Deadlines have carried me for years, but may no longer be enough (or, do I have ADHD?)

I’ve known for a few years now that I exhibit a lot of symptoms commonly associated with ADHD.

The DSM-5 identifies two symptom domains associated with ADHD: (i) inattention¹, and (ii) hyperactivity and impulsivity². I have nearly all the symptoms associated with inattention, but none of the hyperactivity and impulsivity symptoms.

Why am I considering a diagnosis?

I think I first made the association while going through the DSM-5 for a college project on mental health around 2019.³ (A project which, typically, I never completed.)

I’ve always been skeptical of self-diagnosis. And I’ve never pursed a clinical diagnosis either. I always felt that it was unnecessary to pathologize something I believed I could manage with a little discipline and a few behavioural tweaks.

Lately though, I’ve been finding things more difficult.

The last few months have been messier and more chaotic than usual. Not in any dramatic sense, but enough to give me the growing feeling that I need to get my house in order. I don’t know whether a diagnosis would help with that. But maybe it’s a conversation worth having.

So, this is an attempt to articulate, for myself, what exactly I’m experiencing, with a bit more clarity than the vague notions I’ve had floating around in my head so far.

I need deadlines to get things done

One pattern that’s been present for as long as I can remember is how tightly my motivation is coupled with upcoming deadlines.

I almost never struggle to finish work. But what I do struggle with is sitting down and getting started on tasks in any meaningful manner until the pressure of an approaching deadline becomes unavoidable.

Struggling with and finding ways around submissions at Architecture school

The first time this became a serious problem was at Architecture school.

Before that, assignments at high school were easy enough that it never caused trouble. Even then, I’d never actually do my “homework” at home. Either I’d finish it in class as soon as it was assigned, or I would finish it in class on the day it was due.

At Architecture school, assignments were more complex, and required more time to complete. The ones I struggled with most were Architectural Design (AD) assignments.

In out first year, we were required to submit only hand-drafted sheets. Drafting with ink on paper is slow, unforgiving work. Its not something you can compress into a few hours before a deadline. As a result, I was perpetually behind schedule and constantly struggling to keep up with the workload.

This pattern continued for the next five years. I never broke the habit of waiting until the last moment to start. But I developed a few workarounds to the problem. In later semesters, when we were allowed to work digitally, I would set myself fake deadlines to get the sheets printed — usually two days before the actual submission date. This didn’t really give me more time to work, but it did help me avoid some of the panic and anxiety that submissions otherwise caused.

The amount of time I managed to spend on assignments had a direct impact on the quality of work I produced though. In my final semester of Architecture school, things got so bad, I was genuinely unsure whether I would pass (thankfully, the jurors were kind).

Getting more reckless in recent times

Over five years of architecture school and two years of design school, I learned how to work around the way my brain operates. I got through it successfully — even if not very comfortably.

More recently, I’ve become more reckless with this approach.

In office work, much of what I do is less demanding than college was. Because of that, I’ve often been able to get by without the scaffolding that helped me earlier. I’ve mostly been winging it, leaving things to the last moment, and that has been good enough.

The recklessness probably started with my first UX job interview.

It was with Infosys, for a job I didn’t particularly want. We were given an assignment to complete the day before the interview. I didn’t bother. Instead, I got sidetracked working on a completely inconsequential — but far more interesting — elective assignment on Urban Design Politics. For the assignment, A friend and I were making a small booklet titled The Architecture of Totalitarianism.⁴ The content of it wasn’t particularly enlightening, but I was really into the project because I wanted to get into print/editorial design at that point in life (and the booklet we made, I thought, turned out pretty neat).

Anyhow, on the morning of the interview, I sketched a few wireframes right outside the interview room in about 5 minutes. I got the job offer based on that anyway and thought, “that worked?” And so my work life has followed that pattern ever since.

At my current job, which I joined three months ago, the variability in workload has made this harder to manage. Some days, there’s simply too much to do at once. That’s compounded by the fact that I often haven’t worked on the things I was supposed to, because I got sidetracked by something more interesting — like building a design system or redesigning a random dashboard from scratch — while waiting for deadlines to properly get started on actual tasks assigned to me.

This means that Im no longer avoiding the last-minute panic and anxiety I had learned to manage for years.

Not being able to sleep until physically exhausted

Some of my problems are, I’m certain, are made worse by poor sleep.. My sleep quality has been poor for a while now (by which I mean ~15 years).

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been sleeping 4-6 hours per day, on average. I have been unable to fall asleep until I reach a point of physical and mental exhaustion (which reminds me that I need to go to the gym more often). This usually doesn’t happen on most days until 4AM, and sometimes even later. And since I often have meetings in the morning, I have to get up regardless of how much sleep I got.

This is not a particularly new pattern. I cycle through periods of very poor sleep followed by stretches where my sleep schedule is between decent to great. What worries me now is that the bad periods seem to be getting longer, and the good ones shorter.

A constant state of mental fog is one of the consequences of poor sleep quality. And that’s something I’ve been noticing way more lately compared to when I was younger (is this how getting old feels like?). On days when I feel more rested, things do feel different, but those days are becoming increasingly rare.

An attempt at clarity over definite answers

The cost of the problems mentioned above has never been catastrophic.

On the contrary, Ive occasionally used these patterns to my advantage. Over the years, I’ve learnt to trust my ability to hyperfocus before deadlines and produce a large amount of work in one chunk. That’s allowed me to free up time for things I enjoy more: like reading, watching films, or working on random personal projects.

Still, even if not catastrophic, these problems have been persistent.

I’ve resisted framing any of this in terms of ADHD for a couple of reasons. One, I don’t identify with most of the traits associated with hyperactivity. And two, I’m also deeply wary of how casually the label gets applied in everyday conversations. Too many people confidently describe themselves as having ADHD (or other disorders) without ever having been diagnosed, and that makes me suspicious of my own conclusions.

I’m not writing this to arrive at a conclusion as such. I’m writing it because I needed to articulate some of these patterns. If I do decide to pursue a proper diagnosis, I’d want that conversation to be grounded in something more concrete than a vague sense of unease over procrastination.