It Started Early

I believe that hyper-focus is very much an issue for me in certain situations.  I found a couple of supporting articles in case you are interested in researching further:

• ADHD and Hyper-focus
• 4 Simple Steps to Break Yourself Out of Negative Hyper-focus
• ADHD Hyper-focus: What Is It and How to Use It

 

My issue with hyper-focus presents itself primarily with electronics; specifically with computers.

When I was in high school, I lived with my grandmother on my dad’s side of the family. She bought me a VIC-20, and then a COMMADORE-64. I remember sitting in front of the television (that was the monitor back then) and writing lines and lines of code at the age of 15 just to make a ball bounce across the screen . And I knew at the end of the day, or if we had a power outage, that my hours of work would be gone. I had no way of saving the program.

Then the day came! My grandmother happened to work for IBM. The day came that IBM offered their first home computer to employees (at a discounted price I am sure). She brought one home for me! I sat in front of that computer for hours and hours with nothing but a three-ring-binder copy of the IBM DOS user manual to refer to and taught myself to program in BASIC.

I have been fascinated with computers ever since. A lot of people I know that work with computers want nothing to do with them when they get home because they have been working on them all day. For the most part, I could sit in front of a computer and work on it 24 hours a day if I allowed myself to and be content.

Absent-Minded

Hyper-focus can be a wonderful thing. But on the other hand, it can also be a dangerous curse. When I was a young adult, hyper-focus caused me to be late for EVERYTHING. I would get so engrossed at the task at hand that I could set an alarm to be on time for something, it goes off, and before I could get out the door (or sometimes off the couch for that matter), my mind would return to the task I was working on and I would completely forget the alarm ever went off. I’ll leave you with the clip from “Flubber” below. It is so funny on film, but in reality it is a downright depressing situation for both the person dealing with it and the people around them: