问HN：注意力缺陷多动障碍（ADHD）治疗是否帮助你提升了自我导向工作的能力？
我是一名四十多岁的开发者，正在考虑首次进行注意缺陷多动障碍（主要是注意力不集中型）的诊断和药物治疗。我在职业生涯中一直是利用我的大脑而不是与之对抗——自由职业和咨询工作让我可以选择感兴趣的项目，不断切换技术栈、编程语言和领域以保持参与感，并且对可维护的工程实践有着敏锐的敏感度（因为我知道，如果代码变得混乱，我将无法在其上工作，即使我的生活依赖于此）。
这种方法在过去几年中有效。但现在我拥有了追求真正有潜力项目的资源和经验，却遇到了瓶颈。问题在于，我对我的超专注周期了解得太透彻了，以至于如果我意识到一个项目会超出我的专注时间窗口，我甚至不会开始。我学会了快速工作，以便在我的专注力耗尽之前完成任务，但并没有快到需要我不断切换注意力来应对业务的不同需求的程度。这种情况对我来说越来越糟，而不是变好。
讽刺的是，避免我“应该”做的工作反而让我成为了一个更优秀、更灵活的工程师——我在拖延中广泛学习，出于自我保护形成了对可维护性的强烈看法，并且真正地成为了多学科人才。但我从未能够进行传统的就业（甚至从未尝试过，因为让我去做一些我并不特别感兴趣的事情简直是不可能的，无论是奖励还是惩罚），而现在即使是自我导向的工作也在逐渐流失。
我很好奇：这里有没有人在成年后被诊断并接受药物治疗，发现这对自我导向的长期项目产生了实质性的影响？更不用说因为注意缺陷多动障碍而导致我生活的其他方面一团糟。我并不寻求一般的注意缺陷多动障碍成功故事——我想知道治疗是否帮助了像我们这样通过变通活到现在的人，但现在希望真正执行我们独特定位的事情。
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I'm a developer in my 40s considering getting diagnosed and medicated for (predominantly inattentive) ADHD for the first time. I've built a career around working with my brain rather than against it - freelancing and consulting where I could choose projects that interested me, constantly switching stacks / languages / domains to stay engaged, and developing an acute sensitivity to maintainable engineering practices (because I knew if code became a mess, I'd be physically unable to work on it even if my life depended on it.)<p>This approach worked for years. But now I have the resources and experience to pursue projects I now have real potential, and I'm hitting a wall. The problem is that I understand my hyperfocus cycles so well that if I realize a project will outlast my focus window, I don't even start. I have learned to work fast to outrun my focus juices running out but not <i>that</i> fast where I need to do more than development and switch my attention to different needs of a business constantly. It is getting worse for me, not better.<p>The irony is that avoiding work I "should" be doing made me a better, more versatile engineer - I learned broadly while procrastinating, developed strong opinions about maintainability out of self-preservation, and became genuinely multidisciplinary. But I've never been able to do traditional employment (didn't even try it ever, making myself work on something I'm not intensely interested in is simply impossible, regardless of reward or punishment), and now even self-directed work is slipping away.<p>I'm curious: has anyone here gotten diagnosed and medicated in adulthood and found it made a meaningful difference specifically for self-directed, long-term projects? Not even mentioning how the rest of my life is a mess because of ADHD. I'm not looking for general ADHD success stories - I want to know if treatment helped people like us who've survived this long through workarounds, but now want to actually execute on the things we're uniquely positioned to build.