If you visit these pages regularly, you'll probably be aware that I periodically mention that I tend to be a rather "scattered" person with a somewhat short attention span... or what our society likes to medicalize and call "ADHD."
I have never been treated for this particular affliction, nor have I ever sought treatment for it. That said, I definitely recognize that I embody the clinical definitions.
Anywaze...
I have fairly effectively "skated by" in life by employing a series of home grown "tools" that allow be to operate as at least a semi-functional human being, according to the societal metric for what such a person looks like.
Before I go any further, I suppose I should pause for a moment and say that I have no judgment against those who address their ADHD with prefessional help and medication... you gotta do what you gotta do, to get by in in life!
Summer... winter... all over the map... get it?
Late Last Year
As a bit of a Christmas present to myself, I decided that I wanted to try a new form of personal "management" that would permit me to be a bit more effective, in terms of getting work done, more reliably.
One of my challenges has long been that I tend to see many of the things on my to do list as "overwhelmingly monumental" tasks, as a result of which I tend to "freeze" and not get them done, usually by distracting myself with relatively irrelevant sidetracks.
So I sat back and considered what it is I typically get done — and would like to get done — in the course of a month, and even three months. There's pretty much a smorgasbord of jobs there, because I am self-employed and engaged in about 4-5 different "ventures" at any given time.
The Value of Allowing "Small Chunks" and Flowing With it
So, starting the day after Christmas, I started the experiment of no longer pretending that I "should" finish one project before starting on the next. Instead, I would just work a little bit here, and a little bit there... and basically flit back and forth between my various projects like a bee in a field of flowers, having only "the GREATER objective" as a thread to hold everything together.
After about a month of doing this, I have to admit that my actual productivity is considerably improved, in large part because I almost never feel bored and disgruntled.
Naturally, there are limitations within this experiment, such as the focus needing to be on actual work/income producing activities, rather than spending hours watching kitten reels on tiktok.
Even so, there's still a lot of freedom within this system... for example, for such things as "sidetracking" into spending some time creating blog posts and engaging here on Hive.
And why not? Doing so still serves a purpose, in the sense that my activities here are very slowly building a sort of savings/investment balance.
The main benefit has been that with fewer occasions to feel overwhelmed by the size of the tasks at hand, I am actually spending a lot less time zoning out with YouTube, playing solitaire or just staring out the window.
Don't get me wrong, some of these jobs are still huge, I have just done away with the compulsion to grind away at one particular thing till it's done.
There Are Always Exceptions!
Of course, this may all sound a bit like idealistic "pie in the sky" and there are certainly occasions on which things have to get done, post-haste.
Most often, this would apply to book editing jobs, which can sometimes have very tight deadlines that require intense focus for long periods of time. Haven't really encountered that situation yet, as I only changed my work structure about a month ago. So it'll be interesting to see what happens when one of those deadlines turns up!
All in all, though, I am pleasantly surprised at how "easy" it feels to actually get a lot more done!
There'll probably be more to follow on this experiment, as we get some months and even years into it!
Thanks for stopping by, and enjoy the remainder of your week!
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Created at 2023-01-26 00:22 PST
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