Sorry I took so long responding to this. I must have been tired when I read it, and set it aside for dealing with later, and then, of course, forgot. You know how it works.

Anyway, YES. I do believe this is common for people with ADHD. I gather this from my experience working with ADHD academics coaching them through their dissertations [they’ve all graduated with doctorates, btw, and have teaching or administrative jobs]. And with other students, like my teen friend here.

Mostly it’s from paying attention to how my mind works, how applying what I’m learning to my own life slows down my reading immensely…especially if it inspires me to write down those thoughts, and I end up running off on tangents…and new dissertation topics!

BTW when I’d tell my dissertation adviser I wanted to talk about my dissertation, he’d say “which one?” I had 3 different topics, all in one way or another related to each other, but no one else would be able to see those connections because, aside from them being abstract and theoretical, the connections came from personal experience — even the highly abstract topic, “theories of agency,” with which I finally concluded. Another was on autobiographies written by journalists, arising from my interests in both the journalists and the art of memoir [I’ve been writing one for 40 years!]. The third was on a specific journalist, Rheta Childe Dorr, who in 1898 left her husband in Seattle, took her toddler son, and moved to NYC to become a reporter. Her autobiography was fascinating. And…get this…she died the day before I was born! Yes, that’s a bit silly [I don’t believe in reincarnation], but silly means FUN, an interesting flight of fancy.

Watch your own mind as you work thru whatever projects you come up with.