A few years back I decided to work on my ADHD. I’ve tried lots of different tactics over the years, but I wanted to try something new. I would install a piece of software that tracked everything I did on my work computer, and then categorized all the activity into categories like “communication,” “productive” or “entertainment.”

So I installed RescueTime and braced myself. The results were … not flattering. Although I got work done, I was losing a decent chunk of my day to compulsively pulling up the same websites over and over, looking for a new article or video to spend a few minutes on. Those “breaks” added up to hours lost.

I don’t want to litigate whether reading the news on work time is moral or not. That’s not the point here. My point is that, even though I was doing those things, I didn’t WANT to be doing them. Whether or not they’re moral, they’re not what I wanted to be doing. So I started working to change my habits. That meant blocking some websites, or closing my web browser entirely when I was working on something. Eventually I created a productivity pattern that heavily utilized virtual desktops — a strategy I employ to this day. My RescueTime reports gradually improved until I felt like every day I was giving my best effort to get important things done.

(there’s another discussion to be had about business vs. productivity and how you can game something like RescueTime — the only reason it was effective was because I was choosing to do it for myself. But that’s a discussion for another blog)

Impulse control is a big part of ADHD. Something reminds you of the existence of sports and, before you know it, you’re pulling up defector.com to see if they posted anything new.

But impulse control isn’t something that only those with ADHD struggle with. In fact, major corporations are constantly working on better ways to erode our impulse control every day. And that, finally, is what I want to talk about. Why you do what you do on any given day.

Addiction vs Compulsion

An addiction is typically a behavior you repeat that is causing harm — generally something you want to stop, but can’t.

A lot of things get called “addiction” but I think a more appropriate word for many of the things we think of ourselves as “addicted” to is “compulsion.” Compulsion is a strong urge to do something — it doesn’t have anything to do with whether it’s harmful or not.

So I want to talk about your compulsions, because when we talk about “addiction” everyone wants to debate what harmful really means. Is scrolling TikTok for an hour harmful? I don’t know and, frankly, I don’t care. What I want to know is, do you feel compelled to scroll TikTok?

That’s a lot easier for most people to answer because we’re not bringing a moral judgment into it. YES, people feel compelled to scroll TikTok (in fact, people can become compelled after using TikTok for just 35 minutes, which is insane to me).

Compulsion is interesting because it means that you’re allowing someone else to decide how you spend your day. I don’t mean this in a judgy way at all — when I installed RescueTime it was because I felt like I wasn’t spending my days the way I wanted to. In that case, I was allowing my own impulses and the compelling nature of click-baity internet articles and videos to control my day.

And I didn’t like that. I wanted to be deliberate about how I spent my day. I wanted to get to the end of the day and say “I spent my day how I intended to today.”

SO! Let’s get to it.

List your Compulsions

On any given day, what do you feel compelled to do? What do you feel a very strong pull towards, even if it’s not something that you have planned to do that day?

Alternately, what’s something that, once you start, you have a really difficult time stopping? Even doing it for a few seconds now it takes a minute to get back to what you were doing.

I’ll make a (partial) list here for myself, based on the last week or so:

• Drink Caffeine
• Watch YouTube Shorts (seriously, it’s the lamer version of TikTok, which I have avoided, and I can still sit there and swipe through twenty minutes of videos without realizing it!)
• Watch regular YouTube videos
• Check internet news (I use an RSS feed reader now so I just check one place….. for the most part)
• Check LinkedIn
• Check BlueSky
• Check my email/chat/etc.
• Play video games (or sometimes just … mindlessly scroll the playstation store looking for a NEW game that I definitely have plenty of time to get into)
• Play drums

Maybe these things aren’t ruining my life. But when I think about it, I definitely wish I did them less.

Now categorize them

OK, now that you’ve got your list, I want you to categorize them as follows: Good (G), Bad (B) or Neutral (N). Here’s my list, categorized:

Category	Item
G (helps with ADHD! What can I do?)	Drink Caffeine
B	YouTube Shorts
N	Regular YouTube
N	Internet News
N	LinkedIn
N	BlueSky
G	Email/Chat/Etc.
N	Video Games
G	Drums

You can see a handful of good compulsions (although they’re only really good in moderation, and the goodness of some is debatable as it is), one that I recognize as bad, and the rest are pretty neutral.

Now do it again!

I was once at an event where a Netflix executive spoke. I’m not sure if this is a common talking point at Netflix, or if it’s been said elsewhere (I looked and could find only a semi-related quote), but I’ll paraphrase what he said:

“Netflix isn’t competing against Hulu or Blockbuster or whatever. Netflix is competing against sitting down with a good book, or going for a walk with your family, or getting a good night’s sleep.”

(the sleep part is the only one I found evidence of online)

That seems so dystopian to me! If I was at work, and someone said “Man, we just need to stop people from spending so much time with their loved ones!” I would probably consider a change in employer. It feels a little evil.

But the truth of the matter is that EVERYTHING competes for your attention, attention which could be spent on incredibly valuable things. So when we categorized a compulsion as “neutral” up above, we were looking at it in a vacuum.

But what if we add one piece of context — when we’re doing that thing, we have a choice between that activity and something we find personally meaningful and fulfilling. When we compare the activity to the thing it is replacing, does it stay neutral? Or does that tip some stuff into bad?

For me, it’s all about the amount of time spent, compared to what I wanted to do — what I was trying to choose to do.

The world wasn’t made for us

Hammurabi created one of the first written legal codes and published it on a giant stone stele that was discovered and translated in the early 1900s. It says, more than once, that the purpose of the laws (and thus the government) is to “prevent the strong from oppressing the weak.”

(there’s a great section on Hammurabi in “Forgotten Peoples of the Ancient World“)

Our government has, unfortunately, abdicated this responsibility. Organizations with functionally infinite resources and employing the best psychologists available are free to carve up our day, selling hours of our attention to the highest bidder, and replacing uplifting activities with, at best … neutral compulsions.

But it’s not hopeless. Although Facebook spends billions of dollars maximizing the compulsion capacity of their websites, they are still, you know, way over there, somewhere else, on the other side of the internet connection

Mark Zuckerberg has a lot of money and, you know, Hawaiian Islands. But he still has less influence on you, personally, than someone you see every day in the flesh. That human connection is still more powerful than an algorithm.