A New Adventure, Part Four: What I've Learned

Read Part One here, Part Two here, and Part Three here!

    Before I get started, please keep in mind that all the tips and tricks I share here are things that have worked for my brain. They may or may not work for yours, and I'm not claiming to have found some kind of Universal Truth for working with neurodivergent brains. I'm also very well aware that some of these tips and tricks may be imperfect methods, and I plan to continue exploring and experimenting with my brain to find more effective ways to work with my neurotype. This advice is specific to my brain; feel free to adapt it how you need.

Part One: The ADHD

    At the moment, my top tip for working with the ADHD part of my brain is this: Weaponize Distraction.

    Recently, my parents alerted me to the fact that they'd like to see me helping out around the house more. The fact that I tend to hang out in my room doing nothing productive has apparently been growing rather wearing on them. So, I started thinking about it and experimenting with it, and this is what I've found.

    My mom's favorite phrase for getting things done is, "Use your moments." When you have a moment of open time, fill it up with something productive. How many dishes can you put away in the thirty seconds before you leave the house?

    This has never made sense to me. If I'm on my way out of the house, shouldn't I be focusing on getting out of the house? Why would I go out of my way to put dishes away when I'm on my way out the door?

    What I realized yesterday is that it's a difference in the way our brains work. I don't usually go anywhere near the kitchen on my way out the door. For me, putting dishes away in the few minutes before I have to leave somewhere makes no sense. However, part of my mom's house-exit routine is to fill up her water bottles in the kitchen sink. She's already in the kitchen, might as well put a few dishes away on the way out. This does, however, often lead to her trying to stuff more dishes into the time she has before leaving than will actually fit, so in the past she's often been late. She's doing much better at that now.

    Rather than trying to "use my moments", I'm going to try "Weaponizing Distraction." I already know that I tend to get distracted from the things I ought to be doing, so now I want to try and turn that distraction to something positive. If I've just been outside in the evening helping my mom study information from the classes she's taking, chances are when I go inside I'm probably going to be heading toward my room to go flop on my bed and cool off. It's hot outside! However, the kitchen lies between the backyard and my bedroom. It really doesn't take that long to put a few dishes away during the transition, so... why not? Same thing if I'm getting a drink at the sink.

    Similarly, something else that has helped me is making otherwise long, boring, and tedious tasks a little bit quicker. We recently re-painted, re-carpeted, and re-arranged my entire room. When we were putting all the furniture back in, I insisted that we get rid of my dresser. I don't use it anyway; I'm so bad about folding my laundry that I've honestly spent the last year living out of the heap of clean clothes on my floor. So instead, why not remove a step?

    I'm good about washing my clothes. I'm good about drying them, too. I'm also pretty good about transferring them from the dryer to my floor. It's at that point that I've historically gotten stuck, because moving clothes from hamper to washer, from washer to dryer, and from dryer to floor are all quick, easy, less-than-five-minute tasks. Folding the laundry, however, can take twenty minutes or more, and I'd rather spend that time doing something else!

    So, what I've done is to put four hampers in my closet for the clean clothes. One for whites, one for pajamas, one for jeans, and one for day shirts. Now when I take my clothes out of the dryer, all I have to do is sort the clothes into the proper hampers. No folding necessary. What used to be a twenty or thirty-minute task of folding each clothing item and stuffing them into the dresser at the end is now a less-than-five minute task. No more item-by-item folding and sorting for me; I can take care of it all by category now.

    This has worked incredibly well for me. For the first time in years, my floor is consistently clear. Frankly, it's a miracle. And because the hampers are stuffed in the closet, my room looks... really nice, actually. Put-together. Organized. Decorated! It looks like a normal-person room for once! As a kid, I remember going to playmates' houses and seeing their rooms and wondering how on Earth they managed to keep it so clean and nice-looking, because my room was always a train wreck of crap lying around everywhere.

    Honestly, it was a train wreck just two months ago! I had a bunk bed, and the top bunk was covered in old college papers and handouts, the heap of old clothes that needed to be donated to the thrift store, a random whiteboard calendar that never got hung up on the wall or used (because there was no wall space with the bookshelves and bunk bed up against the walls), and a variety of other stuff that ended up there because I didn't know what else to do with it. Now the bunk bed is gone, there are paintings on my walls, and my room actually looks clean!

    Why did this work? I think it's because, by removing the long, dull, tedious step, I turned putting my laundry away into a task that's easy to weaponize distraction for. It's a lot easier to get intentionally distracted for five minutes while I sort my clothes away than it is to convince myself to sit down and fold for twenty.

    When it comes to homework, I've figured out a trick there, too.

    It used to be that when I had a paper to write, I would procrastinate until there was hardly enough time left to get the thing done. Then I would have a very stressful ten minutes while I tried to figure out how to start the thing, and then an hour and a half of reasonably productive work.

    It turns out that my biggest issue with papers is actually getting started. Once I've started the paper, I simply must finish--my brain won't let me rest until I do. So, I've weaponized that too. When there's a paper due soon, I simply take thirty seconds to open a document and stick the title of the assignment in at the top. Then I leave the document up in the background on my computer where it will bug me as soon as I come back to watch YouTube and walk away to get a snack.

    When I come back, I pull up YouTube and find a video to watch.

    ... but there's that paper I really need to finish. It's all started and ready to go; I just need to finish.

    Okay. YouTube gets to play in the background; I pull the document forward and type away until the paper is done.

    If you have any doubts about this method, I'll have you know that I had to write over twenty one-page papers in two semesters for my Early Childhood Education degree, plus a research paper, a case study paper, and a couple of other miscellaneous writing assignments. Early on, before I worked out this trick, every paper was a battle. By the end, all I had to do was write Standard X Reflection on a piece of paper, copy the standard I was writing about onto the paper beneath it and walk away, and that paper would usually be done by the end of the day simply because I could not leave it unfinished without my brain screaming at me to get it done. There were a few exceptions right at the very end when I'd begun to run out of unique things to say (that happens when you have to write three separate papers on each standard of educational professionalism), but that was less an issue of the method not working and more a result of me having written the same things over and over a few too many times.

    The last big trick that's useful for me here is timers. If I have somewhere I need to be, or something I need to do, the easiest way to make sure I do it on time is to set a timer that will go off when I need to be getting ready for the thing. Usually, without the timer, I'll get up a little late. With the timer, I usually turn the timer off and go get ready between ten and fifteen minutes early.

    I'm not sure why this one works, but for whatever reason it does, and it's a method I've been using for years to manage my time and make sure I meet commitments when I said I would.

Part Two: The Autism

    My autism helps my ADHD, because, while I struggle to get started on a project, it's the autism that ensures I won't get distracted once I get going. My need to finish whatever I've started, which works so well for writing annoying school papers, is a result of the autistic wiring in my brain.

    However, the autism comes with challenges too. As I've mentioned, perhaps too many times, in this blog post series, I struggle in social situations. Reading social cues is hard! I also have somewhat rigid thinking, and being flexible in my schedule in the face of last-minute changes is very difficult for me. I can handle one last-minute change in a day, and I'll be a bit frustrated but otherwise okay. Two, though, throws me off my day entirely, and it's even worse if something is cancelled last-minute, and then is suddenly back on and happening again later. My brain doesn't like flip-flopping like that, and several major changes in plan in one day will usually end up with me hiding in my room trying to recover from the mental whiplash.

    It's the same thing with repeated interruptions--when I'm zoned in on a project, I can be interrupted once and it'll be okay; I can get back into it. Twice, and I'll be a bit annoyed, but can still zone back in after a few minutes. Three times, though, and my concentration shatters, and won't come back again unless I take a break from the project and come back later.

    So, part of what I'm working on in this department is trying to figure out how to be more flexible, while at the same time using my natural tendency toward routine to accomplish tasks that I wouldn't do otherwise. 

    The first big thing I've been doing is what I'll call Process Lumping--that is, lumping two or more related tasks together as part of the same routine. This is somewhat similar to Weaponized Distraction in that the idea of it is to help me get more things done in the time I have; however, Weaponized Distraction focuses on using transition times to get distracted and get a productive thing done, while Process Lumping focuses on taking two tasks with similar themes, which occur in the same location, and putting them together into one task.

    Hold on a minute! Wasn't I talking earlier about how breaking laundry down into a set of smaller, easier tasks made it easier to accomplish?

    Yes, yes, I was--however, with the laundry, I removed the hardest part in order to make the whole process flow more smoothly.

    In this case, there is no way to get around it--I can't just take out the hardest part of one or more of the tasks without losing the whole task. Let me explain what I mean.

    I have struggled with hygiene for years. I've received numerous comments about the way I smell over the years, and have tried for ages to figure out what was going on and how to fix it. Ultimately, the only answer was to shower more. Which meant adding another task to my daily or near-daily to-do list. Which in turn has felt rather overwhelming.

    Over the last two years, my oral hygiene has dropped a lot as well, to the point where from January to April of this year, I was barely brushing my teeth once or twice a week, let alone once or twice a day, and as a result I've had to get a couple cavities filled.

    The problem I was running into was that I was treating showering and brushing my teeth like two separate tasks I had to complete every day--which felt overwhelming. As a result, a lot of the time, neither would actually end up happening. By instead putting them together into one process and brushing my teeth as soon as I get out of the shower, I'm actually becoming more regular about brushing my teeth every day. Showering already takes a while--what's a few minutes more to clean my teeth afterward?

    For the moment, that's what I've worked out. I'm still exploring, still experimenting, still learning. But hopefully, something of what I've discovered in the last year or two will be helpful for someone out there.

    Thanks for hanging out with me in this series! Good luck on your adventures! :)