So, to update on the ADHD-PI (apparently the current name for what was once ADD) situation:
Dexedrine is going well so far. 4 days in and there are distinct changes in how my brain is working. These may seem perfectly normal to some of you but they're completely unfamiliar to me:
I am able to rapidly shift my focus between things and shift back without lost time. It's an instant shift of focus. Also, I think my memory cleanly picks up where it left off in these cases over the day.
It's much easier to motivate myself to work on something. Doing things immediately rather than putting them off until later feels easier.
The advice I've been told a million times over to "get rid of distractions" actually seems to make sense now. Previously, I could have been alone in a room with my work in front of me and if uninterested no force on Earth could get me to do the work. Distractions were never the issue. Now if I only have one thing in front of me, I'm able to focus entirely on it for long stretches.
I am able to more easily interrupt an activity for something more important, or limit an activity to a specific span of time.
I have a compulsion to clean things at the moment. This includes putting dishes and tools away when done with them and doing large cleaning jobs around the apartment that were badly in need of being done but felt completely overwhelming before. So far this is a very good thing, but hopefully it settles down once things are actually clean.
I seem to actually be able to use my Trello boards (https://trello.com/) over the day and track progress on things as I go. I assume this is related to #1 and #4 above, and maybe a bit of new-found compulsion.
I can read faster. I'm losing less time while reading. I haven't tried to dig into why yet, but it seems to be the case. Issues that will probably have to be solved separately:
a. I'm still capable of procrastinating. I can easily find more interesting things to direct my attention toward, though i think I'm somewhat less prone to do so now.
b. The corollary to #1 and #3 above is that if I have distractions available to me now I'll focus on too many things at once (rapidly shifting between them) and productivity will dwindle. I can observe myself doing this though and nudge myself to get back on topic, but I need to learn to eliminate the distractions until the work is done.