I sure do wish my friends were able to be strategic about such things when I'm not. (I bet there's selection effects for this kind of clustering.)
Do you actually find this to be a “sit down and do it” type task, though? (At least, that's how the post reads to me connotationally; maybe I'm misunderstanding it.) My experiences, at least in terms of “how it feels to do from the inside while depressed”, have been more along the lines of “make several ambiguous decisions on how to quantize your situation so it fits into the only form they'll accept while worrying about being judged on whether you'll be able to back that up with socially certified proof in front of unknown arbiters an arbitrary amount of time later” as the initial phase, followed by a foggy gauntlet of appointments in which you must continue to make decisions based on very little information, be perfectly reliable across long irregular time delays, never miss any postal mail, email, text messages, telephone calls, or Health Portal messages that require you to log in with 2FA every time and take five minutes to load, and never miss any lack of postal mail, email, text messages, telephone calls, or Health Portal messages that require you to log in with 2FA every time and take five minutes to load (except when the portal is down, in which case you have to make a note for yourself to try again repeatedly until it's up again) because sometimes they silently fail to send you a thing you need, and sometimes the receptionist can't understand you over the phone or misspells your name so the records are wrong which results in getting brick-walled later, and sometimes the one person doesn't fax the thing to the place and you get a blank stare or a nastygram or a giant bill two weeks later, which leads to another three phone calls, which… it's not usually every single one of those things, but you wind up having to be prepared for a functionally unlimited amount of it regardless. A friend who tried to support that process effectively would have to keep the task in context over a period of months and spend energy dealing with retries and eliciting communication and stuff; just getting the ball rolling and then letting go would have a terribly high failure rate. Is this just a Different Worlds thing?
If you're uncertain, you can just try ADHD meds or depression meds (shoutout bupropion) for a bit, and if they help they help.
Anecdotally I have heard some friends had wildly different experiences with different prescriptions. Calibration of dosage, frequency and drug were needed to find a regiment that actually helped the individual. So I would caution “just try it for a bit” by noting that negative signal for one prescription might not mean other, similar prescriptions won’t help. (This is 100% anecdote, would be curious to know if research supports)
Relatedly, OCD and anxiety meds can also be quite helpful for some people.
For all my efforts at deliberate practicing rationality, by far the most actionable way to self-improve is "get on ADHD or depression meds, if you need them."
Your friends with ADHD and depression struggle to summon the motivation and focus necessary to get themselves a teledoc who can give them such meds. One of the most useful things you can do is sit them down and say "hey, wanna do the steps here to get some meds?" and then stare at them until they do.
(or, until they say "really I do not want that actually.")
This brought to you by ~2 years of Feedbackloop-first Rationality workshops and Thinking Assistance (where it often seemed like the most impactful bits were the 10 minutes of getting someone to sit down and get an appointment with a psychiatrist)