DESCRIPTION:
Here are ADHD friendly steps you can use to make decisions about how to use your time.
KEY TAKEAWAYS:
* Need to have your calendar and task manager up to date.
* It is important to have a process and a time to update your calendar and task manager.
* Upfront thinking is a task.
* You might need help to execute the plan
RESOURCES:
Blog Post:
*
7 Tips ADHD Adults Can Use to Plan a Productive Day
*
The ADHD Adult’s Guide to the Weekly Review
TRANSCRIPT:
(00:01):
Are you using your time the way that is the most important to you? You’ve tuned into Scattered Focused, done Re-Imagining Productivity with ADHD, A podcast for ADHD, adults like you who want to learn how to adopt the best strategies, tools, and skills to be able to get your essential work done in a way that works with the way your brain is wired. I’m Marla Cummins, and I’m glad you decided to join me today on this journey to re-imagining productivity with ADHD, so you can get what is important to you done without trying to do it like everyone else. You know that as an adult with ADHD, you may think fast and have too many thoughts at once. This can make it hard or even harder to make decisions about what to do with your time. It can feel overwhelming to say the least.
(00:55):
As Dr. Charles Parker notes your prefrontal cortex, which helps you regulate your attention, emotion, and behavior, which includes making decisions, becomes relatively frozen in time, and you have what he calls unmanageable cognitive abundance. This ADHD, stuck thinking according to Dr. Parker can present itself in one of three ways. First, there’s frozen thinking without worry. In these instances, while you aren’t emotional, you still think a lot about decisions as an example that just aren’t that important.
(01:35):
Leaving yourself feeling exhausted. You may however, try to micromanage in an effort to minimize this thinking. The second is frozen thinking with abundance of indecision and worry. With this type of thinking, you may often get stuck in your thinking, unable to make a decision or making it too late, leading to negative consequences in your personal and professional life. The third is frozen thinking with feeling of anxiety. If this happens to you, the anxious feelings come from thinking too much and then you’ll become indecisive and worry until you can feel it in your body, maybe your head, your chest, or your stomach.
(02:23):
Can you think of recent times when you were trying to make a decision about what to do with your time and have experienced any of these type of thinking that I mentioned in addition to your thought processes? The other reason is hard to prioritize Your thinking about what to do with your time when you have ADHD is of course the challenge with executive function skills such as planning and organizing task. It’s just hard to prioritize when you don’t have a systemic way to do it. For example, you need to know how long a task will take and how much you can do in that time. ADHD time blindness can make this hard to do. One result is that you may think you can do more in a day than you can actually do.
(03:12):
