Yesterday I wrote a bit about "owning our weaknesses and shortcomings;" front and center of mine is this ADHD thing.
I don't like to think of it as a diagnosis as much as merely a way for me to understand why I struggled so much to accomplish certain things that most people find incredibly easy while I can often do with ease things that the majority of the world have no understanding of how I'm capable of doing.
For me, the toughest thing of all is essentially time management.
I have a piss-poor sense of time! It's not that I don't understand the passing of time, it's that I have a singularly poor sense of how long it takes to complete a task in spite of the fact that I have completed that same task 100 times before. On top of that, while I am doing something, I have very little sense of whether I have been working on it for ten minutes or two hours.
Now you might be thinking ” that makes absolutely no sense at all!” But the trouble I run into is that these tasks I've done 100 times before sometimes get done in five minutes and sometimes get done in two hours because I discover a bunch of peripheral things that need to be done in order for a foresaid task to be completed.
As a super oversimplified example, sometimes "mowing the lawn" is merely mowing the lawn, but at other times it's removing branches from a storm, rolling up garden hoses, bringing lawn furniture to the patio and raking up Mrs. Denmarkguy's weeding project and then mowing the lawn.
Along with time management comes the tendency to get overwhelmed when I realize there are far more steps to doing something than I had originally estimated. This is a particular trait I share in common with Mrs. Denmarkguy, who also struggles with adult ADHD.
ADHD is very "trendy" as something to talk about these days, just like society likes to cycle through various personality disorders as if they were part of pop culture. Of course the problem with that is that you end up with a huge number of "armchair experts" who essentially get where they are because they relate a little bit to some of the traits involved, but as part of the process end up deminishing the plight of those who have struggled with particular things all their lives.
As I've alluded to before, ADHD for me is simply about understanding and managing how I function in life. I like to share my musings in my blogs and periodically on my Facebook wall and other places simply because one of the ways those of us so afflicted manage things is by sharing tips and coping mechanisms.
The majority of people with ADHD really don't want to be medicated.
Anyway, general sharing is quite different from creating a popular YouTube channel with no purpose other than to sit and whine about how hard your life is! And yes, there are quite a few of those these days.
One of my spiritual teachers many many years ago — although this had nothing whatsoever to do with ADHD — remarked that history is useful in the sense that it is through understanding where we've been that we can figure out where we need to go. Hence I spend a fair amount of time looking at my earlier life before I really understood how my brain functions, as a sort of partial guidebook to what I need to do to move forward.
It's easy for armchair quarterbacks to sit there and say "you just need to focus more," or "you just need to take a pill," but that isn't really a workable solution for most. A lot of advice for people with ADHD is offered by people who observe and treat the condition but don't actually live with it.
Consider, for example, the perfectly "good" advice that you should make a list of all the things you need to get done, rank them from hardest to easiest, and then do the hardest thing first, to "get it out of the way."
Doesn't really work, since most people with ADHD lack the necessary dopamine to suddenly undertake a large project. What actually works is doing the easiest thing first, getting a small dopamine lift so you can do the second thing and so forth, building up a good mementum so you can tackle the hardest thing last.
Managing time is incredibly important for those of us with ADHD... because if we don't, chances are we'll get up, start on our day, and next time we look at the clock it is 3:00 in the afternoon, and we have no idea where the day went!
That has happened to me on more occasions than I am comfortable counting.
You often have to employ various forms of "psychological trickery" that involves subtly fooling yourself to sticking with things when you really don't feel inclined to do so.
These days, we often talk about the "gamification" of many aspects of our lives, and I must admit that it is a trend that has definitely helped me manage my time a lot better. I don't so much use other people's advice for structuring my time, as I create my own systems, with checklists and spreadsheets that offer me a highly visual representation of what I have accomplished, and what I need to accomplish.
It's not perfect, but it's certainly better than the chaos I used to live with!
For those of you who visit my Hive blog regularly, you might have noticed that I am writing more about this topic these days than I used to.
And there's actually a purpose to why I'm doing so: namely that blog post related to my attempts to manage my ADHD life and manage my time are relevant in a way that allows me to post them to various online forums away from Hive, thereby (potentially) driving additional traffic here to our community.
And if you just read that and have no idea what I'm talking about, click here to learn about Hive and make an account or click the one of the links below and check it out!
As always, thanks for stopping by and have a great week ahead!
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Created at 2025.10.26 22:12 PST
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