1. Waiting for the buzz to kick-in before starting to work.

On Adderall, your work routine looks like this:

Have work to do. Don’t really feel like doing it. Take an Adderall. Dick around for 20 minutes. Pill kicks in, feel energized and focused. Feel like doing work. Work.

In your new, post-Adderall life, the energy and focus don’t come until after you’ve started the work. You’ll be sitting around feeling tired and unenthusiastic, and you’ll start looking for something to make you feel like working. In your mind, that is still the order of things: First you feel like working, then you work.

You can’t wait on your brain to “feel like it” anymore. Without Adderall, you will rarely ever feel like working (unless it’s something you care about). Instead, you must re-learn how to start working even when you don’t feel like it.

Often all it takes is one hard grunt of willpower to get you on your way. Then once you get rolling, it’s not so bad. It’s the start that seems impossible. And it still takes a lot of time to build this willpower muscle back up. Some people go lifetimes without ever really working on their willpower. Now you don’t have a choice.

2. Doing work in one big binge

Once you start a task on Adderall — however trivial — you have to keep going. You have to make it perfect. You have to make it epic. You will binge yourself on the task at hand. On Adderall, it’s downright fun to pop a few pills and tackle a big project in some grand fashion.

Work binges are so pleasant and commonplace on Adderall that you will try to approach every project in binge fashion. This means that you will regularly put off projects until you have time to binge on them. This is also why all-nighters are so common with Adderall users.

In post-Adderall life, you will rarely have the time or energy for work binges. All-nighters become the rare exception, rather than the rule. Whereas you once relished the idea of staying up all night on Adderall and finishing all your work, now you will avoid staying up past your bed time at all costs.

The sober brain prefers bites over binges. You must learn to break up your work into manageable sections.

3. The illusion of infinite time

Adderall allows you to get lost in the moment, with little regard for the motion of the clock. It is the fantasy of every Adderall user, at the peak of their high, to be able to freeze time and obsessively-tweak their project until they’ve seen it through to its glorious, perfect end.

It’s 5 o’clock and everybody else is going home? Good; that’s less distractions for you. The janitors are finished with their rounds and locking up the office? No big deal; you have your own key. It’s getting really late? No matter; you’ll pop another dose and keep working through the night. You can run home and shower around 6am and be back before everybody gets in. Oh, it’s 6am? Whatever, you can shower on your lunch break. You must keep working on this amazing project. Everybody will be so impressed when you are done.

On Adderall, you can always keep pushing back your body clock and personal life in service to the task at hand.

When you quit, you are suddenly at the mercy of your body and mental energy levels. At 5pm when everybody else is going home, you suddenly want to go home too. And in the evening, you want to sleep. You can tell yourself all day that you’ll stay late and finish it, but when “late” comes around, all you want to do is go home and sleep.

You suddenly realize that without Adderall, deadlines are much more real than they used to be.

4. Everything is pleasant

There are few tasks that are truly unpleasant when you’re on Adderall. Sure, there are tasks that you put off because they require extra attention, but nothing that you really dread. Whatever task is assigned to you, small or large, you know you can handle it — it’s just a matter of how much of your special awesomeness that you’ll get to apply to it.

On Adderall, you never have to “man up and do this” in anything more than a non-trivial way. In some sense the notion of work, as others see it, is gone from your life. You may tell yourself that you are a hard worker, but being willing to pop pills until you finish something is not quite the same thing as being a hard worker.

For most people, the definition of “work” is something like this:

Work: Doing something mildly-unpleasant that you are skilled at, for the sake of a paycheck that affords you things that you want.

Work is not a happy destination for most people. Most people do not wake up and say “hooray I get to go to work now!”

They plod through it dutifully, because that is what needs to be done, and they draw some satisfaction from it when possible.

That is a feeling that you have likely forgotten while on Adderall. You’ve forgotten what it’s like to count down the hours until your lunch break, and then count down again until you get to go home.

For you on Adderall, work is very enjoyable. To most sober people, work is between bearable and pleasant. When you quit Adderall, work can be agonizing.

It would be a mistake, at first, to expect work without Adderall to eventually be super-enjoyable again. Do what most sober people do: Aim for bearable, and hope for pleasant. In time, you’ll get there. And if you really work to change your life, you’ll break into all-new territory: fulfilling.

5. Epic expectations

When you are creating something on Adderall, it has to be more than perfect; it has to be the best ever. It must be the most epic, penultimate cover page (or whatever). When you finally finish, everyone will love and praise you for this. Of course, that’s if you finish (often, when the pill wears off or when you are forced to move on to something else, your epic project gets left to gather dust).

Let me tell you something you already knew: That drive for perfection you have is every bit as much you as it is the pill. If you have a problem with perfectionism on Adderall, then you are naturally a perfectionist…the pill just brings it out of you to an extreme degree.

When you quit Adderall, you still demand perfection of yourself, but you don’t have the will to spend the focused time making something perfect anymore. You hate yourself for it, but you just can’t make it as perfect as you know it should be without your pills. The idea of doing something in way that is less than perfect — and less than hugely consequential — is hard for you to accept.

This contrast between wanting it perfect and not being able to make it perfect (as perfect as you could have on your pills) often results in a kind of perfection paralysis. That is, you can’t bring yourself to even start the work because you’re so self-conscious of your own sudden inability to produce something anywhere near your former standard of quality.

Back in the time before Adderall, you didn’t have this problem. You just wanted to get your unpleasant projects done and over with so you could get the grade and move on to perfecting the projects that mattered to you. Before you found Adderall, you would write the crappiest, laziest paper that would get you a B or an A grade. On Adderall, you try to get published in one sitting.

Now that you’ve quit, you need to learn how to half-ass things again. You need to re-learn how to accept far, far less than perfect in the name of getting it done and moving on.

Here’s your first assignment: Bullshit something. A paper for school, a project for work, or even a cleaning of your room. Just do something so half-assed that you’re ashamed of yourself when you turn it in. Barely cross that “minimum effort required” line and then stop and call it done. Now watch the results. You’ll be amazed at how few people notice.

6. Coasting

Once you take an Adderall pill, you’re going to be in “productivity mode” for at least the next four hours whether you like it or not. To keep working on a project, all you really need to do is point yourself in the right direction and start, and the Adderall will keep you moving along happy and focused. It’s kind of like pressing the cruise control button on your car. You turn wheel, and the cruise control will take care of the gas pedal.

On Adderall, there is no “letting off the gas.” Your pedal is pressed down for you.

When you quit Adderall, it’s like you suddenly think “What the fuck? I have to keep pressing this gas pedal down myself now? But that’s so much effort for my leg to have to do!”

I’m over-metaphorizing this, but the point is: Without Adderall, you have to constantly re-make your own motivation to do a task, even as you do it. If you let off the gas, car slows down. It’s a whole new world.

7. Shooting from the hip/under-planning

On Adderall, you can think about everything at once. You can carry a million variables inside your head and all you want to do is find something to apply them to for hours on end. You want to do work that is exciting, captivating, impressive. By comparison to doing the actual work, preparation-oriented tasks like planning and outlining feel boring and uncreative, so you skip them. You don’t need planning — you’re an Adderall-fueled genius! You dive into the project and chase every obsessive tangent until you finish (or until your dose wears off).

In the sober world, planning doesn’t just make things better, it makes them easier to do. Planning is one of the great reducers of effort and unpleasantness. Planning is often easy. And the more you plan, the easier the work is when you get to it.

In an Analogy

It’s moving day. You’ve got a big, heavy, oak cabinet that you have to move from one part of your house to another.

If you had unlimited physical strength, you could just walk up to the oak cabinet and start pushing and muscling it.

But you don’t have unlimited strength. You know you’re going to get tired after a few seconds of pushing. So you take your time putting down rollers and cloths to slide it on, measuring door frames, and planning your path before you ever start pushing. You have limited effort, so you naturally want to do things that will ensure that once you actually start exerting that effort, it will be as streamlined and efficient as possible. Plus, planning is an excuse not to have to start pushing yet.

As you’re pushing this painfully-heavy oak cabinet around your house, you might think about how great it would be to have unlimited strength like superman or something.

But the reality is: You wouldn’t actually move the cabinet better with unlimited strength. You’d forget to look where you’re going, you’d get overconfident, and you’d probably bang into a few things. Planning prevents those errors, but you don’t think to plan until it you have limited strength.

A planned world

After you’ve been off Adderall for a while, you start to realize that for most tasks, thurough planning followed by a little bit of effort will trump super-human effort that is unplanned. Most great projects are planned meticulously before major action is taken. Planning can make the difference in a quality product and a shoddy one; a repeatable success and a fluke.

Try this experiment: Go out and rent a movie that includes an extensive “Making Of” bonus feature. If you want to see detailed planning, watch a big-budget movie be made. Everything is scripted, cold-read, story-boarded, and set-designed before a camera even starts rolling. They don’t do this because they’re anal-retentive. They do this because it reduces effort and it’s more cost efficient.

Planning is your new best friend

Now that you’re off Adderall, you don’t have a choice: You have limited effort now. If you want to get something done without ripping your brain apart, you’re going to have to plan it a little. It may be uncomfortable at first, it may feel pointless and silly, but planning is the path to greatness in the world of the sober.

And nothing reduces effort like a little planning. If you’re freaking out over a project, step back and outline it. Break it down. Plan a little. Takes the edge right off.

8. Thinking that “work” is the same thing as “progress”

On Adderall, you have a tendency to convince yourself that productivity is the same as movement. You’re making epic progress in your mind. You’re doing hugely creative things with style. You’re working harder than everyone around you and enjoying it. You’re such a hard worker, such a workaholic. And yet your life somehow seems to stay the same.

You’re knocking down so many trees that you forget to look at the forest and check your direction.

Work and productivity are nothing without constant awareness of longterm goals. A single hour of smartly-chosen work can often bring about greater results than days full of busywork.

The good news is that seeing the forest for the trees again will come naturally to you when you quit Adderall. Afterall, that’s why you’re quitting, isn’t it? To get your priorities straight again? Well, quitting Adderall will help you do that in spades.

If the problem of Adderall is not being able to see the forest for the trees, then the problem of being off Adderall is that all you can see is the forest. You have to learn how to chop down the trees again. But that’s a good thing. It is better to gravitate towards looking at the forest. It is natural for prioritizing to come easily, and work to come with effort. The way it is in Adderall World (work comes easily, prioritizing is difficult) is counter-productive, despite how productive it feels.

9. Infinite energy

With Adderall, you are never more than a pill pop away from 110% alertness, no matter how long you’ve been up. In fact, your biggest problem on Adderall is trying to relax because being overly-energized has become your natural state. There is no 3:00pm lull that can’t be fixed with a 10mg bump. You can let yourself crash if you have nothing to do, but if you’ve got work on your plate, you never have to worry about getting tired.

When you quit Adderall, you quickly realize why energy drinks like Red Bull are a multi billion-dollar market. Your energy level becomes a huge concern at every hour of the day. You feel like you’re tired all the time. At best, maybe there are a few spots in the day when you feel alright, but the rest of the time you feel like you’d much rather be at home in bed.

All the productivity tips in the world won’t help you if you can’t keep your energy up. It’s amazing how fast all your best intentions will go out the window when fatigue hits. For this reason, you must find a solution to your energy level problem. You must figure out your own personal method for staying productively awake for at least 9 hours a day.

Your natural tendency may be to try to stuff a bunch of sugar and carbs into your body to keep it awake like some kind of sugar-animated zombie. Don’t do that. Try to keep your snacks relatively healthy, and try to stay hydrated with water. But beyond that, having coffee at your desk can do the trick. Coffee won’t feel like Adderall, but it will keep your head up. After a while, that becomes all you need.

My personal energy solution: Coffee and granola in the morning gets me to lunch. Sometimes I can usually make it to the end of the day with just some snacks (fruit is the best), but if it gets really bad I’ll add another coffee. If I have stuff to do after work, I’ll grab a small coffee around 5pm as a booster, which will take me to bed time. I also exercise regularly and take Omegabrite every day (which made a noticable difference over other Omega 3 products).

Posted in Articles, Work and Productivity