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Acronym orgy: GTD, ADHD and KonMarie
Apr. 19th, 2018 08:56 amI've had to accept that trying to get my apartment and appearance "good enough" to avoid getting pointed questions from my dad on his visit is both futile and exhausting. It's going to come anyway. I'm just making my life unmanageable by making an outcome something I'm responsible for.
The problem with ADHD is that I become like a little robot in a cycle when I'm hyperfocused on a new project. And this leads to exhaustion because there's always a new project lurking around the corner. I try and plan and execute them all and this is exhausting and setting myself up for failure. I never saw adhd as a problem before this: I just focused on work and let all other things take second priority based on how absolutely urgent it was. With direct debit and paypal and home delivery, a lot of things were not that urgent. So the house looked a mess and the plants always died. Got work done!
Getting organised was a little bit like how an antidepressant can make people worse by making them better: once I saw I could make progress in more than one project, I started queuing up lots of them. But in this case, it was treating a symptom of adhd - lack of organisation - not the need inside me that makes me feel I must have 14 active projects going on, all told. Some of these projects are just "updating hubs facebook page" or "fitness" or "learning Spanish", but the fact is: it's 14 things in my head that I feel I need to make progress on.
That's insane.
It's tempting to look for a system to make placing and storing and even acquiring or not acquiring household items organised like GTD, and make planning finances organised like YNAB, but the fundamental problem of feeling "not good enough" as I currently am and easily distracted must be addressed.
And it only became apparent that this was a deep need when I was printing off motivational quotes for inside my planner and noticed that most of the ones I liked were from 12 step programs ("progress not perfection", "I am responsible for the effort, not the outcome", etc).
I've been unsubscribing from every email newsletter and email alert I've ever signed up for. And it's amazing how many lists one subscription can put you on: it's been 400+ I've unsubbed from since last Friday and each day is another 6-12 more.
Adblocker is on. I read a subscription newspaper (no ads) rather than social media. I use a different browser without FB alerts. My old kindle is preferable to the ipad for reading ebooks.
Streaks for building habits can be dangerous for someone with adhd. It's tempting to delay higher priority and harder tasks to achieve a easier streak status. That can work if it's a single habit being worked on, but not the way I'm overloaded.
The problem with ADHD is that I become like a little robot in a cycle when I'm hyperfocused on a new project. And this leads to exhaustion because there's always a new project lurking around the corner. I try and plan and execute them all and this is exhausting and setting myself up for failure. I never saw adhd as a problem before this: I just focused on work and let all other things take second priority based on how absolutely urgent it was. With direct debit and paypal and home delivery, a lot of things were not that urgent. So the house looked a mess and the plants always died. Got work done!
Getting organised was a little bit like how an antidepressant can make people worse by making them better: once I saw I could make progress in more than one project, I started queuing up lots of them. But in this case, it was treating a symptom of adhd - lack of organisation - not the need inside me that makes me feel I must have 14 active projects going on, all told. Some of these projects are just "updating hubs facebook page" or "fitness" or "learning Spanish", but the fact is: it's 14 things in my head that I feel I need to make progress on.
That's insane.
It's tempting to look for a system to make placing and storing and even acquiring or not acquiring household items organised like GTD, and make planning finances organised like YNAB, but the fundamental problem of feeling "not good enough" as I currently am and easily distracted must be addressed.
And it only became apparent that this was a deep need when I was printing off motivational quotes for inside my planner and noticed that most of the ones I liked were from 12 step programs ("progress not perfection", "I am responsible for the effort, not the outcome", etc).
I've been unsubscribing from every email newsletter and email alert I've ever signed up for. And it's amazing how many lists one subscription can put you on: it's been 400+ I've unsubbed from since last Friday and each day is another 6-12 more.
Adblocker is on. I read a subscription newspaper (no ads) rather than social media. I use a different browser without FB alerts. My old kindle is preferable to the ipad for reading ebooks.
Streaks for building habits can be dangerous for someone with adhd. It's tempting to delay higher priority and harder tasks to achieve a easier streak status. That can work if it's a single habit being worked on, but not the way I'm overloaded.
