Beware digression
Medium · ADHD & Neurodivergence · 2016 · 498 words
Visa describes his scatterbrained nature and his 1,000,000-word writing project to overcome digression and improve focus.
Beware digression
I'm a typical scatterbrained ENTP with ADHD. I'm not a big fan of the terms, but anyone who knows me will tell you: I fit the stereotype perfectly.
For most of my life, this has been more of a curse than a blessing. I struggle to focus. I struggle to stick to the matter at hand. I did terribly in school, and made all sorts of excuses for it. I'd damage relationships, miss deadlines, break promises (including, worst of all, the ones I made to myself) and life was just becoming this large, stinking mess that I was avoiding by chasing the wisps of every passing thought.
Sometime around 2012, I decided that I was going to overcome my weakness by embarking on an exhaustive writing project. I wanted to write 1,000,000 words, in 1,000 sets of 1,000. I lovingly call them "word vomits". It's now 2016, and I'm 54.8% of the way through.
It's been an incredibly interesting, sobering experience. I've been forced to come to terms with the limitations and consequences of my own thinking/working style.
79,000 words in, I wrote the following:
"I love making digressions. I almost can't help it- I hate the idea of not sharing all these auxiliary details. Aren't we impoverished when denied context? This informs my writing style to a dramatic degree- which is why I use so many commas, em dashes, parentheses, fragments. I write like I talk like I think- very messily."
After writing another 480,000 or so words, I've changed my mind:
"I now recognize that sticking entirely to my comfort zone is limiting, and keeps me from being able to do the work that I want to do. In order for me to get things done, I have to learn to manage myself and my thinking/writing styles. When there's an objective to be met, it often makes a lot of sense on focusing on what's best for the objective– instead of blindly hoping to randomly achieve it through wild trial and error. Especially when you have limited resources, and especially when the objective is complex."
I'm still fundamentally a "breadth-first" person, and I don't think this will ever change. Give me something that needs doing, and my mind immediately races to contextualize it, to compare and contrast it with other things, to flip it over, turn it inside out, ask "what if" and so on.
But I'm learning to resist (or at least postpone) this impulse when appropriate. Digressing is fun, but achieving your goals is even more fun.
Constant digression eventually fills up the entire ideaspace that you have access to. And once you've done that, it gets really boring really fast.
Making progress beyond that ideaspace requires doing hard work that requires focusing on tasks. When you've succeeded at those things, you open up new spaces and opportunities to explore. Which is where the fun is.
Digress for pleasure, and digress to explore, but do not digress at the expense of your own goals.
Originally published at https://medium.com/@visakanv/beware-digression-62f8f304c6c.