How Do You Keep Your Eye on the Ball - Maintaining Attention with ADHD

First step: Get started.

That was the topic of my last blogpost, dealing with the activation aspect of ADHD.

Following my own advice, just now I did two quick little internet tasks and crossed them off my list. Got a dopamine hit off that, like taking one bite of a piece of pie. So now I have a long task in front of me, writing my next blogpost on attention.

Oops, damn. Just took a break to eat a banana. And then I started a timer on one of my games. And now I'm remembering it's a friend's birthday and I haven't sent a card yet.

via GIPHY

NO! I will get back to the blogpost. Ugh. Even with a med on board, this is hard.

So. How do I keep working when my friend really deserves a birthday card and I really want to send it?

Here are my tricks:

  • Keep it short. Don't even try to work three hours at a time on any one project. I have a number of projects going right now. Each could benefit from an eight-hour-day effort. I never put in an eight hour day on any of them. My day is divided into blocks and I assign a different task to each block. No task gets more than two hours. And I take mini breaks in the middle of two hours. So yeah, I will check my email - waiting to hear back from my publisher. And I won't beat my ADD brain up for doing it.

via GIPHY

That reminds me: decades before I knew anything about my brain, one of the reasons I loved working in a parish was the variety of tasks within a day/week/year. Hurray for CHANGE!

  • Break it down. This one is related to the former. I have a whole book to edit. Nope. Gonna edit one chapter today. That's it. Next chapter tomorrow. Move on to a different task. Laundry: I pile the clean clothes on top of the dryer and fold one item each time I pass by. Who made some dumbass rule that says you have to wash, dry, fold, and even put away a load of laundry all in one day? You're an adult. Change that rule.

via GIPHY

  • Build in movement. I write at a standing desk and shift my position frequently, wiggle my hips, stretch my arms over my head. Go fold one more piece of laundry.

  • Build in a mindless task to run in the background. In grade school, I used a coloring book. My grad school notebooks are filled with doodles. Back when I went to in-person conferences (remember those days?) I would bring my knitting for those two hour meetings. Now that all my meetings are on Zoom, I can play a game while listening (yes, I really am listening) and no one is the wiser.

  • Make yourself accountable. Give yourself a deadline. Your boss or your professor may handle this for you. But those deadlines are probably for the whole task. Once you have broken it into the bit you can accomplish before lunch, tell somebody else what you're doing, a coworker, a spouse, Twitter, whatever works for you.

And look -- there's a whole blogpost!

But I gotta tell ya. Sure, my little kid ADHD prefrontal cortex developed, and sure, I developed some of these coping mechanisms on my own. But there is a difference between [agonizing over a blogpost for four days, eventually abandoning it in the draft pile] and [hanging in there with a few little breaks but getting it done in one morning.] And that difference seems to be medication.

Next up: well, I'm not sure. But I think I will continue on the ADHD thread and review a resource or two.

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