Space and Time Management
My roommate encouraged me to "get out" this weekend. While I lay half-awake this morning, I went through all the possible outdoor locations where I could go to relax. The Waterfront? Nah, I'd be a little too envious and regretful if I went there. The mall? The National Book Festival will be occupying all of that space this weekend. Fredericksburg ( Read more... )
People like me, who fit the ADD description, have trouble exhibiting certain kinds of executive function in many common environments. We tend to go impulsively from task to task, get caught up in our own thoughts or new, interesting things that appear. We also get bored very easily with things that we don't like, or don't seem too relevant.
While everyone struggles with planning, attention, and keeping personal commitments, you don't strike me as someone fitting the ADD description. In fact, you strike me as quite conscientious, though often full of conflicting doubts and worries.
There is a book by David Allen called Getting Things Done (so popular, it is often referred to as "GTD"). Most of the book has to do an organizational system, but you might find the introduction pretty elucidating on the topics like executive function and organization.
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It's interesting to hear about how ADD impacts these areas, too. I was recently talking to my parents and they told me that when I was young, I was diagnosed with ADHD and medicated for a brief time. I think only the "hyperactive" part applied, so now we're wondering if that was more due to other factors such as anxiety, sensory issues, etc.
Have you found any techniques/tools helpful to keep focused and on-task with ADD?
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1. deciding what is most important
2. remembering what I have to do
3. giving myself permission to work on it
"Deciding what is most important" is one of the hardest parts. It is the most difficult, up front, because so many things seem important right now. It is the most subjective and requires the most reflection, but not doing this first can mess things up. And above all else, it involves elimination (at least for the time being).
"Remembering what I have to do" includes what people talk about when they refer to staying organized. Calendars, lists, filing systems, reminder systems all fit in here. But ADD gives me some other challenges--I often get lost in thought and completely wander off in the middle of the task. Or, I'm heading towards doing something, and something new comes up. Have you ever gone from one end of a building to another, gotten involved in something, and then left, only to realize that you hadn't done the thing you'd intended to do in the first place? This happens to me several times a day! It happens to me on the computer too. Setting guidelines for periodically reminding myself what I was doing before, not starting new things in the middle of a task, and also just giving myself enough time to be forgetful are things I'm working on.
In terms of reminders, I've found the biggest thing is trying to stick to a schedule for working. I'm often late to appointments, classes, and work, but I'm much more cognizant of time when I'm thinking about appointments than when I just tell myself I will do stuff at some point during the day. Even if I end up not following the schedule, I feel it, just as I feel missing a day of work, a counseling appointment, or a class.
Permission to work is the biggest and trickiest part. It involves getting started and also sticking with a task, without branching off into unecessary sub-tasks. It involves confronting perfectionism, and scheduling internal interruptions (e.g. looking up something minorly related on Wikipedia) for later.
Mainly, these guidelines have helped:
- give yourself a definite ending time
- schedule a time to start
- be willing to work for short periods of time if necessary
- do what you can, with the resources that you have
The Pomodoro Technique (http://www.pomodorotechnique.com/ ) tries to address a lot of these, and I think it does a good job. But sometimes I need a bit more. Here's one I got from using AJATT to learn Japanese:
- working for one minute, typing one sentence, learning one kanji, watching 30 seconds of video counts as starting--nothing is too little ("do one rep")
- you can't "finish" a task--you can only start it over and over again until you are ready to eliminate it (which goes back to step 1)
It's all stuff I'm still working on, but I think if less forgetful people implement some of these things, they might be able to go much, much farther.
If you're interested strategies for coping with ADD, I can recommend the book, Delivered from Distraction. There are a lot of suggestions I haven't implemented, such as having a clear desk at home (I wish I had a desk at all!) or making sure to spend time with friends (this has been hard; recently, I've not had many in-person friends) but it gave me additional perspectives to improve what I've already been trying to do.
Anyway, that's quite a bit, off the top of my head--I hope to organize it to make each part a bit clearer sometime in the future.
Added: To put things in perspective-- GTD tries to talk about #1 but helps mostly with #2. Pomodoro focuses a little on #2, but mostly #3. There's a well known book called 7 Habits of Highly Successful People that tries to take you through everything. I recently found that it draws quite heavily from the work of the Stoic philosopher Epictetus! Both philosophy and religion are great tools for figuring out #1.
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