My Personal Rule List: Seems More Aspie, or AD(H)D?

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I made up a list of rules for myself, to try to stop making the same mistakes over and over. Can you give me opinions on whether my challenge is mostly an autism spectrum disorder, or attention deficit/hyperactivity?

The rules I need:

1. At the start of a conversation, ask people how they're doing.
2. Say thank you.
3. Introduce people.
4. When shopping, remember there may be other people around the corner.
5. When walking through a crowd, remember you're NOT IN THAT BIG OF A HURRY.

6. Don't joke with people who don't know you well.
7. Don't make personal comments.
8. Keep your mind on the most important task of the moment (getting bus transfer, why you're going where you're going so you take any necessary items, washing your hair--so you can remember you already did it and not keep rewashing, etc.)
9. Talk less--about the amount the other person is talking.
10. Think about whether you might be revealing too much in what you're saying--things that might interest people in taking advantage of you. If so, change the subject.

11. Don't interrupt people who are talking.
12. When you meet people, look for a couple of things to remember them by, esp. in their faces. It's also a way to practice eye contact. --{I have moderate face blindness}--
13. Remember that social occasions are good for you and you're capable of enjoying them, and smile with pleasure.
14. If someone reminds you of something you forgot to do, just say "Oops! Thanks."

I really do need these rules because I makes mistakes in these areas over and over, and I understand why they don't win me friends.

This seems like both an autism spectrum disorder and ADHD to me. But which one is it the most? Or is it just one?

It could be both, it could be neither.

You should take this list with you to your GP and discuss the situation with them and ask if you may benefit from screening.

It could be ADHD, because I have a friend with ADHD and for all I know he could have wrote that list.

But I'm not sure so don't take my advice.

definitely sounds like both.

I blatantly have both, but I've never particularly grasped the alleged fetish with stacking.

Maybe it's over-rated, or maybe it's something that gets partly neutralized when you overlay ADD.

I do stack things as an organizational strategy (one that fails pretty badly in terms of random access efficiency).

I might stack things if I'm utterly and completely bored, and have nothing more compelling to entertain myself with, but I can't conceive sitting transfixed with a crate of poker chips or dominos stacking them for hours and hours at a time. It's fun and satisfying for about 40 seconds, then just kind of gets boring.

All of them sound like rules I live by, among many others much like them.

I have been diagnosed with both Autism and ADD. One is behind some of the rules, one is behind others, and both are behind the rest.

Thanks, all of you. I will ask a professional next time I see one, but that won't be for a while. Still, I might not totally trust the answer if they look at a list of 6 characteristics or so and if I don't fit them, say, nope, you're normal. (And what, I'm just stupid and lazy or deliberately inconsiderate?)

When I'm out I can't remember more than one or two of these, so I'm going to write them on a card and review them when on the bus, etc.

I didn't consider this in the past because I thought someone who did well in school couldn't have a disorder like this (but I 've always had few friends and some people who disliked me for no reason I knew. I thought I was just hard to like--instead, I was probably breaking the rules frequently.)

Is anybody else's story like that?

Even being on the wrong planet isn't as bad when there are other people like yourself on it.

If it helps clarify the distinction a bit, here's my opinion of how two supra-geniuses, one who's purely aspie, one who's aspie+add, might end up as engineers:

The Aspie with ADD will be the brilliant engineer who comes up with 9 design concepts that are flawed, and 1 that's positively brilliant & solves some problem that was previously regarded as intractable by drawing on knowledge from something completely unrelated, and figuring a way to extend the metaphor and apply it to some other problem.

The pure Aspie will be the guy who catches the hidden defect in 3 of the Aspie+ADD engineer's designs that would have worked unless some bizarre (but not inconceivable) sequence of events happened. Then he'll be told (by the sociopath CEO) that they're going to go with the least-bad of those 3 defective designs anyway, because the flawless design is too expensive and the flawed design is "good enough"

Hmmm. Now that I think about it, there's a major dichotomy in my life.

I like for things to be neatly organized. In fact, I get stressed and upset when they aren't. But I'm utterly incapable of actually keeping things that way.

Once or twice a year, I'll break down in complete frustration and spend a week trying to clean, sort, and organize things. I'll buy a crate of banker's boxes, then go room by room and put things that belong in other rooms in the proper box for the proper room. Then promptly forget that everything I put into the boxes exists. When everything is said and done, the house will be marginally cleaner and neater, and every room will have a mountain of banker's boxes... the ones from the latest round of house-cleaning, stacked on top of two dozen boxes from the previous 5 years of doing the same.

Once in a very, very great while, I'll try sorting through the pile of boxes stacked in a room to try and eliminate the boxes and put things where they "belong". 87 times out of 100, I'll decide that it belongs... in the box, because that's where it's been for 98% of the time I've had it in my possession, and I can't think of anywhere else to put it. So it goes back into a box, and the boxes end up forming a slightly lower stack. Wash, rinse, and repeat. Sigh.

Sometimes, I'll decide that I'm going to organize things once and for all. I'll go out and buy a bunch storage containers, labels, and other stuff needed to sort and store them "properly". If I'm lucky, I'll make it 20% through before losing interest in it, and within a matter of months most of the formerly-sorted things will be back in piles and boxes scattered around the house.

I've learned the hard way to never try and "properly" sort things related to one of my core aspie obsessions that's currently in remission, because there's a very real risk that it will re-activate *just* long enough to derail whatever I'm currently obsessed with and induce me to shop for the next round of supplies related to it, only to promptly forget about them a couple of days later and have the new stuff end up in yet another pile (or box) after arriving. Worse, I've discovered over the years that things I buy during an "obsession relapse" tend to be forgotten about and boxed somewhere non-obvious, so that when I *really* get back into it at some point in the future, I'll end up re-buying the parts again.