ADHD update:
Sleeping less has finally caught up with me. Unlike Modafinil (the stuff I wanted and which my therapist agreed was good, but which insurance only covers under a very specific diagnosis), adderall* doesn't actually make your brain think it needs less sleep.
Yes, most Americans use stimulants like caffeine to help keep them awake, and to some extent, the trick works. The chemistry behind blocking "sleep signals" is really cool; I may write about it in detail some time, but for now you can easily Google the facts. However, there is also a point (as I understand it) where the stimulant has the opposite effect, and basically blocks ITSELF rather than the sleep signals.
I took my final adderall for the day around 4:15, figuring maybe I'd get an "end of day" burst of productivity after my earlier futzing around with software. But no, even though adderall usually only takes 20 minutes to kick in, at 5:00 I was still moving slowly, and worrying about things like why my syncs aren't working like they did before I did all this futzing. I looked at my to-do list and was pretty disappointed with myself, given how good I've been since last Thursday. However, I also realized lack of sleep was the likely cause, so I sent myself home for a nap (good thing that during the summer I am my own boss, so I can do that...)
Moral of the story: No matter how much you think you can get another hour of productivity out of the adderall, don't push past your bedtime! I hope, however, that if I don't take a long nap, I will actually be able to sleep normal hours tonight so I can be refreshed for my psych appointment tomorrow.
GTD (Getting Things Done) software update:
The crisis that caused me to waste even MORE time at work after I posted that last blog entry was caused by Now Up-To-Date (NUD). It seems like the most reliable technologies fail as soon as you are looking at new ones. I would love to say that it's just because I am in love with OmniFocus, but it's not. The odd thing that happened was that I suddenly LOST my entire "ideas" category from the To-Do part of NUD.
The "ideas" category is one of the key ways I keep myself from going off in 100 directions. If I am walking down the street and have an idea (more like WHEN, since it's multiple times a day...), I try to jot it down in the limited space provided by the Palm To-Do field. If the idea takes up more room than that, then often it gets moved to a full-fledged Memo. I will admit, I often don't even revisit the idea list, but it quiets down my noisy brain just to know that the core of the idea is stored somewhere. Occasionally when I look back, I have no idea what I was talking about, which is frustrating, but I've learned to accept that if I didn't write down the idea clearly enough to begin with, it probably wasn't that good (I made this rule after moving to taking all electronic notes; NO ONE could read the scribbles of my handwritten notebooks from before, not even me!)
I had a brief freakout at the possibility of losing hundreds of ideas that I haven't thought about in a long time and that I may never act on, but then I discovered that they were, in fact, still intact on the Palm. The sync hadn't wiped them. Unfortunately, it turns out the NUD conduit only has the options of "sync to Palm" or "overwrite Palm". There is no "Palm overwrites computer" option, as I believe there was in the Palm Desktop software that has fallen so out of date on the mac. So, now I have my ideas stored in one place, but heaven forbid if my Centro should need to be wiped!
Thankfully the Centro is the one Palm I've owned that has NEVER gone into the infinite reboot loop; this may be because I have been more careful about which apps I install, but I'd like to think that Palm has learned from its mistakes. On the other hand, they haven't made any great moves to support iCal or Address Book (maybe they recognize that they suck as much as I do?), so clearly Mac isn't a big priority for them.
Anyway, I'm off to take a 10 minute nap now to see if I can STOP thinking about this problem. Stupid brain. Stupid NUD.
NuGo Bar Update (see Good Thing #43 below)
I tried the Double Chocolate NuGo bar on my way home from work. It was a little warm from being in my bag, but not melty, so I can't imagine the flavor was affected that much. The result: the Double Chocolate falls a bit short of the high bar set by the Dark Chocolate Pomegranate one.
In fact, the Double Chocolate from NuGo falls pretty far down the lisst, in a tie for third place in my rankings of top nutrition bars that have a chocolate flavor:
- Luna Bars (technically there is no "pure" chocolate flavor, but the Molé flavor is great if you like your chocolate a bit spicy)
- PowerBar PowerBuilders (full of tasty fat, which helps the chocolatey goodness, but a little artificial)
- Zone Bars & NuGo (both have a good chocolate outside, but the inside is a bit dry and grainy)
For fruit+chocolate, though, NuGo still wins!
* This is the spelling used in "Delivered from Distraction," which is my current reading and my guidebook through this process, so I've decided to adopt it, even though I still think Addirol looks better, and I'll likely slip up and use it now and again.
