I suffer from ADHD, not as badly as some, but still to a quite annoying degree.

Regardless of the actual mechanisms at work, it manifests in three primary ways:

• Hyperactivity. Physically having too much energy to keep still. Imagine a combination of extreme heel-drumming frustration (say, after the 50th failed attempt to thread a needle), the restlessness of infatuation and the congested, need-to-stretch feeling of sitting on a plane for 18 hours.

• Limited concentration on any given subject. Diminishing returns of results-for-effort when trying to focus on a single non-stimulating task. Ever work on a spreadsheet for a couple of hours, and your brain just fills up, the numbers stop meaning anything, and you just can't make yourself hit even one more key? Well, we get that after a couple of minutes. It's a bit like isometric exercise, holding a heavy weight at arm's length - it takes increasing effort to just hold it there, and your arm droops progressively lower and lower.

• Lack of mental filtering and prioritization. This is the big one. Neurotypical people have a great big firewall between sense and conscious perception, that filters out all the irrelevant details before you notice them. If you walk into a room, you see the thing you went in there to find, and damn little else unless it's actually on fire. You don't notice the doorknob, the carpet, the font on your keyboard, the arrangement of the paperclips on that desk, that chair, what she's doing with her fingers, the publisher of the book on the coffee table, the poster on the wall, the tennis ball in the corner, or just about anything but what you're looking for. We, on the other hand, do. We can't block any of it out, and we have to manually keep track of what we're meant to be interested in. And of course, it's not just external things we notice - every single thing you see, hear or think about reminds you of dozens of different things, but you filter out all but one or two of the most relevant before they can surface. We, on the other hand, experience all of them. It's a bit like being stuck in a 24/7 skype call to 20 children of various ages whose entire purpose in life is to loudly discuss amongst themselves everything you experience, and you cannot Ever. Fucking. Shut. Them. Up.

As a result, we're kind of distracted all the time, the way space is kind of big, and water is kind of wet. While you have a magical mental whiteboard where you can track, collate and organize your thoughts, we live in a soft gentle rain of post-it notes, all labelled "urgent". If we expend a lot of effort, we can scrape a space on the floor to hold a few of he notes in place while we work on them, but we have to let go of everything else in order to do so.

And so we have the time- and task-management skills of a five year old. We have no automatic reminder facility - if we lose track of what we were supposed to be doing, nothing will prompt us to think of it again. I've resigned myself to a life of cold tea and burned toast, because I get distracted halfway through (any task with a passive waiting component in the middle is pretty much doomed), and don't remember I was in the middle of making them until far too late. I've been to the shops five times in a row to get five separate items, because I walked home after the first one, each time. Trying desperately to remember - "Must buy eggs. Must buy eggs. Must buy eggs..." only makes it worse, as you end up walking in the front door, still chanting it under your breath, without actually having bought eggs.

We rely heavily on habit and autopilot. If we do something the same way every time, we will do it automatically without thinking about it - and this is about the only way we can reliably get things done - so long as you don't disrupt our routine. For instance, I've been distracted out of taking my lunch to work by my wife reminding me to take my lunch to work. And you think I'm kidding.

Also, as you might imagine, we can get overwhelmed by too much chaotic input, very easily. Parties can be rather hellish - you'll know the ADDers, they're the ones helping out in the kitchen and staying at the edges of the group. Crowded shopping malls, on bad days, can invoke outright panic.

Interestingly, the best cure for overload isn't calm and quiet, as you might imagine. The problem isn't the amount of input, it's the effort of trying to not perceive things. Instead, about the best thing I've found is a bloody good game of Quake 3 - we can expand our perception into extreme situational-awareness mode while streamlining our intent down to a very singular purpose, giving our twitch reflexes something to chew on and our fidgetiness a 'productive' outlet. It soaks everything right up.

One thing we are very good at, however, is context. We lose the context all the time, so we have constant practice in picking it up again - and we can sift through an inordinate number of possibilities at lightning speed, because that's what we always have to do. As a result, I've lost count of the times my wife has said "How the hell did you know what I was talking about?"

This means we're good at out-of-the-box solutions, too. We see options others wouldn't, and in random order - the 'obvious' solution doesn't come first.

aaand I'm running late - I'll pick this up later.