Part of ADHD life is getting really stuck when trying to manage a complex flow of work and tasks. It’s part of our impairment to forget stuff.
My work is really varied series of tasks. I do a lot of events, writing, coding, building VR environments, design work, meetings etc etc.
I used to have elaborate systems to help me to remember things. Trello boards, notes apps, physical post it notes etc.
They never worked very well for me. The overhead of managing the tasks was often larger than the cost of doing the tasks.
So these days… I don’t manage tasks. I have a limit of a handful of things at a time. If something comes up before I have space for it, I direct folks to people who could help or I ask people to wait till I have capacity. Once I’ve done so, I forgot about it.
I don’t write it down, I don’t have a queue of pending tasks, and I don’t book things against my future capacity (aka ‘a plan’)
This has more or less doubled the amount of work I get done in the time I have available.
All of those tasks sat in the queue represented ‘pending demands’. They consume energy just by existing. They don’t need to exist.
Nothing I do in my day to day work is a matter of life and death. If it was, I wouldn’t be doing it. Occasionally something important will come along and to take it on I will need to drop everything, but those situations are rare.
I find being effective is not the same as being busy. When I was busy I made more mistakes, fixing those mistakes meant even more work.
My goal is a gentle but consistent pace. Delivering a steady stream of work in a cheerful and productive way.
