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Reaching 85%, or, How I ADHD (a.k.a. Hyperfocusing on ADHD Today, Sorry Not Sorry)
I told the psychiatric nurse who supervises my meds, on a day when I was pulled over in a parking lot talking to her on the phone because I'd forgotten we had a virtual appointment so she called me to ask where I was, that my planner works about 85% of the time, as long as I LOOK at it in the morning/before I start work. She said, "85% is good. I'm happy with 85%." That sounds like a goal to aim for in life.
This is how I aim for that 85%.
Written because of a discussion I was in on possible ADHD elsewhere online.
MY ADHD
Let me start by saying that how my ADHD expresses itself is not necessarily how your or your loved one's ADHD expresses itself. Which means that my coping strategies may not work for you or them. Also, my coping strategies won't necessarily be working for me next year, and I may have to change them.
My diagnosis is Combined ADHD, which means that I exhibit symptoms of both inattentivity (which AFAB ADHDers commonly present with) and hyperactivity (which AMAB ADHDers commonly present with). My hyperactivity is not usually physical, but instead mental and emotional. The sort of thing that causes you to buttonhole someone at a party, grabbing their lapels and saying "LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT WARHAMMER!" in their face. This is a symptom that gets subsumed into fannishness quite a lot, because in fan circles quite often the response is "YES PLEASE DO TELL ME ABOUT WARHAMMER!" and not "Who are you and what the hell are you doing?!"
I have a significant, measurable difference in my working (short-term) memory as compared to the rest of my cognitive skills. I cannot play games that involve strategy, nor do I do well at academic subjects that involve lots of rote memorization or internalizing of methods and rules, such as most STEM subjects and languages. I do well at games that involve knowing lots of random facts like Trivial Pursuit, or turning on a dime such as Fluxx, and I do well at academic subjects that involve lots of reading (provided I am not bored stiff by the material) and writing that allows me to refer back to references and notes like most humanities and some of the social sciences. There's a reason I have a BA in anthropology, an MA in anthropology and museum studies, and an MLIS in library and information sciences with a certificate in digital imaging when as a child I really, really wanted to be an astronomer.
The exception is any subject I get hyperfocused on for a while, in which I will retain vast amounts of information until I lose the hyperfocus and most of it melts away.
I do not often do well at writing book reviews because I cannot remember the events of the book even while I am reading it. I retain just enough to get through from one plot point to another. If you ask me what a book is about, I'll sort of stare at you, then try to regurgitate what bits I remember of the plot, then fizzle out and give up. On the bright side, this means if I like a book, it has almost infinite re-readability for me. This is also why I prefer books with one or two point-of-view characters because I cannot deal with multiple POVs because I can't remember who is who and I can't follow the plots. It kills me that on paper the Malazan books ought to be total catnip for me, but because they are sprawling plots with many, many POVs I cannot read them. I've tried multiple times including the audiobook, but nope. This may be why I had no problems reading Harrow the 9th when it confused the hell out of a lot of people: I just assumed Muir knew what she was doing and that it wold come together at the end of the book, because that is my normal reading experience!
I also have the typical ADHD time blindness, which means I cannot reliably estimate how long it will take me to do a thing, and I cannot mentally comprehend the future as it relates to daily things. That means I have to have an externally imposed structure to do or learn things: for example, I cannot bring myself to study a language for 30 minutes every day because something in my brain cannot make the connection between slow, steady work at a thing bringing mastery a long time later. If I want to learn a language I have to sign up for a course that will make me study (at the last minute, of course!) regularly or suffer the consequences of failing tests and humiliation in class when I cannot remember the words the teacher is asking for.
GENETICS
There's a strong genetic component to ADHD and I'm pretty sure both my parents had it. Mom's told me that she thinks she might, and she coped with it by standing up while teaching. I also note that she got up at 5AM to go into school to get things done when nobody else was there because she couldn't concentrate at home. Dad got sent to military school as a kid, which I think put some discipline into him, and got a degree in physics (and also liked dancing, which Mom didn't--I think the exercise helped him in college). He went into the Air Force and got more structure and discipline, and came out, making a 180° turn into wildlife science for his MS and Ph.D. He changed the direction of his career within the field every 5 years or so, ending up working with early AI modeling of animal behavior (not the language models of today called "AI") in the late 80s and early 90s before he died. He also had a billion interests and hobbies, buying all sorts of books on them so we had a large, eclectic library at home, and also impulse spending problems. That never got too bad for him, but unfortunately I suffer that WAY HARDER. I got the worst of both worlds.
Anyway! On to Stuff About Getting Things Done.
WHAT DOES NOT WORK FOR ME
Tight schedules
Tight schedules drive me nuts. I cannot out down "Do Thing A from 2:30 to 4:30 PM, then Thing B from 4:45 to 6:00PM" because it might take me an hour to get into doing Thing A, and then I'm well into the swing of it by 4:30 and stopping now means I'm not getting back to it. Then I have to get into the swing of Thing B and by the time I've done that, it's time for dinner and I'm frustrated.
Pomodoro
Oh, lord, 25 minutes is about the time it takes me to get into the thing on a good day, and that INFERNAL ALARM going off every 25 minutes and jolting me out of the zone is MY ETERNAL ENEMY.
To-Do Lists
I put everything on them and end up being overwhelmed, or I spend so much time crafting the to-do list that I have satisfied the Do A Thing urge and I no longer have any impetus to Do The Thing.
Daily Planners
I can't do a daily planner because I need to see everything that's supposed to happen this week. If I don't realize that I have a dentist appointment on Thursday, then the impetus to get Thing A done by Wednesday isn't there.
Setting Deadlines Myself
There are no consequences for blowing deadlines I have set myself and thus no reason to pay attention to them. I ask my clients for their deadline and alas, most of them are incredibly nice and don't want to impose and say "What's good for you?" What's good for me is them setting a deadline, but it's kind of hard to say that.
Scheduling via Deadline Dates/Times
ADHD time blindness means I cannot estimate how long a given task will take. While I need a hard deadline imposed by someone else, I cannot just put that date in the planner and successfully Do The Thing. I must block out a period of time in which I am Doing The Thing. And I cannot estimate that period of time until I have Done The Thing multiple times and remembered to record it.
What Does Work For Me
Routine and, ironically, Change
Routine
Getting into a routine for work helps my brain flip into Do The Thing mode. I wrote and edited my book by:
-- Starting at right about the same time every day (after dinner while working at the library, in the afternoon when I quit my job)
-- Getting on the treadmill for 10-ish minutes
-- Listening to a curated playlist on the treadmill and at my desk that I listened to only while writing and editing the book
-- Settling down with a drink
-- Wearing earbuds--often forgetting to turn the music back on!
-- When I had meds, taking Ritalin right as I got on the treadmill, then again 3 hours later when the first wore off
The treadmill plus music allowed me to close my eyes and start my mind drifting onto the topics I was writing/editing: a problem I needed to fix, what the next scene was about, a character's motivation. Not actively trying to work on the problem, but letting the topics drift. In 5-10 minutes my subconscious would start throwing more concrete ideas into my had--usually about the problem I had, but sometimes about another scene--and I'd dictate notes into an email on my phone and send it to myself when I'd gotten enough in my mind that I had to get off the treadmill and go work.
Why did it work? Movement occupying the hyperactive parts of my brain and being in a place that I can't write stuff down usually works to allow the rest of my brain to focus on a problem. More on that below.
Book Cover Design Work
The treadmill is less actively helpful on this, but the routine still is: I sit down at my computer after lunch and pop open Photoshop (and DAZ if I'm using it), plus Milanote, where I keep my client notes at the moment. I'm still distracted a lot by the Internet, but I've gotten used to This Is The Time You Work On This.
This is also where deadlines come into play: I book one cover per week (or 2-3 weeks if it's a painting), and designate This Is The Week You Do This Cover. Time blindness means that if the deadline is Friday, I will not start the cover until Thursday. It took me FIVE YEARS to figure out that "This Is the Week You Do The Cover" is how I have to structure it.
Neurotypicals might not see the difference. But it's a huge fucking difference that I wish I'd learned in school. It only took me half a bloody century to figure it out.
Also....accepting that if I have A Thing To Do at a certain time, that I will not get anything done in the leadup to it. Dentist at 11AM? Shower and breakfast are the only goals I have. Dentist at 2PM? Shower, breakfast and lunch are the only things I'm getting done. Online meeting at 2? Breakfast and lunch only. Shower not happening because it doesn't need to.
Change
Ironically, change can also help. Not constant, hyperactivity-induced change, but once I've gotten into a rut, I stop paying attention to my schedule and flake out. Starting a new system or schedule work to fix that: I follow the new system for a while until it stops working, then go back to the old or find a new one. For the past five years, this meant I basically got a new planner every six months and tried that system. (What this resulted in is that I like the Passion Planner system, without the monthly check-ins, and ended up using the Jibun Techo, which is more-or-less PP without the check-ins.).
Fun fact: My most productive two months ever, back in 2018 or so, turned out to be because I was hyperfocused on productivity, not because the system I was using at the time was particularly fabulous, and it didn't last. :)
OUT OF SIGHT, OUT OF MIND
If I can't see it, it doesn't exist. I cannot put away a half-finished project because I will never finish it. I can't use an electronic planner because it's not open in front of my face. I can't organize a room with closed cabinets because I will never see the things I put away and this either forget I own them or stop using them.
What I do:
1. Leave projects out in the open. This is not optimal if, say, we have friends coming for dinner and I've got sewing all over the table, but in those cases sweeping it all into an OPEN box that goes in my office and comes right back out afterward is somewhat helpful. But corraling the unfinished project in an open box on the table works for daily use. Mostly. I've got hemming I need to do since August on the table right now...
2. A weekly planner where I can see everything that is happening this week OPEN on my desk. It cannot close. As part of my weekly routine (ding!), on Sunday or Monday I look at the monthly pages and transfer everything happening this week to this week's spread, which stays open just to my left.
3. Adding my appointments and recurring things like meds to Google Calendar and having it automatically email me. Appointments get 2 reminders: 3 days before and 1 day before. Meds get a daily reminder: "Have you taken your meds yet?"
4. As I said earlier, scheduling a block of days to be working on a project, not working directly to the deadline. It helps if I HAVE the deadline (see below), so I know what block of days I need to schedule, and also so I can prioritize when life happens and I have to shuffle projects around.
5. Multiple programs open at once and visible. When I was working at a day job, I had two monitors open with email on one, the document I was working on open on the other, and various browser windows (for research or HTML coding results) open between the two. At home now I have a 32" monitor and multiple things open and overlapping so they're not completely hidden.
EXTERNALLY IMPOSED LIMITS
Deadlines
I can't set them myself because there are no consequences when I break them. I can't set consequences either, because my brain will go "That's bullshit." (thank you impulse control problems with ADHD. XD) So no "If I make this deadline, we'll go out and see that movie this weekend," because I'll go see the movie anyway and just feel guilty.
If a client or other limitation, like we fly out of the country on X date, sets the deadline, it's significantly easier to hit because I'm going to face consequences that I cannot slide out of.
Supervision/Accountability
This worked better when I was in the working world and not freelancing. If I had a regular checkup with a supervisor or coworker, I could get things done because there would be consequences if I didn't. Unless, the times I managed not to hit it quite, there were no consequences and the person was "That's fine, just whenever you can get to it." Nooooo! I need you to be disappointed in me! Don't give me loads of leeway! Alas, that is not a professional thing to say in the working world, so I managed to miss lots of those sorts of deadlines because my coworkers were all nice and understanding.
Client requests
This in where creativity comes into productivity! I have a more difficult time doing a cover when the client has zero vision for it, and it's also not that great if they have a very detailed specific vision, but if they've got ideas they can lob at me I can bounce off of them and come up with things. I don't do well in a vacuum--my creativity works best when inspired by a starting set of limitations, then growing out from there.
This is one of the reasons why I do the fanworks exchanges when I have time--I have a hard time doing fanart by myself because I either have too many ideas or none at all. A request letter narrows the ideas down and I can go from there. I also have external deadlines and accountability with exchanges, because others are expecting me to Do The Thing At The Time.
WORKING WITH/NEAR OTHERS
Body doubling
This is a thing where someone sits with you, not helping you and sometimes not even talking to you, while you Do The Thing. There's some sort of accountability that often descends upon the brain when someone else is there. It can be formal, as you hire an ADHD coach to come around who ends up sitting there while you clean the room, or it can be informal, like when you go to a coffee shop and write with other people around you.
I've been to a local tea shop to write a couple of times, which worked to an extent, but I had a hard limit of time there because I didn't want to leave my computer on the table while I went to the bathroom and also didn't want to pack it all up, go, then come back out and unpack because it wold interrupt the flow. :)
Writing sprints on Discord, Zoom or other online spaces are this same sort of thing: participants often get more work done because other people are also getting work done in the same social, if not physical, space.
GROUP PROJECTS
This works far better for me than body doubling, because I get the external accountability. This is also why I used to ask online if people wanted to join me in developing projects--comics/manga mostly--because I could never do it all by myself. Alas, it rarely worked out because people want to work on their own IP, basically, and I essentially got offers for "You can do a comic of my already-written fic!" when I wanted to co-develop from the ground up, or get help for my IP. So it goes.
[*****But if you're interested in developing an online comic set at an SF convention where you can follow different storylines/character lines by clicking on that person (or object!) then hit me up! I've wanted to do that for 15 years!]
PHYSICAL MOVEMENT AND TOUCH
Not just exercise, though that's a big part of it. Regular aerobic exercise is one of the most important things you can do that can calm ADHD, but it's not the only form of physicality that helps. These other things work to engage the busy part of my brain so that the rest of my brain is free to work, or to Start The Thing.
Standing up
The few times at work I felt confident enough to stand during a meeting or working group, I was able to THINK so much better and to contribute so much more. Also, I cannot draw for 3 hours in a row, but if I'm at an art class where I'm standing or sitting on a stool to do life drawing for 3 hours (with breaks!), I can focus so much more on the art. I really should utilize my sit-stand desk for this (we got it because I am short and typical desk height is too tall for me!)
Pacing and fidgeting
Movement again, occupying the busy parts of the brain. I have to admit that pacing doesn't do much for me unless it's on the treadmill because I get distracted by all the things around me, air currents on my skin, sounds, etc. The treadmill is Boring and that's Good. Fidgeting helped me stay focused in work meetings, and nowadays when watching online seminars and classes, as did doodling.
Driving
If I need to think, driving also occupies the part of my brain that's hyperactive. I don't do it much because it's hard to get the impetus to leave my desk, put on the right shoes, get into the car, figure out where to go (it has to have an objective, not be aimless, but that's me), etc. But it's an option.
Massage
I started getting regular massages back when I got migraines, to see if it helped them. Massages did not help the headaches, but lying down on that table, I could THINK! Long, involved thoughts! Slow thoughts! I COULD REMEMBER THE THOUGHTS. WOW AMAZING. So for writing I'd figure out what I wanted to plot next, put on The Appropriate Playlist on the way to the massage therapist, and then spend 90 minutes mulling it over. I plotted a lot of the book I wrote on that table. Even when I didn't do mental work, the 90 minutes of my brain turned OFF was so lovely and calming that we have budgeted for me to keep going even when I quit my day job.
ORGANIZING THE PHYSICAL ENVIRONMENT TO AVOID COGNITIVE OVERLOAD
Limiting my wardrobe
Neil Gaiman and Steve Jobs both followed the same idea: wear the same thing every day and you can save your mental energy for other things. It's not a bad idea--ADHDers have a limited tank of motivation (dopamine) compared to neurotypicals, and exhaust it much sooner. Limiting the decisions you have to make each day helps preserve that tank, and wearing a basic uniform works.
For some people, this might manifest as not giving a damn what you wear. Alas, I have impulse control problems with shopping along with needing to feel that I look somewhat good--and needed to appear business casual when I was working the day job--which tends to result in an out-of-control wardrobe and spending lots of getting-dressed time staring at everything I own trying to figure out what to wear. So I set a uniform: jersey-knit shirt, pants or jeans, cardigan, long necklace. I set a limited range of colors/shades: grey to black for the neutrals, and pink to burgundy for the colors. Everything I owned went with everything else, I could grab any shirt and cardigan and wear them together with any pair of pants, and the necklace made it look like an outfit.
I don't need to wear the full uniform anymore, and I'm mostly sliding into not-giving-a-damn since I stay home most of the time, but the set of clothes I wear outside the house still follows much the same rules. Only I have pink, burgundy, and black sweatpants and leggings instead of work-appropriate pants. :D
Tidying my immediate environment
I am naturally a slob, thanks to ADHD. It's damn hard to focus on tidying--unless I get into hyperfocus and I can't STOP, which is pretty distressing when it happens--so things collect on every surface around me until one day I realize that I've been having a hard time doing work because the clutter is so damn distracting. And then it takes a while to clean up my office because I feel that I can't afford the time to clean because I have this project that must get done, but I can't get the project done because the clutter is so distracting. Eventually I will hit the tipping point and spend an hour or so tidying and feel SO MUCH BETTER. And then I GET THE THING DONE!
Maybe part of it is the physical effort put into moving around, in addition to getting rid of the clutter. Either way, it works for me.
Longer term: designing my environment to be pleasing and efficient
1. If I hate my house, I can't work. Maybe this is the artist in me, but things around me need to be harmonious. YES I know that 85% of the time there's a layer of crap cluttering every surface, but the overall arrangement of furnishings and storage units needs to look good when the clutter's been (temporarily) tamed. I have to FEEL good about my surroundings, and there needs to be a rhythm and balance to the arrangement.
2. Things need to be stored at the point of need. This is a bit of dissonance in our household: for example![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
myrialux likes to store cleaning products all in one place. I, OTOH, like to store cleaning products next to the thing they will clean. So in my ideal household I'd have 2 bottles of toilet cleaner, one next to each toilet and toilet brush, while myrialux naturally wants to store them in the Cleaning Products Closet. (We solved this conundrum by getting cleaners to come in and clean for us, honestly.) Anyway, packing materials should ideally be stored near the location where I wrap packages, sewing supplies near where I set up the machine to sew, etc. Have I succeeded in this? Not really well in this house, alas.
3. I can put laundry up semi-regularly if I do not have to go to another room. Our rental house, ages ago, was great because we had sliding door closets in the main bedroom, and it was easy to dump the hamper on the bed and shove the clothes into the drawer units RIGHT THERE as I picked them up, no sorting needed. In this house, I have to dump the clothes on the bed, first sort them, then go through the bathroom into the closet multiple times to put clothes up. (Folding? Does not happen. I cram. Folding will never happen.) We have future plans of putting a PAX wardrobe in the bedroom itself, to remove this point of friction. (Take the hamper to the closet? No--I have to bend over multiple times to empty it since it sits on the floor, and that's another point of friction.)
4. Having a DARK OFFICE with targeted light on my work surface. I get visually distracted easily. If I could sit with my back to the door or the middle of the room I could face a blank wall but I cannot do that. My current office is light colored, with light shelves, and it's INFURIATING. Turning the lights off and a task light on does help to an extent, but I spent 2 weeks a year ago in our very dark library/dining room when we needed to sequester a radioactive cat in my office (iodine thyroid treatment) and it was GLORIOUS. Current long-term plans involve painting my office walls very dark and painting shelving units black to reduce visual cognitive overload. Cannot wait.
5. Noise-cancelling headphones and ambient music. I am addicted to the bands published by Cryo Chamber on Bandcamp that produce dark, ambient electronica. It doesn't pull me away from what I'm doing with regular beats or intelligible lyrics, just fills in the soundscape with atmospheric sound so I don't get distracted by every little noise in or near the house.
BOOKS AND OTHER RESOURCES
(Affiliate links to Amazon: if you buy I'll get a little kickback)
How to ADHD (Amazon affiliate link)
Jessica McCabe has run the How to ADHD YouTube channel for years, on which she talks about ADHD from an insider's viewpoint and speaks to experts about the hows and whys of ADHD and strategies for living and working. She's just recently published her book, which I haven't read yet, but which is sitting on my Kindle app.
The one video series of hers that really spoke to me was on The Wall of Awful: that big mental block sitting there stopping you from Doing The Thing: basically the distress of Doing the Thing is more than the distress of Not Doing the Thing so Not Doing wins. Combine that with a task that for neurotypicals is a simple, single task, for example taking a shower, becoming a giant ball of Many Things: finding clean clothes in the laundry basket (because they're not getting put up), hating the feel of water on my face, having to interrupt the book that I'm reading, having to find the shower cap (because washing my hair is a Whole Other Thing), having to put my dirty clothes up, having to get out a clean washcloth, having to put moisturizer on afterward because my face is dry after being washed, etc. etc. etc.
Dirty Laundry (Amazon affiliate link)
Richard Pink is a neurotypical husband, Roxanne Emery an ADHD wife. Emery was diagnosed late, after they'd gotten together and this is a personable book, a little bit memoir, a lot of tips on living together in a neuro-spicy relationship and how they figured things out. They also run a YouTube channel at ADHD Love (I assume they're on TikTok as well, given the short format videos, but I don't have a link). Roxanne's expression of ADHD is on the order of 95% like mine. We diverge in a few places--when you've met one person with ADHD, you've met one person with ADHD--but I find myself nodding (or feeling called out!) more often then not when watching their videos.
Russell Barkley, Ph.D. (Amazon affiliate link)
Link goes to his Amazon page and not a specific book. If you're like me and prefer to get analytical about ADHD, Barkley is a clinical professor of psychiatry who has done a lot of specialization in ADHD. His books tend to be aimed at clinicians, parents, caretakers, and partners of people with ADHD, to get them to understand what ADHD really is and how to help and live with their patients and loved ones, but ADHDers will also find them useful. He has his own YouTube channel where he posts lectures and commentaries, and you can also find his lectures broken up into shorter bits on channels like ADHDoers. I especially recommend this 13-minute segment of a lecture that explains that motivation does not come from inside for ADHDers, it's produced by structuring the external environment to Do The Thing [see the ways I do that above].
Productivity Alchemy Podcast | ADHD Tag
And the above note about structuring the external environment leads into this podcast: I know of several people, including Ursula Vernon, who use anxiety as a way to Get The Thing Done--Ursula explains it as not wanting to die in a ditch outside Wal-Mart--and it's often so successful that they don't realize they have ADHD. This might not be the best long-term strategy, but it can be effective.
You can find Ursula's ADHD diagnosis journey on Productivity Alchemy, hosted by her husband Kevin Sonney and frequently co-hosted by her, under the ADHD tag--check the show notes for episodes where the intro focuses on her: if you don't want to listen to full episodes, you can just listen to the chatty intros to catch up on her journey. (I think 2019 might be the year she was diagnosed--I recall listening to the podcast while putting up an exhibit at work in February 2020.) Even though I've been reading about ADHD for years, I learned from Ursula that hyperactivity is not necessarily physical, it can be channeled into mental and emotional obsession. Which explains some of my fannish tendencies. :D Lots of other people with ADHD have been interviewed under that tag and find out about the vast array of strategies people employ that work--or don't work--for them.
CONTENT WARNING: Ursula went through breast cancer diagnosis and treatment in recent months, and while she's now wrapping up treatment successfully there are a lot of episodes from the last year that mention it. Kevin puts content warnings at the top of the description for cancer and other potentially triggering topics.
Anyway! That's a giant-ass post about ADHD and my coping strategies (and others I've heard). Could it be a hell of a lot shorter if I edited it? Probably! Am I going to? No! I hyperfocused all afternoon on it and now I'm hungry and have lost the hyperfocus so if I wait to edit it, it's not getting posted.
Have fun!
This is how I aim for that 85%.
Written because of a discussion I was in on possible ADHD elsewhere online.
MY ADHD
Let me start by saying that how my ADHD expresses itself is not necessarily how your or your loved one's ADHD expresses itself. Which means that my coping strategies may not work for you or them. Also, my coping strategies won't necessarily be working for me next year, and I may have to change them.
My diagnosis is Combined ADHD, which means that I exhibit symptoms of both inattentivity (which AFAB ADHDers commonly present with) and hyperactivity (which AMAB ADHDers commonly present with). My hyperactivity is not usually physical, but instead mental and emotional. The sort of thing that causes you to buttonhole someone at a party, grabbing their lapels and saying "LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT WARHAMMER!" in their face. This is a symptom that gets subsumed into fannishness quite a lot, because in fan circles quite often the response is "YES PLEASE DO TELL ME ABOUT WARHAMMER!" and not "Who are you and what the hell are you doing?!"
I have a significant, measurable difference in my working (short-term) memory as compared to the rest of my cognitive skills. I cannot play games that involve strategy, nor do I do well at academic subjects that involve lots of rote memorization or internalizing of methods and rules, such as most STEM subjects and languages. I do well at games that involve knowing lots of random facts like Trivial Pursuit, or turning on a dime such as Fluxx, and I do well at academic subjects that involve lots of reading (provided I am not bored stiff by the material) and writing that allows me to refer back to references and notes like most humanities and some of the social sciences. There's a reason I have a BA in anthropology, an MA in anthropology and museum studies, and an MLIS in library and information sciences with a certificate in digital imaging when as a child I really, really wanted to be an astronomer.
The exception is any subject I get hyperfocused on for a while, in which I will retain vast amounts of information until I lose the hyperfocus and most of it melts away.
I do not often do well at writing book reviews because I cannot remember the events of the book even while I am reading it. I retain just enough to get through from one plot point to another. If you ask me what a book is about, I'll sort of stare at you, then try to regurgitate what bits I remember of the plot, then fizzle out and give up. On the bright side, this means if I like a book, it has almost infinite re-readability for me. This is also why I prefer books with one or two point-of-view characters because I cannot deal with multiple POVs because I can't remember who is who and I can't follow the plots. It kills me that on paper the Malazan books ought to be total catnip for me, but because they are sprawling plots with many, many POVs I cannot read them. I've tried multiple times including the audiobook, but nope. This may be why I had no problems reading Harrow the 9th when it confused the hell out of a lot of people: I just assumed Muir knew what she was doing and that it wold come together at the end of the book, because that is my normal reading experience!
I also have the typical ADHD time blindness, which means I cannot reliably estimate how long it will take me to do a thing, and I cannot mentally comprehend the future as it relates to daily things. That means I have to have an externally imposed structure to do or learn things: for example, I cannot bring myself to study a language for 30 minutes every day because something in my brain cannot make the connection between slow, steady work at a thing bringing mastery a long time later. If I want to learn a language I have to sign up for a course that will make me study (at the last minute, of course!) regularly or suffer the consequences of failing tests and humiliation in class when I cannot remember the words the teacher is asking for.
GENETICS
There's a strong genetic component to ADHD and I'm pretty sure both my parents had it. Mom's told me that she thinks she might, and she coped with it by standing up while teaching. I also note that she got up at 5AM to go into school to get things done when nobody else was there because she couldn't concentrate at home. Dad got sent to military school as a kid, which I think put some discipline into him, and got a degree in physics (and also liked dancing, which Mom didn't--I think the exercise helped him in college). He went into the Air Force and got more structure and discipline, and came out, making a 180° turn into wildlife science for his MS and Ph.D. He changed the direction of his career within the field every 5 years or so, ending up working with early AI modeling of animal behavior (not the language models of today called "AI") in the late 80s and early 90s before he died. He also had a billion interests and hobbies, buying all sorts of books on them so we had a large, eclectic library at home, and also impulse spending problems. That never got too bad for him, but unfortunately I suffer that WAY HARDER. I got the worst of both worlds.
Anyway! On to Stuff About Getting Things Done.
WHAT DOES NOT WORK FOR ME
Tight schedules
Tight schedules drive me nuts. I cannot out down "Do Thing A from 2:30 to 4:30 PM, then Thing B from 4:45 to 6:00PM" because it might take me an hour to get into doing Thing A, and then I'm well into the swing of it by 4:30 and stopping now means I'm not getting back to it. Then I have to get into the swing of Thing B and by the time I've done that, it's time for dinner and I'm frustrated.
Pomodoro
Oh, lord, 25 minutes is about the time it takes me to get into the thing on a good day, and that INFERNAL ALARM going off every 25 minutes and jolting me out of the zone is MY ETERNAL ENEMY.
To-Do Lists
I put everything on them and end up being overwhelmed, or I spend so much time crafting the to-do list that I have satisfied the Do A Thing urge and I no longer have any impetus to Do The Thing.
Daily Planners
I can't do a daily planner because I need to see everything that's supposed to happen this week. If I don't realize that I have a dentist appointment on Thursday, then the impetus to get Thing A done by Wednesday isn't there.
Setting Deadlines Myself
There are no consequences for blowing deadlines I have set myself and thus no reason to pay attention to them. I ask my clients for their deadline and alas, most of them are incredibly nice and don't want to impose and say "What's good for you?" What's good for me is them setting a deadline, but it's kind of hard to say that.
Scheduling via Deadline Dates/Times
ADHD time blindness means I cannot estimate how long a given task will take. While I need a hard deadline imposed by someone else, I cannot just put that date in the planner and successfully Do The Thing. I must block out a period of time in which I am Doing The Thing. And I cannot estimate that period of time until I have Done The Thing multiple times and remembered to record it.
What Does Work For Me
Routine and, ironically, Change
Routine
Getting into a routine for work helps my brain flip into Do The Thing mode. I wrote and edited my book by:
-- Starting at right about the same time every day (after dinner while working at the library, in the afternoon when I quit my job)
-- Getting on the treadmill for 10-ish minutes
-- Listening to a curated playlist on the treadmill and at my desk that I listened to only while writing and editing the book
-- Settling down with a drink
-- Wearing earbuds--often forgetting to turn the music back on!
-- When I had meds, taking Ritalin right as I got on the treadmill, then again 3 hours later when the first wore off
The treadmill plus music allowed me to close my eyes and start my mind drifting onto the topics I was writing/editing: a problem I needed to fix, what the next scene was about, a character's motivation. Not actively trying to work on the problem, but letting the topics drift. In 5-10 minutes my subconscious would start throwing more concrete ideas into my had--usually about the problem I had, but sometimes about another scene--and I'd dictate notes into an email on my phone and send it to myself when I'd gotten enough in my mind that I had to get off the treadmill and go work.
Why did it work? Movement occupying the hyperactive parts of my brain and being in a place that I can't write stuff down usually works to allow the rest of my brain to focus on a problem. More on that below.
Book Cover Design Work
The treadmill is less actively helpful on this, but the routine still is: I sit down at my computer after lunch and pop open Photoshop (and DAZ if I'm using it), plus Milanote, where I keep my client notes at the moment. I'm still distracted a lot by the Internet, but I've gotten used to This Is The Time You Work On This.
This is also where deadlines come into play: I book one cover per week (or 2-3 weeks if it's a painting), and designate This Is The Week You Do This Cover. Time blindness means that if the deadline is Friday, I will not start the cover until Thursday. It took me FIVE YEARS to figure out that "This Is the Week You Do The Cover" is how I have to structure it.
Neurotypicals might not see the difference. But it's a huge fucking difference that I wish I'd learned in school. It only took me half a bloody century to figure it out.
Also....accepting that if I have A Thing To Do at a certain time, that I will not get anything done in the leadup to it. Dentist at 11AM? Shower and breakfast are the only goals I have. Dentist at 2PM? Shower, breakfast and lunch are the only things I'm getting done. Online meeting at 2? Breakfast and lunch only. Shower not happening because it doesn't need to.
Change
Ironically, change can also help. Not constant, hyperactivity-induced change, but once I've gotten into a rut, I stop paying attention to my schedule and flake out. Starting a new system or schedule work to fix that: I follow the new system for a while until it stops working, then go back to the old or find a new one. For the past five years, this meant I basically got a new planner every six months and tried that system. (What this resulted in is that I like the Passion Planner system, without the monthly check-ins, and ended up using the Jibun Techo, which is more-or-less PP without the check-ins.).
Fun fact: My most productive two months ever, back in 2018 or so, turned out to be because I was hyperfocused on productivity, not because the system I was using at the time was particularly fabulous, and it didn't last. :)
OUT OF SIGHT, OUT OF MIND
If I can't see it, it doesn't exist. I cannot put away a half-finished project because I will never finish it. I can't use an electronic planner because it's not open in front of my face. I can't organize a room with closed cabinets because I will never see the things I put away and this either forget I own them or stop using them.
What I do:
1. Leave projects out in the open. This is not optimal if, say, we have friends coming for dinner and I've got sewing all over the table, but in those cases sweeping it all into an OPEN box that goes in my office and comes right back out afterward is somewhat helpful. But corraling the unfinished project in an open box on the table works for daily use. Mostly. I've got hemming I need to do since August on the table right now...
2. A weekly planner where I can see everything that is happening this week OPEN on my desk. It cannot close. As part of my weekly routine (ding!), on Sunday or Monday I look at the monthly pages and transfer everything happening this week to this week's spread, which stays open just to my left.
3. Adding my appointments and recurring things like meds to Google Calendar and having it automatically email me. Appointments get 2 reminders: 3 days before and 1 day before. Meds get a daily reminder: "Have you taken your meds yet?"
4. As I said earlier, scheduling a block of days to be working on a project, not working directly to the deadline. It helps if I HAVE the deadline (see below), so I know what block of days I need to schedule, and also so I can prioritize when life happens and I have to shuffle projects around.
5. Multiple programs open at once and visible. When I was working at a day job, I had two monitors open with email on one, the document I was working on open on the other, and various browser windows (for research or HTML coding results) open between the two. At home now I have a 32" monitor and multiple things open and overlapping so they're not completely hidden.
EXTERNALLY IMPOSED LIMITS
Deadlines
I can't set them myself because there are no consequences when I break them. I can't set consequences either, because my brain will go "That's bullshit." (thank you impulse control problems with ADHD. XD) So no "If I make this deadline, we'll go out and see that movie this weekend," because I'll go see the movie anyway and just feel guilty.
If a client or other limitation, like we fly out of the country on X date, sets the deadline, it's significantly easier to hit because I'm going to face consequences that I cannot slide out of.
Supervision/Accountability
This worked better when I was in the working world and not freelancing. If I had a regular checkup with a supervisor or coworker, I could get things done because there would be consequences if I didn't. Unless, the times I managed not to hit it quite, there were no consequences and the person was "That's fine, just whenever you can get to it." Nooooo! I need you to be disappointed in me! Don't give me loads of leeway! Alas, that is not a professional thing to say in the working world, so I managed to miss lots of those sorts of deadlines because my coworkers were all nice and understanding.
Client requests
This in where creativity comes into productivity! I have a more difficult time doing a cover when the client has zero vision for it, and it's also not that great if they have a very detailed specific vision, but if they've got ideas they can lob at me I can bounce off of them and come up with things. I don't do well in a vacuum--my creativity works best when inspired by a starting set of limitations, then growing out from there.
This is one of the reasons why I do the fanworks exchanges when I have time--I have a hard time doing fanart by myself because I either have too many ideas or none at all. A request letter narrows the ideas down and I can go from there. I also have external deadlines and accountability with exchanges, because others are expecting me to Do The Thing At The Time.
WORKING WITH/NEAR OTHERS
Body doubling
This is a thing where someone sits with you, not helping you and sometimes not even talking to you, while you Do The Thing. There's some sort of accountability that often descends upon the brain when someone else is there. It can be formal, as you hire an ADHD coach to come around who ends up sitting there while you clean the room, or it can be informal, like when you go to a coffee shop and write with other people around you.
I've been to a local tea shop to write a couple of times, which worked to an extent, but I had a hard limit of time there because I didn't want to leave my computer on the table while I went to the bathroom and also didn't want to pack it all up, go, then come back out and unpack because it wold interrupt the flow. :)
Writing sprints on Discord, Zoom or other online spaces are this same sort of thing: participants often get more work done because other people are also getting work done in the same social, if not physical, space.
GROUP PROJECTS
This works far better for me than body doubling, because I get the external accountability. This is also why I used to ask online if people wanted to join me in developing projects--comics/manga mostly--because I could never do it all by myself. Alas, it rarely worked out because people want to work on their own IP, basically, and I essentially got offers for "You can do a comic of my already-written fic!" when I wanted to co-develop from the ground up, or get help for my IP. So it goes.
[*****But if you're interested in developing an online comic set at an SF convention where you can follow different storylines/character lines by clicking on that person (or object!) then hit me up! I've wanted to do that for 15 years!]
PHYSICAL MOVEMENT AND TOUCH
Not just exercise, though that's a big part of it. Regular aerobic exercise is one of the most important things you can do that can calm ADHD, but it's not the only form of physicality that helps. These other things work to engage the busy part of my brain so that the rest of my brain is free to work, or to Start The Thing.
Standing up
The few times at work I felt confident enough to stand during a meeting or working group, I was able to THINK so much better and to contribute so much more. Also, I cannot draw for 3 hours in a row, but if I'm at an art class where I'm standing or sitting on a stool to do life drawing for 3 hours (with breaks!), I can focus so much more on the art. I really should utilize my sit-stand desk for this (we got it because I am short and typical desk height is too tall for me!)
Pacing and fidgeting
Movement again, occupying the busy parts of the brain. I have to admit that pacing doesn't do much for me unless it's on the treadmill because I get distracted by all the things around me, air currents on my skin, sounds, etc. The treadmill is Boring and that's Good. Fidgeting helped me stay focused in work meetings, and nowadays when watching online seminars and classes, as did doodling.
Driving
If I need to think, driving also occupies the part of my brain that's hyperactive. I don't do it much because it's hard to get the impetus to leave my desk, put on the right shoes, get into the car, figure out where to go (it has to have an objective, not be aimless, but that's me), etc. But it's an option.
Massage
I started getting regular massages back when I got migraines, to see if it helped them. Massages did not help the headaches, but lying down on that table, I could THINK! Long, involved thoughts! Slow thoughts! I COULD REMEMBER THE THOUGHTS. WOW AMAZING. So for writing I'd figure out what I wanted to plot next, put on The Appropriate Playlist on the way to the massage therapist, and then spend 90 minutes mulling it over. I plotted a lot of the book I wrote on that table. Even when I didn't do mental work, the 90 minutes of my brain turned OFF was so lovely and calming that we have budgeted for me to keep going even when I quit my day job.
ORGANIZING THE PHYSICAL ENVIRONMENT TO AVOID COGNITIVE OVERLOAD
Limiting my wardrobe
Neil Gaiman and Steve Jobs both followed the same idea: wear the same thing every day and you can save your mental energy for other things. It's not a bad idea--ADHDers have a limited tank of motivation (dopamine) compared to neurotypicals, and exhaust it much sooner. Limiting the decisions you have to make each day helps preserve that tank, and wearing a basic uniform works.
For some people, this might manifest as not giving a damn what you wear. Alas, I have impulse control problems with shopping along with needing to feel that I look somewhat good--and needed to appear business casual when I was working the day job--which tends to result in an out-of-control wardrobe and spending lots of getting-dressed time staring at everything I own trying to figure out what to wear. So I set a uniform: jersey-knit shirt, pants or jeans, cardigan, long necklace. I set a limited range of colors/shades: grey to black for the neutrals, and pink to burgundy for the colors. Everything I owned went with everything else, I could grab any shirt and cardigan and wear them together with any pair of pants, and the necklace made it look like an outfit.
I don't need to wear the full uniform anymore, and I'm mostly sliding into not-giving-a-damn since I stay home most of the time, but the set of clothes I wear outside the house still follows much the same rules. Only I have pink, burgundy, and black sweatpants and leggings instead of work-appropriate pants. :D
Tidying my immediate environment
I am naturally a slob, thanks to ADHD. It's damn hard to focus on tidying--unless I get into hyperfocus and I can't STOP, which is pretty distressing when it happens--so things collect on every surface around me until one day I realize that I've been having a hard time doing work because the clutter is so damn distracting. And then it takes a while to clean up my office because I feel that I can't afford the time to clean because I have this project that must get done, but I can't get the project done because the clutter is so distracting. Eventually I will hit the tipping point and spend an hour or so tidying and feel SO MUCH BETTER. And then I GET THE THING DONE!
Maybe part of it is the physical effort put into moving around, in addition to getting rid of the clutter. Either way, it works for me.
Longer term: designing my environment to be pleasing and efficient
1. If I hate my house, I can't work. Maybe this is the artist in me, but things around me need to be harmonious. YES I know that 85% of the time there's a layer of crap cluttering every surface, but the overall arrangement of furnishings and storage units needs to look good when the clutter's been (temporarily) tamed. I have to FEEL good about my surroundings, and there needs to be a rhythm and balance to the arrangement.
2. Things need to be stored at the point of need. This is a bit of dissonance in our household: for example
myrialux likes to store cleaning products all in one place. I, OTOH, like to store cleaning products next to the thing they will clean. So in my ideal household I'd have 2 bottles of toilet cleaner, one next to each toilet and toilet brush, while myrialux naturally wants to store them in the Cleaning Products Closet. (We solved this conundrum by getting cleaners to come in and clean for us, honestly.) Anyway, packing materials should ideally be stored near the location where I wrap packages, sewing supplies near where I set up the machine to sew, etc. Have I succeeded in this? Not really well in this house, alas.3. I can put laundry up semi-regularly if I do not have to go to another room. Our rental house, ages ago, was great because we had sliding door closets in the main bedroom, and it was easy to dump the hamper on the bed and shove the clothes into the drawer units RIGHT THERE as I picked them up, no sorting needed. In this house, I have to dump the clothes on the bed, first sort them, then go through the bathroom into the closet multiple times to put clothes up. (Folding? Does not happen. I cram. Folding will never happen.) We have future plans of putting a PAX wardrobe in the bedroom itself, to remove this point of friction. (Take the hamper to the closet? No--I have to bend over multiple times to empty it since it sits on the floor, and that's another point of friction.)
4. Having a DARK OFFICE with targeted light on my work surface. I get visually distracted easily. If I could sit with my back to the door or the middle of the room I could face a blank wall but I cannot do that. My current office is light colored, with light shelves, and it's INFURIATING. Turning the lights off and a task light on does help to an extent, but I spent 2 weeks a year ago in our very dark library/dining room when we needed to sequester a radioactive cat in my office (iodine thyroid treatment) and it was GLORIOUS. Current long-term plans involve painting my office walls very dark and painting shelving units black to reduce visual cognitive overload. Cannot wait.
5. Noise-cancelling headphones and ambient music. I am addicted to the bands published by Cryo Chamber on Bandcamp that produce dark, ambient electronica. It doesn't pull me away from what I'm doing with regular beats or intelligible lyrics, just fills in the soundscape with atmospheric sound so I don't get distracted by every little noise in or near the house.
BOOKS AND OTHER RESOURCES
(Affiliate links to Amazon: if you buy I'll get a little kickback)
How to ADHD (Amazon affiliate link)
Jessica McCabe has run the How to ADHD YouTube channel for years, on which she talks about ADHD from an insider's viewpoint and speaks to experts about the hows and whys of ADHD and strategies for living and working. She's just recently published her book, which I haven't read yet, but which is sitting on my Kindle app.
The one video series of hers that really spoke to me was on The Wall of Awful: that big mental block sitting there stopping you from Doing The Thing: basically the distress of Doing the Thing is more than the distress of Not Doing the Thing so Not Doing wins. Combine that with a task that for neurotypicals is a simple, single task, for example taking a shower, becoming a giant ball of Many Things: finding clean clothes in the laundry basket (because they're not getting put up), hating the feel of water on my face, having to interrupt the book that I'm reading, having to find the shower cap (because washing my hair is a Whole Other Thing), having to put my dirty clothes up, having to get out a clean washcloth, having to put moisturizer on afterward because my face is dry after being washed, etc. etc. etc.
Dirty Laundry (Amazon affiliate link)
Richard Pink is a neurotypical husband, Roxanne Emery an ADHD wife. Emery was diagnosed late, after they'd gotten together and this is a personable book, a little bit memoir, a lot of tips on living together in a neuro-spicy relationship and how they figured things out. They also run a YouTube channel at ADHD Love (I assume they're on TikTok as well, given the short format videos, but I don't have a link). Roxanne's expression of ADHD is on the order of 95% like mine. We diverge in a few places--when you've met one person with ADHD, you've met one person with ADHD--but I find myself nodding (or feeling called out!) more often then not when watching their videos.
Russell Barkley, Ph.D. (Amazon affiliate link)
Link goes to his Amazon page and not a specific book. If you're like me and prefer to get analytical about ADHD, Barkley is a clinical professor of psychiatry who has done a lot of specialization in ADHD. His books tend to be aimed at clinicians, parents, caretakers, and partners of people with ADHD, to get them to understand what ADHD really is and how to help and live with their patients and loved ones, but ADHDers will also find them useful. He has his own YouTube channel where he posts lectures and commentaries, and you can also find his lectures broken up into shorter bits on channels like ADHDoers. I especially recommend this 13-minute segment of a lecture that explains that motivation does not come from inside for ADHDers, it's produced by structuring the external environment to Do The Thing [see the ways I do that above].
Productivity Alchemy Podcast | ADHD Tag
And the above note about structuring the external environment leads into this podcast: I know of several people, including Ursula Vernon, who use anxiety as a way to Get The Thing Done--Ursula explains it as not wanting to die in a ditch outside Wal-Mart--and it's often so successful that they don't realize they have ADHD. This might not be the best long-term strategy, but it can be effective.
You can find Ursula's ADHD diagnosis journey on Productivity Alchemy, hosted by her husband Kevin Sonney and frequently co-hosted by her, under the ADHD tag--check the show notes for episodes where the intro focuses on her: if you don't want to listen to full episodes, you can just listen to the chatty intros to catch up on her journey. (I think 2019 might be the year she was diagnosed--I recall listening to the podcast while putting up an exhibit at work in February 2020.) Even though I've been reading about ADHD for years, I learned from Ursula that hyperactivity is not necessarily physical, it can be channeled into mental and emotional obsession. Which explains some of my fannish tendencies. :D Lots of other people with ADHD have been interviewed under that tag and find out about the vast array of strategies people employ that work--or don't work--for them.
CONTENT WARNING: Ursula went through breast cancer diagnosis and treatment in recent months, and while she's now wrapping up treatment successfully there are a lot of episodes from the last year that mention it. Kevin puts content warnings at the top of the description for cancer and other potentially triggering topics.
Anyway! That's a giant-ass post about ADHD and my coping strategies (and others I've heard). Could it be a hell of a lot shorter if I edited it? Probably! Am I going to? No! I hyperfocused all afternoon on it and now I'm hungry and have lost the hyperfocus so if I wait to edit it, it's not getting posted.
Have fun!
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I also swear by the "reduce the decision tree on anything I don't care about much" (I started for chronic health reasons, but it works great for this too.) Clothing, food choices when I can make that work, how I handle household stuff in general.
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(My own diagnosis? Entirely self, aided and abetted by a school psychologist of over 30 years experience and a speech-language pathologist with similar experience, both of whom had worked with me for five years by that point.)
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Also - have you come across focusmate.com ? No idea if it would work for you - basically it's just body-doubling via zoom