A cute ADD thing
Yesterday I caught myself compensating for ADDness in a fairly odd way. Of course, once I did I threw myself totally off kilter for about four hours. But hey, that’s how it goes.
The hunt has me in a blind panic, and as any ADDer who’s been told “don’t get up from that chair until you finish your homework” can tell you, there’s NO worse thing for productivity than deadline panic. What starts as a simple out of phase harmonic disturbance in your head turns into a thunderous cacophony of pressures, voices, and raw stress.
Fun! (for values of “fun” approximating “holy shit I’m gonna die in 3…2…”)
I realized all of a sudden (and it’s strange to say it that way) that I was washing a pan, putting a pair of jeans in the laundry bag, writing an email, emptying a garbage pail into a bag (can’t get the bags to stay on) then washing a dish, checking dice.com, picking up a few socks and putting them in the laundry basket, looking for my MS Office dvds and organizing a bookshelf for a couple minutes, checking monster.com, washing another dish, responding to two job recs I’d saved on dice, wrote some ftp client code, moved a couple unused books to a shelf farther away, then brought a couple poignant ones closer to the computers, where I checked craig’s list (which is unadulterated ASS btw. Please address all complaints to this brick wall next to me. Craig’s list is the ghetto of the internet), etc, etc.
I was cruising like that for about two hours. Sure, I was sufficiently caffeinated (which I’ve noticed is getting tougher and tougher to do.)
So yeah, it turns out that if multiple, entirely disparate projects are fragmented into sufficiently small chunks, I can be relatively productive by rotating around the task list (in a random order, otherwise I get locked up again.)
Of course some things actually require blocks of attention (any reasonable coding task) but that’s ok, those require attention because they’re WORTH the attention.
So… yeah. Fun.
UPDATE: Just realized that I should probably write more about that, but there was a dish to wash.
It would pay, I think, to organize my giant hybrid ToDoList from hell that way. Colorize projects or something so that I could pick the next task off of any of N individual project lists. To have tripped over this accidentally is relatively important. Of course, if I push it too hard I’ll get that whole Gurdgeiff springback thing. (oh, go look it up on here someplace. I’m too lazy to find the link.)
More as I think of it, or maybe a bit after.
hmmpf. wtf is that sock doing THERE?
July 21st, 2009 at 7:18 pm
I tend to get chain-distracted. I wash a pan, notice there is a spot on the counter next to where I set the pan down, clean the spot, noticing the paper towels are almost gone, get more paper towels, notice the candle shelf below the paper towel storage is out of order, organize the candles, notice that where I’m sitting on the floor to organize needs swept, sweep floor and find spots that need re-mopped, notice the place where the mop is kept needs tidied….
And later on, hours later, I see the pan sitting next to the sink and wonder “wtf is that doing there?”