Yes and no; you left out part of my quote. Stuff that can be put in a reminder is up to me (especially if I tell them “I’ll handle it”). But if for whatever reason that’s not possible and I tell them “you might have to remind me again next week” and they are fine with that, then they shouldn’t be pissed if I indeed needed a reminder. That’s what I meant with “I warned them”.

This doesn’t seem reasonable… If you accept some responsibility

But … that was the point. “Telling them your boundaries” implies not accepting something you are not up to. My managers know that I am not a good manager myself. I have a lot of qualities, at being a driving force in a project is not among them. So they don’t utilize me for that. Which is good.

Yes, it would be on me if I constantly tell them “sure, just let me handle it” and then not handle it. But that would be the opposite of what I wrote above.

I mostly agree, but (what else ^^):

No one has the right to make their internal turmoil everyone else’s problem, even if it may be particularly burdensome. The world should be far more sympathetic and empathetic, but at some point you have to take responsibility for you.

IMO you do take responsibility when you tell others about your boundaries and how they can work around them. If they don’t want to because it also costs them a little bit of energy and disrupts their typical workflows they have (again: IMO) no right to blame it all on you. If I tell them “I can’t do X” or something and they again and again expect me to do X, it’s also on them.

Simple example: I tell colleagues, family, whatever to please remind me again if they feel I missed something they expected of me. If they do, all is good. If they later are pissed that I missed something and immediately blame me … sorry my friend, I warned you. (If I had the ability to set a reminder, sure that’s on me for not doing that. But it doesn’t always work that way.)

Software/Staff Engineer, as Architect and Solver. So I help design our system (from the technical side), I assist and to a degree coordinate teams, I jump in when know how or man power is needed, I rework or rebuild systems that have no clear ownership of a team, and so on. Oh and I always have an opinion no matter which (technical) topic.

That’s true. The circumstances could be right. If reading laws somehow put him off though, the criticality of acquiring this knowledge might still not offset the “negative” dopamine.

Did I trigger your hyperfocus? 😁

I know, but even those theories (if we talk about the same ones) argue with the attention quickly swapping to new situations, making one practically a “problem solver”. I think, however, that still only works out under the right circumstances and might only be an advantage in the statistical median. Some problems/topics simply don’t catch ones attention and then the missing dopamin rush will simply prevent one from focusing on it. So I think someone with ADHS alone would have a big evolutionary problem, but in a group of people they can jump into action whenever the right circumstances occur and then solve whatever it is quicker than anyone else.

My understanding is, that the hyperfocus sets in for something that catches ones attention in the right way. If one was able to do that deliberately with any chosen task/topic, would it still be an “attention deficit”?

If one could “just hyperfocus” on something, AD(H)S would be a weapon, not a disorder.