How to Make Decisions About How to Use Your Time
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:
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):
One reason for this, it is also common for ADHD adults to be overly optimistic about how much you can get done. So in the case of dealing with a backlog, for example, you may feel a sense of urgency as if everything needs to get done. Now. Then again, you may try to take on too much because you want to get everything done right now, prioritizing takes time. No doubt. You may not do it right now because you have too much on your plate and you don’t feel you have time.
(03:51):
But when you don’t prioritize, you may just end up doing whatever comes to mind in the moment. You may also allow other people’s requests to just run your day. Then again, you may operate out of habit, so you start your day checking your email and responding to it. As your day goes on. You may also give into distractions. Doing whatever again gives you an immediate reward, that release of dopamine, so you do whatever activity is interesting, challenging, novel or urgent. It’s the stimulus of the need for immediate gratification that you may be after.
(04:30):
Then again, you may just end up doing whatever’s easiest. Ready to see how you can turn this around. Here are some steps you can take when you’re trying to make decisions about how to use your time. The first step is to make sure your calendar is up to date. Do you have all your appointments in there?
(04:49):
Also, do you need to change any of your appointments? Go ahead, check out your calendar, see if it’s up to date. The next thing is to explore where do you keep your list of tasks right now, if you don’t have one central place, they may be on stickies, pads of papers, somewhere in your meeting notes, maybe in your emails or on the memo app in your phone. You write them down in these various places because you’re hoping in the moment that that will help you remember to do them.
(05:21):
But this makes it hard to make decisions about what tasks to tackle when they’re all over the place as well as when to do them because you just can’t see them all at once. Here’s a quote from David Allen to illustrate this point. It’s not one thing, but five all wrapped together. People keep stuff in their head.
(05:43):
They don’t decide what they need to do about that stuff. They know they need to do something about it, but they don’t organize action reminders and support materials in functional categories. Also, they don’t maintain and review a complete and objective inventory of their commitments. Then they waste energy and burnout, allowing their busyness to be driven by what’s latest and loudest, hoping it’s the right thing to do, but never feeling the relief that it is.
(06:13):
So to avoid this, the second step after making sure your calendar is up to date, is to have a central place where you can keep all your tasks, you can see them all. I know you may not be comfortable with using Electronic task manager, but I recommend trying one. Of course, get help. If you’re not sure how to use one, it’s definitely not an easier quick fix, and I’m sure you’ll even feel uncomfortable at first because that’s not the way you’re used to operating.
(06:44):
But once you have a centralized place to keep your task and your calendar is up to date, the next step is to have dedicated time to think. To do this, you’ll want to slow down to make decisions about what tasks you are going to do and when you are going to do them. The key is to set aside dedicated time using a specific process to make these decisions.
(07:13):
If you don’t do this, now, it may be because you don’t think of decision making as a task, but when you overlook this, you may commonly say to yourself, I have to get to this, and then you procrastinate. Right? Well, there certainly may be. Other times you need to dedicate time to these making decisions. Two definite times you want to do this are weekly and daily. I’ve included a link to both blogs and podcasts with the podcast on my website that will walk you through how to do a weekly and daily review.
(07:51):
But to summarize, in the weekly review, you will process all your inputs where tasks might be coming from that you might not have processed yet. This may include email, snail mail, text. Then you review and update your task list. Next, you review and update your calendar, and then the last part is decide where are you going to focus your time and energy, at least in the following week, if not further along.
(08:25):
Then in the daily planning. Again, to summarize, have a method to plan your day. Make it visible. Trust your plan that is the right one for that day. Resist adding more to your plan. Have a good self-care plan, and last, have a shutdown routine. Again, you can refer to the podcast or blog post for more extensive explanation.
(08:56):
What I’ve just shared with you probably makes sense and perhaps something you may want to do or maybe already do in some form, but you also know that following through is the hard part for adults with A D, H, D. So the next step is to consider what will help you execute on these. One type of help you may need is someone to process your ideas with. You can talk through what is on your plate and maybe they’ll ask you questions, help guide your thinking, or if you want, give you their opinion about what you should do.
(09:35):
Sometimes once you explain your thinking, the solutions just naturally come to you. Maybe you just need someone to sit with you as you work. Also called body doubling. The presence of a body double can serve as a calming influence. They can also serve as a reminder of your intentions.
(09:54):
When you get distracted, you also likely feel obligated to work while your body double is there. And then again, another option is an accountability partner. Someone you can check in with or will check in with you to see if you follow through on what you tended to do once you decided your priorities, of course, again, that does not mean you will necessarily follow through on executing on them. You already know that. So the next step is deciding what to do each day. The question of how to do this can take up many podcasts, so I’m just going to share a few suggestions.
(10:38):
One option is to sparingly time box your task. I say sparingly because as an adult with ADHD, you may resist this. It is useful to ensure you accomplish what is most important to you, though in some cases. So you just don’t want to do whatever comes to mind or what you feel like doing.
(11:00):
An alternative is to use the 1 3 5 rule at the beginning of the day. You choose one big task, three medium task, and five small tasks. You get to decide what big, medium, and small means. You may also plan what to do each day according to your energy level. Once you’ve chosen your priorities. Of course, the next step is execution, and that’s more on for another podcast. So what are you going to do to choose your priorities on how to use your time?
(11:37):
That’s it for now. I’m really glad you joined me and stayed until the very end. If you’re interested in learning more about my work with adults with ADHD, check out my website, marla cummins.com. Of course, if you’ve learned a thing or two from today’s podcast, which I hope you have, please pass along the link to anyone else in your socos you think might also benefit. And until next time, this has been Scattered Focus Done. And I’m Marla Cummins. Wishing you all the very best on your journey to reimagining productivity with ADHD.
