Anyone with autism NOT have ADHD?

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I solidly meet the criteria for inattentive type ADHD, and I just barely miss meeting the criteria for combined type. If I were diagnosed under the DSM-5, I would easily meet the criteria for combined type.

I notice people say "I can't have ADHD, I don't have an attention deficit." ADHD is called "attention deficit hyperactivity disorder" but the name is a misnomer - it isn't actually an attention deficit. You could call it an intention deficit disorder or a motivation deficit disorder, or an executive dysfunction disorder, or even a self-regulation deficit disorder, but it's not characterized by a short attention span or a true attention deficit. Calling ADHD "attention deficit" is like saying autism is all about flapping hands.

For me, ADHD isn't about how long I can pay attention to something at all. I can pay attention to things for hours. It is about - to some extent - controlling how I direct my attention, intentions, motivations, etc. The problems it causes for me are related to impulsiveness (I often do and say things without thinking, purchase things I don't need without really thinking about whether I can afford it, etc.), organization, doing anything I find to be boring, shifting my attention from things I like. I can't plan very well - when I clean a room, my plan is fairly haphazard and tends to involve shifting from one task to the next without making a lot of headway, and without really knowing which part I should do first, or next. Usually, what motivates me is that I need to find something I lost, or I need to have a room clean by a certain day for various reasons, but even then I don't manage it very well. I lose things all the time. I don't do it as much, but I used to set things down and then spend hours trying to find them again. Nowadays, it's more like I don't have as much stuff to keep track of and therefore lose.

I remember occasions when I set out to clean up a room to find a specific thing - a pair of shoes for example. Once I found the shoes, the motivation to continue cleaning simply evaporated. I couldn't prioritize it above other things I wanted to do, which made it difficult to push forward with the cleaning task, even though I actually did want to finish.

It impacts my sense of time, as in I barely have one. I am really good at guessing what time it is, but I am terrible at knowing how much time has passed. To me, I may feel like only a few minutes have passed, but in reality hours have. Further, I don't really have a strong sense of "the future." I mostly have a sense of "now," with a somewhat faint sense of "tomorrow" followed by "next week to next month." Anything past that might as well be never as far as how I think about it.

I think some of this is autism and some of this is ADHD. And some is both. But mostly, ADHD is a lot of things that aren't best described as "attention deficit."

@verdani What I actually heard him say (on The Coffee Klatch) was that 20-60% of those on the Autism spectrum have ADHD but that confused me a bit!

Is is 20%, 60%, somewhere in the middle - was he referring to the results of different surveys/studies/research?????

There are several different studies with different results. I think the ones I read ranged from 60 to 75%.

I don't think ADHD has anything good associated with it, very much unlike autism.

I disagree a bit.
ADHD has Hyper-focus! That can be good.
It also seems that many people with ADHD are highly creative.

Other than that I agree.

Hyper-focus is generally linked to autism more than ADHD

I disagree a bit.
ADHD has Hyper-focus! That can be good.
It also seems that many people with ADHD are highly creative.

Other than that I agree.

That's odd, I thought it was well known that people with ADHD have the ability to Hyper-focus. But it's mostly on TV and video games. Not on subjects like Neurology, Psychology, and Deductive reasoning such as I do.

I don't think ADHD has anything good associated with it, very much unlike autism.