Do You Have ADHD and Play Tetris with Your Personal Calendar?
Are you always trying to figure out if you can fit one more activity into your day, week, or month? Packing your calendar so tightly that when the first activity doesn't start on time or takes longer than expected, your entire day, week, or month falls apart?
It can be satisfying to puzzle out how you will get everything done, but when you have ADHD, you're very likely to put more on your plate than you can manage.
When our calendar crashes from overload, our hopes can crash as well. Then we say things like, "What is the matter with me?" "Why do I keep messing up?" "I am a total loser!" This reduces our motivation to try again. Over time we could even become despondent or depressed.
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People with ADHD are not alone in creating calendars more tightly packed than the President's.
According to a 2021 Wired magazine article (1), people don't want to admit they have limits and can't do it all. We swallow whole the marketing slogan, "You can do more with less." But it just is not true. When we try to do more, we actually do less.
The Wired article gives additional reasons why a tightly-filled calendar doesn't mean you will get more done:
● People envision their "future selves" doing the future work and that their "future selves" will be more capable, less distractible, will have fewer competing tasks, and will be more efficient. This (overly) optimistic assumption makes it easy to sign-up their "future selves" for what their "present" selves are too busy to do.
● Having unfinished tasks occupies our brains even when we are doing other things (it can even affect our ability to sleep!)
But beyond these drawbacks to packing a calendar too tightly, there are additional task completion difficulties for people with ADHD:
● We have a "Now/Not Now" view of time because our interest-based brains focus on what is important now while having difficulty working on activities that are important only in the future.
● We have an "outlaw brain" (2) which convinces us that other (easier or more fun) tasks are more important to do first.
● Our emotional energy varies considerably throughout the day.
● It often takes us longer to complete tasks.
● Long task lists can lead to overwhelm and an inability even to start.
I learned from Alan Brown (alanbrown.com) the benefits of pausing each morning and choosing three tasks as priorities for the day. I am having great success with the Pause and Plan Method. I may still have five (or ten! or twenty! or fifty!) other tasks, but only three are the top priority.
What if your life is so busy that there are always more than three tasks each day?
That was my situation when raising my two daughters. Feeding them three times a day was three tasks, and there was everything else children needed to be done for them, as well as many self-care and home-care tasks. (3)
There would never be enough time! If I had chosen just three tasks, I would have felt successful instead of a failure. Success motivates the ADHD brain much more than failure. I could have used the momentum from my successes to attack other needed tasks and been happier while doing it.
Choosing only three priority tasks sounds CRAZY, right? But it works!
Here are my three tasks for today:
● Finish the draft of this post😉
● Host my day's coaching sessions.
● Exercise for 60 minutes.
During the day, my husband suggested we go and sign up for a one-month membership at our local gym. I paused, thought about whether it would fit into my schedule, and decided to do it if I had enough time. It became number four on my list. If I decided the gym errand was a top priority, I would have replaced a top-three task with going to the gym.
The Pause and Plan Method helps me complete the important things while allowing me to adapt to each day's activities.
Resources:
1. www.wired.com/story/to-do-apps-failed-productivity-tools/