The Working Memory challenges of ADHD make it hard for us to hold a lot of options in our heads at one time. If we run out of working memory by considering too many things, it's instant confusion. It's something interesting to notice about yourself. 2 things, great we got this. 3 things, yeah, still fine. But when I hit 5 or 6 it's over, all the options come tumbling out of my brain and I can hardly remember them let alone compare them.
The two most straightforward ways to manage this are to start writing things down to limit what's in your head at one time OR start splitting your options into categories so you only have to consider the things in one category at a time.
The 3 Ps help to do the second thing. If you try to think about everything in your life all at once you're guaranteed to create confusion for yourself and then feel overwhelmed and paralyzed. If, like the timeframe organization I suggest for tasks, we split up our approach to managing our life into categories by how big a time scale we're thinking about, we can limit how much we have to think about at one time.
The 3 life-management time scale-categories I use are:
You've probably made a plan before. Everything from that "what do you want to be doing in 5 years" question that I hate so much in job interviews down to "what should I cook for dinner" counts as a plan. Planning is all about what you want to have happen. "I want to be sitting on the beach with a cold drink and definitely not doing this job I'm interviewing for." Or, "I want to be eating food that will hopefully keep me alive."
If we get lost in the details and skip the planning we end up with results we're not happy about. "Why am I sitting in this job interview with a cold drink?" Or, "why do I smell smoke?" These examples are a bit tongue in cheek but ADHD can make us impatient and impulsive, and it's really easy to just jump into doing something without understanding all the things we'll need to be successful.
Without some planning, it's also easy to get confused about what we're trying to get done and end up reorganizing the silverware drawer instead of making food.
Here's where it starts getting interesting. Our ADHD Executive Function issues prevent that natural sense of how get things done that Neurotypical people seem to have. I honestly find it mystifying that someone could just decide to do something and then do it. For most of my life I thought that everyone had an elaborate and arcane set of steps that they would do to get themselves to do things. Turns out that ADHD forces us to develop an external process to help ourselves get things done.
The upside to lacking a built in sense of how we should get things done is that we've become really good at process. Process is the how we take our decisions from our planning and then actually do them. This is usually the core of what you see with the usual "How to manage your ADHD" advice. Journals, ToDo lists, postit notes, are all examples of process. They are all about organizing the How of getting things done.
I'll bet that if you think about it, you have a process for almost everything you do. You might not have though about it like that but it's our defense against our Executive Function challenges. Without process, we either do nothing or we do too much of something - hyper-focus and paralysis.
This last P is the most neglected of the 3. I'm using practice to mean "to perform a particular activity regularly," and not as "I'm going to practice cooking so I don't burn my house down." We certainly could practice our practice of our planning process but I think 3 Ps is about as many as I can handle. Practice is the smallest part of what we do to get things done.
I don't want to risk too much money but I'd also bet that when you think about it, you also have a lot of practices you use to get yourself to do things. Reminders, timers, putting tools in visible places, putting on music, and sitting at your desk with a coffee are all things that I use as part of how I get myself to do things. When I actually do something, it's usually something I get from my process which has things from my plan but if I don't sit at my desk, I'll never actually do anything at all.
Practice is the hardest part for people with ADHD. We're naturally inconsistent about the things we do. We love them or we forget about them. If we don't use a huge array of ways to trick ourselves into doing things or trick ourselves into stopping doing things we are lost.
Practice also is usually the biggest thing that goes wrong with our systems for managing our lives. Remember that daily planner you haven't looked at in months? That's a practice problem. If you don't open the notebook, it doesn't matter how much work you put into your planning and process.
Here's were the actual advice starts. People with ADHD should think about each of their Ps separately. If we mix them all together, it overwhelms our working memory and creates confusion.
With all the Ps mixed together, we also lose track of where we're actually going wrong. If you're missing one of the Ps no amount of the other 2 will fix what's going wrong. We end up doing the wrong things really well, or creating beautiful plans that we ignore, or sitting at our desk with our coffee wondering how all of this will get us to the beach.
If we don't spend time understanding which P is tripping us up we end up rearranging the chairs on the Titanic - even if we're really good at it, it's probably not going to end well.
I'll contradict conventional wisdom again. Pretty much every organization tool tells you about all the great things you can do with it. This focus on all the different cool things you could do invites you to try them all out and build a complicated process. You can set up schedules, and reminders, and repeating tasks, and labels, and priorities, and estimates, and on and on. And so what do you do? You set them all up. You're going to do this the best way. It's going to be beautiful.
What always happens, I've seen it a million times, is the system gets out of control. All your beautiful things start to fight you. You just got 12 reminders and can't figure out why. You start to have too much of everything spread out over too many places. The system that was intended to tame the chaos is now contributing to it.
Practice is the answer. You have to have some Planning and Process but you should keep it simple. Start using your tool of choice as simply as possible. Your first goal is to develop the practice of using the tool. When do you went to use the tool? What are your cues to use it? How do you use it to solve the key problem of starting and stopping? You want to take all the excitement and energy of starting something new and focus it on using your tool. You're developing your practice with what really happens when using your new tool so you can keep using it.
Now you can start getting fancy.
No! Resist the urge to get fancy. We need to get better without losing our Practice with what seems to be a 4th P that came out of nowhere. Now is the time to think about the original 3 Ps separately for the actual stuff we've actually done with our tool.
Which P is causing the most trouble? Maybe it is time to try some scheduling or a reminder. Or maybe we need more to add more practice - we sit at our desk with our coffee... at 9:30am. This is your opportunity to think through what's been hard and think about what you can try to make the hardest things less hard. You might be surprised what is actually making things hard for you. Looking at what you've done through the lens of each P will help you identify what sort of things you should try to make things better.
You're ready for our mysterious 4th P. We need to perfect our system. Not to make it perfect, but to perfect it. We need to make things better in small steps. Remember that if we try to think about too many things we run out of working memory and bad things happen. Change something to make the hardest thing you ran into less hard and then work on Practice again with that new thing.
Try things out with your new change. You want to see how it actually works for you. Is it better, is it worse, you'll find out by incorporating it into your practice. It's a little change so it should be easy to add it in without confusing or overwhelming yourself.
Your goal is to set up a system for yourself where you can Plan and then implement your plan with your Process. Your Practice is the glue that holds everything together. Do each thing separately. Do your planning. Look at your Process to figure out what to do from your plan. Use your Practice to get that thing done.
A good ADHD system will let you separate each of these things so you don't get overwhelmed on any of them. Your system should let you guide yourself through this process so you feel more centered.
It's fine to bounce around a bit. Maybe you can't get yourself to do the task you want so do some planning. If you're on a roll, you can just keep getting stuff done using your process because you have your plan in place. Can't do anything? Focus on your practice to get you in the right head-space.
As you work, notice what's hard and what's working well. Make little changes and try things in little bites so you don't throw yourself off.
I'll end with the 5th P of the 3 Ps of ADHD. Don't expect complete yourself to always be on the ball with your system. You're going to get distracted or overwhelmed and stop. These pauses (more Ps?) need to be part of our process. It may not be how we want our system to be but it's just how things work for us.
Our system should let us neglect it and then pick it up again easily. This is the other reason we should avoid getting to fancy - we need to not let our tool get so dialed in that it won't survive when we use it wrong or not at all for a bit. Stopping and starting are a fact of life.
We succeed by setting ourselves up to have a lot of chances for success. Perfection is a trap. Practical perfection is our goal.
I built ADHDAlly to make it easy to start - just throw some tasks in and go - while giving you room to add fancy things like schedules and repeating routines. The app also is designed so if you end up getting distracted, nothing bad happens and it's easy to jump back in and keep going. I've worked hard to bake these ideas into the app so if you do jump right in you'll be on the right track without having to worry too much about this stuff.
You can also try a simple notebook, postit notes, or a traditional ToDo list. If you can get your practice down you can get fancy later. Don't get lost in the shiny process features that productivity tools dangle in front of you. Process and Planning are important but without the Practice to hold them together there's an iceberg on the way.
