I’ve battled with focus most of my life. I was the kid who put my head down or nodded off and was told by my teacher, “We don’t take naps in 1st grade.”

My teachers asked my mom if anything was going on at home and she told them things were fine–I wasn’t being beaten or starved. She took me to the doctor to see if I had some sort of sleep disorder. After examining me, the doctor shrugged and said, “If she can fall asleep and still keep up with the class, maybe she’s just bored.”

“If she can fall asleep and still keep up with the class, maybe she’s just bored.”

But was it truly boredom, or was I a girl who suffered from undiagnosed ADHD in the early 2000s? Back in those days, the focus centered on physical hyperactivity and not so much on the inattentive side, found more commonly in girls. Girls like me could have easily been dismissed because we did not cause ruckus in the classroom, especially if we were quiet amongst fights and outbursts frequent in underserved schools. We were good…on paper.

College Days

Speaking of papers, by the time I got to college, I could stay awake in an interesting course, but I would need to pull an all-nighter while barricading myself in the campus Starbucks to finish a paper. Procrastination ran rampant. I had the thoughts in my mind (somewhere, competing with dozens of others) and I could mentally outline the paper, but the act of sitting down to type felt like torture. How do you explain this to a teacher, a doctor, a professor, a well meaning mom who loves you yet denies anything is wrong?

I’m waiting on evaluation results from my psychiatrist. I want to understand myself better and know that I’m not imagining things. Life has always felt harder for me because I battle internally with so many thoughts and feelings. It helps me with my creative hobbies, but work is embarrassing because I zone out and miss details in meetings. How can I concentrate?

A Band-Aid

While I investigate what’s really going on with me, I’ll try to keep my stress down, sleep more, stay hydrated, and take vitamin supplements. I’ll also continue to use TickTick, a behemoth productivity app that helps me organize and get things done. TickTick’s premium subscription features:

The Eisenhower Matrix

The Eisenhower Matrix is a system used to prioritize tasks into four categories.

The Pomodoro

The Pomodoro uses 25 minute time bursts to prevent hyper focusing.