People with ADHD have high standards for ourselves. It's great that we can be hyper-organized or meticulous, but for me, forcing myself to follow a system perfectly is a defense mechanism. I have to aim high just so I can scrape by most of the time. I'm great at organization and I am aware in great detail as I begin to fail at my system and then see the wheels come off of my beautifully thought through plan.
I bounce between maniacal compliance to a system and total catastrophe. When my organization system is working it feels easy and when it stops working it feels impossible. It's confusing that both of these feelings, the ease of organization and its impossibility, are true about people with ADHD.
We're stuck as either the stifled banker or the flighty chimneysweep in my slightly forced metaphor for this blog post (forgive me, I really liked the title).
We've had to get good at managing our lives. It isn't natural for us, we have to fight ourselves constantly, our brains aren't designed for consistency. Our trap is how great we are at starting things. When something is new and interesting we can be shockingly good at it. It feels great, we're on a roll, how could this possibly go wrong?
The funny and tragic thing is that it always goes wrong for us. What was once exciting and stimulating is now just another day. Where we used to get a thrill, we now have to force ourselves through the process. It's a grind and we start to spend energy instead of getting energy from what we're doing.
And one day we're tired, or preoccupied, or overwhelmed and we skip our process. You know how this works, you promise yourself that it's just this once and that next week, tomorrow, an hour from now you'll get back on track. For me this is the kiss of death for my routine. I've skipped it once so what's the harm in delaying a little more? I still have time, I can do it tomorrow. All of a sudden, what was once easy is now impossible.
It's like clockwork. Perfection, struggle, catastrophe. Every start feels like we've turned over a new leaf and every failure feels uniquely insurmountable.
We're both the methodical banker and the rooftop-dancing, one-man-band chimneysweep. It's confusing that we're good at both. Both roles are comfortable. Our trap is that we can't pick which one we want to be, when we need to be it. It hurts us to try to be what we feel we need to be, to know that brilliance is right there, if only we could turn it on.
You've probably guessed what I'm going to suggest. The umbrella-wielding hero of our story floats in to teach us a valuable lesson about ourselves. We really do have both the straight-laced banker and the freewheeling chimneysweep inside ourselves. Our answer is not to be better at making ourselves be one of the two but to understand that we should let ourselves be somewhere in the middle and set ourselves up for success no matter who shows up on a given day.
It always struck me that Mary Poppins, who not once seems surprised, or frustrated, or out of her element, describes herself as "practically, perfect in every way." Somehow, her practical perfection seem even more self assured than if she was actually perfect. There is peace in understanding that you can be amazing even if you aren't perfect.
For people with ADHD, we need to see our pattern of perfection and then catastrophe as the trap that it is. If we only expect that we are perfect, we're actually setting ourselves up for failure. Our routines need to work for both sides of ourselves. We can't expect that we'll always show up as Mr. Banks, and our lives are less interesting if we don't get covered with soot sometimes.
We should aim for practical perfection.
How should we practice, practical perfection in our routines? I've done a lot of work on this in my personal and professional life and I have some rules of thumb for making routines work in real life. We need to plan for not how we should work on our routines but how we actually do work on our routines.
My first suggestion is to understand why routines and task work differently. A lot of the problems I see with people using Task lists and ToDo lists are a result of trying to mix things from routines with task lists.
There will always be laundry to do. It doesn't have a deadline and you can't skip it. If you don't do it, it's still there waiting to be done. If you don't do your laundry this week you may need to do twice as much laundry next week but you don't somehow have 2 laundry routines to do. When you put a routine into a task list all these problems start to create mayhem in your ToDo list.
The Task Item for your routine just sits in your list forever and makes it hard to see the other things your are trying to get done. Maybe this is fine if you only have one routine you want to keep track of but it's easy to create confusion on your task list with these forever-tasks.
Or maybe you have your list create a task for laundry each week. Now if you don't do it this week you have 2 laundry routines on your list. If you have something you want to do daily, you could easily end up with 4 or 5 of them on your list.
If we we're perfect, maybe these things wouldn't be an issue but that's a trap. If we let never-ending routines into our task list we've created a bunch of things that can go wrong that will cause trouble for our routine tracking and our task list.
Brushing your teeth is important and if you're like me, it's easy to forget about. It's really helpful to have a reminder but if we create a task, we've created more work for ourselves and yet another thing to forget.
Most task list tools let you make a recurring task. So what if we automatically make a task for brushing our teeth in the morning and one for brushing our teeth before bed. Sounds great right? Now we have to brush our teeth and check off the task in our tool. Checking off tiny task items is almost as much effort as actually doing that thing. Now you have two problems. If we're perfect, everything is fine but that never happens. What always happens is that you end up with a pile of nonsense little ToDos clogging up your list.
Do you time-block 8:15am to 8:17 am for teeth brushing? Do you only do laundry between 10am and 2pm on Sunday? You certainly could, but if we're not perfect all this does is create confusion for ourselves. What if we miss our 8:15 teeth brushing time? Should we skip brushing our teeth? If we're doing our laundry routine, should we not do anything else for most of our day?
Routines need to slide in between other work in a way that doesn't make sense to schedule like a task.
Is taking a shower more or less important than finishing that assignment for work or school? If you are working on prioritizing your task list (and you should) you'll find that this question doesn't make any sense. Yes your assignment is important but asking yourself if it's more important than showering is silly. Worse than silly, it adds confusion to a ToDo list if you try to include it.
The second problem I see all the time with people and teams trying to run a task list is that because routines don't fit well in a task list, they become invisible. When I'm managing teams it's very common to look at the tasks they've done for the week and see a tragically small number of things off the task list that got completed. Why are these teams so bad? Should we fire them? Almost always, the answer you get when you ask what they were actually doing is that they were doing a bunch of super important things that don't make sense to put on the task list.
If routine work is important, it should be equally important to have help managing it. Letting it be invisible and letting it mess up our ToDo list are both bad solutions.
We need a way to keep track of our routines that lives next to our tasks that reminds us, that helps keep track of what we did without creating more problems than it solves.
We need to keep a list of the things we want to get done. This list helps us make sure we don't forget a step and can remember what we've done already. Checklists work great for this. They are simple and quick to interact with. If you did a bunch of little steps all at once, it's easy to check of a bunch of items.
When did you last water your plants? People with ADHD need a little extra help managing time. Our list needs to remember when we last did something so we can notice when it's time to do it again. This works great for routines where we need to do something regularly but the exact timing isn't that important.
When should we be working on our routines? If it's your morning routine, the obvious answer is in the morning. We should be able to highlight this routine for ourselves so we can work on it next to the other stuff we're tying to do. This way we don't have to ask if showering is more important than work assignments - we can see that both are worth thinking about this morning.
Like timeboxing, we need to control what routines we give our attention to at any given time. If we try to look at them all at once, we're probably going to get overwhelmed and distracted. We want to be able to pick one or two routines to work on at a time.
We're going to have to keep doing the things in our routines. We need an easy way for them to let us know that it's time to do the thing again. They shouldn't be too pushy - you don't want 30 push notifications every day - but it should be easy to see that we should do the thing again.
Our routines need to understand that we're going to make mistakes, forget things, get distracted and the million of other ways ADHD influences how we manage our lives. Our routine management needs to make it easy for us try again. If things go wrong and we're not perfect our tasks and routines shouldn't become a mess. Routines should always be ready for us to pick up and do regardless of how things have gone previously.
I built ADHDAlly Routines to address all the messy realities of managing routines with ADHD. Checklists, repetition, scheduling, prioritization are all there in a way that makes it easy to get started but get as fancy as you want. All this next to a task management system designed for getting things done in a way that works with your ADHD.
You can also get a lot done with postit notes stuck to things. Put the notes in a visible place where you would do the routine. If you put the tool (your vacuum for example) in a place you will see in your everyday life it can also be a helpful prompt.
Journals, traditional task management tools, and Kanban boards can all be useful too - just be careful about the pitfalls above.
Whatever you do, embrace your Mr. Banks and your Burt. Understanding both will help you be good enough with your routines. Terrible British accent optional.
