Tomorrow, I’m going to assign a time to each group of tasks and see if it helps my brain focus,
I really want my work days to feel more orderly and solid.
And I want it to be clear when I’m done for the day.
If it works, great!
If it doesn’t, I want to commit to tweaking the process instead of tossing it out and starting over.
Let’s see how it goes.
Before I was diagnosed/medicated, one of the ways that I would regularly overestimate my capacity was to assume that I could get just as much done on a meeting-filled day as I could on a day with no outside commitments.
I’m not sure if the problem was that I was imagining the meetings were taking less time than they were – equating them with a a quickly done task – or that I thought I could scale the other tasks to fit into the time available after the meetings.
I don’t do that regularly any more but every now and then I make that classic me mistake.
Today was one of those times.
Sigh.
Yesterday was a hard day.
I don’t know if it was the fact that I had slept poorly or the fact that the weather was so grey or the fact that so many of my planned tasks were irksome, but I couldn’t make my brain get things started.
None of my usual get-going techniques worked and I got more and more frustrated.
And it was hard to know whether to try to push myself harder or to find ways to rest and take it easy.
You see, the thing about ADHD is that I can’t always trust signals from my brain.
My lack of enthusiasm for the day might be a sign that I needed more rest or it might be a sign that there was some part of one of my tasks was off-putting to my brain and so it had put the brakes on all my tasks to avoid that one thing.
That makes it very difficult to glibly choose to rest because even though, in general, it’s good to rest it might be the opposite of what I need. And, in fact, resting might make things worse because then the task I don’t even realize I am avoiding is going to seem even more daunting when I return to it.
But if I push myself and it turns out that I do need to rest then I will be even more fatigued and miserable.
And, of course, all of this thinking means I’m going to end up overthinking and over-monitoring what my brain is doing (which is a path to misery in itself.)
So, it always seems like there is no good approach to a bad day and that, in itself, adds to my frustration.
Yesterday, I just tried to take it piece by piece.
I jettisoned anything I could.
I did some reading and some drawing.
I did a little exercise.
I tried to do some work.
I took the dog for a walk.
I made supper.
I met a friend for tea.
I went to bed relatively early.
Today, I feel a lot better so I guess yesterday’s non-plan worked ok.
My brain is being a bit of a jerk today so I spent a bit of time listening to an audiobook and drawing and colouring this.
It helped a bit.
I decided to take last Friday and today off so I could have a long weekend and it has been great for my brain (even though the next few paragraphs will make it seem otherwise – bear with me.)
It’s kind of weird though because one part of my brain thinks it is only a day ‘off’ if I am doing absolutely nothing.
Yet, as I have said before, a day with nothing in it is very stressful for me because I spent the whole day subconsciously wondering if I *should* be doing something else.
So, basically my brain is telling me that a real day off is a day doing nothing but if I try to do that, my brain spends the day bugging me about what I’m doing.
Either way, my ends up spending a lot of time asking itself if this ‘counts’ as a day off, if I’m fooling myself, and…you get the drift.
When you couple that with the fact that it is tricky for me to distinguish between my work and my relaxation because my hobbies, my work, and my volunteer work have a lot of elements in common, it makes it even harder to tell if my day off is a day off.
(Especially when you add in the way my brain jumps around and makes connections between things. I could be solving work problems while I am walking the dog or lying in my swing. Not because those problems were on my mind per se but because that’s when the solution floated up.)
So, anyway, that’s where the borrowed phrasing of ‘letting my brain off-leash’ is coming in handy.
I’ve decided that any time in which my brain can be off-leash for the majority of the day counts as a day off.
That gives me nice, broad parameters that are still specific and it doesn’t limit me to specific activities.
And that’s worked out pretty well for me this long weekend.
