feel no urge to actually go to eat. I feel physically hungry, but no real urge to go eat. This is probably part of the pill’s influence on me, I presume.

I read with great concentration, unlike anything I’ve had in the past few months. Kind of sad, considering that I am on Schedule II drugs. I found myself analyzing the characters and deducing a lot about their behavior, personality and so forth.

10:15 - I just finished watching an episode of Futurama. Concentrating was easy, and I did not switch focus back to other applications all the while. I paid close attention to the movie, and my sitting posture was in fact proper.

I feel slightly strange around the chest and upper back. Though I believe this is because I’m not used to actually sitting up straight for this long (~40 minutes at a time). At the moment I’m still keeping the same posture with relatively no effort. The only thing which distracted me was an alert from Growl, telling me that somebody had sent me a message.

In other words, the only distractions out there were really just external stimuli. Otherwise, keeping a clear mind is ridiculously easy.

Although the jokes in Futurama usually fit my taste, I only laughed very briefly, and very often although I did get the joke I remained for the most part unaffected.

Now I think I will attempt to rewrite my social anthropology paper, as I’ve been putting it off for a long time now.

11:06 - I have been working nonstop on my anthropology paper since the last report. This is absolutely remarkable. I did not feel the need to check my email or see who is online. I’ve been working without any music in the background either, which is rare and remarkable.

I have decided to take a short break, although I could probably go on concentrating like this for a long time.

I don’t think I was ever this productive in years - and since I am doing IB now, and this draft is long overdue (it’s an internal deadline thankfully), this is most definitely working for me.

11:13 - I forced myself to go to the kitchen and have something to eat. While I am feeling physically hungry, mentally I don’t feel like eating anything. I had some cucumber, but even that was forced. My interest in sex is very low at the moment, that is to say that I can’t even take the slightest interest in it. And although I would experiment and try to find interest in it, I simply find myself doing something mildly uninteresting, but at least I can pay attention to it.

If this is what normal people are like the whole time, only now do I begin to understand how bad my disability actually is.

11:23 - It’s noteworthy to say that it feels as if time goes much faster. I start writing something, and the next thing I know I’ve been doing so for two minutes without even knowing.

12:03 - I finished watching another episode of Futurama. Again, no real distractions. Although the window is open and I live right above a major artery in the area with a high traffic volume, the noise didn’t seem to bother me a lot.

I’m still hungry, and I think it might be affecting my concentration. I will force myself to eat something and have a glass of water.

Maybe I’ll finish another chapter in the book.

12:19 - I worked on the draft for a while more, considering to go down to 7-11 to get me something to eat. I might as well do that, but before that I need to make a phone call.

12:38 - I called my dad and talked to him about how it feels to be under the influence of Ritalin. My brother takes 20mg, but for some reason we also have 10mg. That said, I caused no harm by taking that pill.

My appetite is coming back to me, and my hunger is worse than it was before. My concentration is fluctuating. Anyway, I’ll go get me something to eat and see what I can do with my time afterwards.

Since the pill should affect me for about 3-4 hours, it probably wore off already.

12:56 - I’m done eating. I’ll try to sit down and read a book to see whether I can actually do it. While eating I started recalling all sorts of songs, which would usually happen to me a lot during the day, and in retrospect it didn’t seem to occur to me back when the pill was still affecting me.

Strangely enough, I only checked for new online messages maybe 3 times. Usually I would end up checking for new messages every 10 minutes or even more frequently. This is surprising, especially now, as I am waiting for a reply from a certain person.

I’m still in two minds about taking Ritalin, and I will have to talk to a professional about it. I was also never actually diagnosed with ADD. Weird, I should say, because I have the exact same symptoms.

The urge to listen to music, which was not present a while ago, seems to bother me now.

Conclusion

Yes, it works. I’m pretty much done with all the work I had to do, and I managed to do things which otherwise I would never have done without great amounts of willpower.

At the moment of writing this conclusion, I’m doing about 3 other things.

I’m considering very seriously to go get a prescription of my own and starting to take it on a regular basis. Or maybe just for exams? Or something, I don’t know.

I still haven’t really felt any depression or aggression or any of the reported side-effects. Maybe to do with taking only 10mg and not 20mg.

Interesting to see how the length of the notes changes over time. From the very brief ones in the beginning of the experiment to the later, longer and more descriptive notes later on.

Maybe the reason why I was never diagnosed as having ADD is because instead of doing something else physically other than working I would just think about something else and look as if I’m still working. Happens to me a lot that I start reading something, think about something else, and come back to the text not actually knowing what I was doing the whole time.

As I said before, my attention span is at an all-time low. It comes and goes with waves, productivity that is.

It comes and goes in waves.

Tagged as: add, concentrate, experiment, life, pills, productivity, ritalin