Will this Day Ever End?

I start to get fidgety around 3 pm everyday. Any guesses why? Yup, I take my ADHD meds at 7am and, like clockwork, at 3pm I feel tired, annoyed, and I start checking the clock every 3 minutes, feeling like I’ll surely die before I get to go home.

No one at my work knows I have ADHD, and I don’t really want to explain why I’m popping pills at my desk, so I try to put up with it, and do the best I can until 4:30, when I shut down my computer and run out the door.

I’m not sure how productive that last hour and a half is, often I’m in the middle of a project and constantly lose my focus, or make careless errors that don’t make any sense. Thankfully, I know this about myself, so I always check and double check what I’m doing, and then quickly skim over it once more the next morning. Another way I’ve found to cope with those last torturous hours is to save some mindless chores until the end of the day. If I absolutely can’t focus on what I’m supposed to be doing I check my e-mail and respond to things that have been piling up in my inbox threatening to distract me all day. If I still have hours (or minutes) to kill, I do things like setting up folders for jobs; organize the many piles that seem to appear on my desk daily, or enter information from faxes we received throughout the day into my computer.

That last hour and a half seems as long as a six-hour day. In the morning I’m so busy and focused on my work that time flies by. Sometimes it gets to be 2pm before I realize that I forgot to stop to eat lunch. As soon as my long-acting stimulants are out of my system, I’m spinning around in my chair, getting over-zealous with the highlighters and basically waiting for the day to end so I can get in the car, roll the windows down, turn up the music, and sit in traffic the whole way home.