ADHD

A weekend’s work

I have had a very interruption-heavy couple of weeks and I have been having trouble getting some important tasks finished.

And that has been hard on my brain.

Everyone has trouble rebounding from interruptions but for those of us with ADHD interruptions are even more dangerous. Not only does the effort to get back on task take even more energy than it does for the average person but there is also the risk of getting even more distracted in the process.

And then my brain likes to toss around the idea that the delay in finishing things is due to something I “should” have been able to account for.

Once upon a time, those “should” thoughts were loud and would completely derail me but since being medicated they mostly just cause me some static. I’m not fully aware of them but they just kind of clutter up part of my brain.

And, of course, if my brain is cluttered then it is hard for me to make any of my plans or tasks really clear.

Which makes it hard for me to do them.

Which compounds the initial problem that the interruptions caused.

Which is why I have decided to spend a good chunk of my Saturday working to clear the backlog and get my brain decluttered.

Saturdays are usually pretty straightforward days with fewer interruptions.

Let’s see how it goes.

Sticking with a plan?

I often have trouble sticking with plans I made for getting my work done.

Either I underestimate the work involved, I forget about travel time, or I make some similar error and get on my own nerves.

Oh, and sometimes I plan for a regular day just when I have a bunch of unusual days coming up in a row.

Yesterday, I made a place for an ordinary day today but I had to pick up my car, go to the supermarket, and head to an appointment by 9:30.

That’s not an ordinary day so I couldn’t use my plan for an ordinary start.

Luckily, I have gotten past the point where I think that means I have failed. And I have stopped abandoning the whole plan when one thing goes wrong.

I still have a little trouble deciding how to change the original plan to match my reality though.

I guess these things just take time. 😉

Monday Braining

Last week, I had added all kinds of details into my Todoist lists about when I was going to do stuff and it caused me a lot of stress.

Since I add everything from walking the dog to answering an email to my to do list, I have a lot of items on a given day.

Normally, that’s not stressful since I know that the number on my list does not mean I have umpteen urgent items to do.

However, once I put those items on my calendar with a fixed time, I felt very stressed.

I had that sense of ‘too much to do’ overwhelm – even though it was the same number of things.

It was saying that I had to do this specific thing at this specific time that was causing the stress.

That’s kind of weird considering that assigning a time to a task usually brings me some relief. (Once a time is assigned, then I don’t have to keep asking myself subconsciously when I am going to do the thing.)

I think it was having so many ‘appointments’ on one day that felt so overwhelming.

And by putting them on the calendar, I lost the sense of flexibility that makes Todoist work for me.

So now I am trying to think in terms of time blocking, scheduling certain types of tasks for specific times and then doing them in whichever order makes sense to me in that timeframe.

Hopefully that will be less stressful.

Classic Me Mistake

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.

On Trying To Figure Out A Bad Day

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.