Yesterday, in the middle of trying to get stuff done, I took a break and sat in the shade of a tree in my yard.

Naturally, Khalee had to come outside too – after all, what about if I was in peril and she wasn’t there to bark at the menace?

I was so happy just sitting there looking at her looking at me that I snapped a photo.

I have done meditative drawing before and I have meditated before and I have ‘drawn my breath’ – moving a pen on paper in time with my breath, but I have never drawn AS meditation before.

What’s the difference?

Maybe some people wouldn’t distinguish between all of those things but for me there was a qualitative difference.

Meditative drawing in mindful drawing – paying close attention to what you are doing and keeping your focus on what you are creating. It’s restful and mindful and soothing but it doesn’t feel the same as meditation to me.

Meditation takes lots of forms but for me it usually centres on focusing on the breath.

Drawing my breath is also meditative but it feels more like a warm up than a meditation. As in, it would slow me down on a hectic day so I could then sit in meditation.

Today’s experience was different again.

Yesterday, I saw an Instagram post suggesting doodling for stress relief and I decided to morph that into drawing as meditation.

I set my timer for 10 minutes and breathed slowly as I drew lines in one direction on my card and then in the other and then drew small squares where the lines intersected.

As you can see, 10 minutes is not enough time to put a square on each intersection but it was enough time to feel focused and like I was finding some inner stillness.

I’ll definitely try this again.

As I was journalling this morning, I ended up at the question what would make this task more fun?

No, I didn’t mean the task of journaling. I was talking about a task that I have been frustrated by the process of trying to complete.

And I realized that, for my ADHD brain, the question of how to make something fun is more more important than I have previously acknowledged.

Now, I am an adult, so I know that not all tasks can be fun. And I know that there are lots of tasks that I have to do that won’t be fun. I’m fully acknowledge that.

However, with that said, there are lots of ways to make tasks a bit more fun.

And given that I have an interest-based attention system, it really helps me if I work with my brain instead of trying to work against it.

A while ago, I watched a video that was talking about how people with ADHD can’t rely on a sense of accomplishment to energize them for a task. People who are neurotypical can anticipate the satisfaction of being done, and that gives them enough of a boost to finish the task.

That video also noted that people with ADHD. Their brains focus on the energy cost of the time cost or the perceived effort of the task rather than the reward of having it done. And seeing as we can’t always judge the size scope or timeframe of the task sometimes tasks take a disproportionate dread level.

And I’ve also seen a post on Instagram about how this person gains momentum by doing a task she wants to do first or the most appealing task first because it gives her a little dopamine to work towards the next task.

So, with those things in mind – awareness of the fact that I can’t rely on the idea of being finished in order to motivate myself, my need to manage the perceived cost of tasks, and the fact that gaining a little momentum can bring me through to the next task- it really makes sense to seek out the fun in any task.

That doesn’t mean making the tasks themselves fun it means making the situation and which I’m doing them more enjoyable.

So I’m going to experiment a bit with some of my more challenging tasks, especially routine administrative ones, and see whether having company, having a time limit, using voice dictation, or alternating with another activity can help me to complete those tasks and get them out of my head.

Let’s see how I roll.

If I were a motivational speaker, or a motivation style life coach, I would probably try to turn the title up there into some sort of aphorism ‘working small, playing big‘ but that’s not how I roll.

Instead, I’m just really interested in the fact that the tasks that I decided to work on this week in very small increments are the ones that I made progress on the ones that I left big have hardly moved.

I actually made a category in my to do list for incremental tasks and put five things in there and as long as I work on three of them during the day, even just for a minute, I can cross that off my list and something about the scale of that is really useful to me.

And the other task that I took on (not a work task, a home task) was cleaning out a closet downstairs and while the closet isn’t perfect it is much much better and I’m comfortable with leaving it the way it is for a long while.

And now I’m thinking that it might be easier for me to relax overall, easier to let my brain off its leash regularly, if I put more things into these incremental task categories

Perhaps part of my challenge with letting my brain relax is my concern that I have things that I’m going to forget.

I don’t know why my brain thinks it’s better to keep them as big tasks and then just keep them on my radar, but not take any action, but I’m going to try to coax my brain to consider the value of working in small doses.

Maybe I need to take notes on how well this has worked this week so I can return to it and remind myself when I need to. ?

Some days, I just can’t condense my thoughts for this space and, instead, I post flowers.