ADHD

Me, at work.

My husband has been sick for the past few days so for the first two days of this work week, I have been opening his shop first thing in the morning for his staff.*

Having a fixed time to be ‘at work’ has made me realize that I need to get up earlier overall.

I have to leave at 8:15 to open his shop on time and I’ve been getting up at 7:30, which felt like plenty of time.

And maybe it is, on paper, but it doesn’t FEEL like enough time.

45 minutes is not enough time for my brain to wrap itself around feeding the dog, having my own breakfast, and getting ready for the day.

This is especially true for when I have to leave the house for part of the day but I think the same holds true for working at home.

I often wish I had gotten down to work earlier but I struggle to make the switch from ‘just waking up’ me to ‘I can work now’ me.

And if my morning goes a bit sideways, it can throw off my whole day.

So, if I want to have lots of time to do the things that are important to me, if I want to feel in charge of my schedule, I have to change when I get up.

And I probably need a plan for what I will do before work and ‘at work’, even if I am not actually leaving my house that day.

Now I guess I have to experiment with how much earlier I should set my alarm.

*His senior staff are working on a project at another location.

Water? What?

For the longest time, I was drinking lots of water every day and it felt great.

At some point, I got out of the habit of filling my water bottle in the morning and since then I haven’t been getting enough water every day.

I can tell by how I feel, how I’m sleeping, how thirsty I am in the middle of the night.

But my brain has been doing its thing – hiding that info from me until the middle of the night when I can’t do anything about it.

Today though?

Today I remembered in the morning.

I’m calling this a victory.

Creating Time

I can’t really create time, of course, but I am trying to change the way my time feels.

I often feel rushed or I have no idea if I can do the things I want to do in the time I have available.

Time feels uncertain to me – like it speeds up or slows down randomly- and I know that is a ‘feature’ of my ADHD but I can’t get used to it.

So, I am exploring ways to help time feel different, to feel some spaciousness.

And I think that starts with having a better sense of what kinds of things I want to be doing at certain times of the day.

I’m not sure how I will figure that out but having the idea is a good start.

A low key victory

Last night, I submitted a grant application, utterly unstressed, 24 hours in advance of the deadline.

Earlier in the day, I submitted an application for a different grant over 36 hours before the deadline.

I’ve occasionally turned in grant applications early but this is one of the first times that it has happened by design rather than by luck.

I worked on both of these applications in little bits, got help and feedback, did revisions, added extra material, for more feedback, and was still able to get them both in early.

I even took 4 days off over the weekend.

I’m really proud of myself for this process.

I actually enjoyed putting the application together because I had plenty of time to think.

One of my ongoing goals is to spend more time working on things in small amounts instead of trying to do them in one fell swoop and this is a very promising start.

Go me!

I’m backdating this

This evening, I ended up on a roll and I got a backlog of things done.

That felt great and I was very excited about that until I realized I had forgotten to post here before midnight.

But that highlights a fundamental disagreement I have tracking daily challenges on a device.

To me, I have done something on a given day if I do it between when I get up and when I go to bed.

Using my phone to track the fact that I did something leads to being tied to chronological time so if I do something after midnight it’s actually the next day.

Now, I get that and I understand that it is literally the next day.

However, when it comes to things I want to do daily, I am way more interested in my experience of time than in doing something on a specific date.

I haven’t gone to bed on my Friday so…

like the title says, I’m backdating this.