231 - Why Can’t I Just Do It? The Life Cycle of an ADHD Task

What's the deal with tasks?! And why are they so hard to do sometimes?! Today we go through the life cycle of a task and what we, as adults with ADHD, must do to accomplish these often crappy things! 

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Transcript

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What are these things called to-dos? Tasks, things that we need to do, things that we want to do, thingamabobs, pains in the asses. Let's treat us like a biology infographic. Let's talk about the life cycle of a task. Get out your peachies. Let's learn some stuff. You are listening to ADHD Big Brother, the podcast for adults struggling with their ADHD, their comorbid depression, their anxiety. Oh, it's just a new. I'm your host and your ADHD Big Brother, Rush Jones. I've got ADHD too. I've got depression as well. It's crapastic. So let's learn some stuff. Let's laugh at some stuff. Let's make some commitments to do some stuff. And ladies and gentlemen, here's some stuff. Alright, welcome to the podcast. Oh, my voice went away. Welcome to the podcast. Welcome to the podcast. How are you doing? You already know I'm gonna tell you how I'm doing. That's just part of the ADHD Brother package. But how what about you? Are you doing okay? Are you struggling? Are you doing great? What's your deal, man? If part of your deal is that you're having trouble getting started on things. Uh, there is a PDF that I give out. It's in the show notes. It's the Ready Set Go PDF. SET is an acronym, and if you do that, you will get started on anything. Um, get the PDF. Prove me wrong. I dare you. Or no, that's that's rot. That's aggressive. A dare, please. I challenge you to see uh how it works for you. And then let me know. All right, let's do the mental health report. Every week I share my mental health in honor of normalizing the conversation, right? We gotta talk about the good, the bad, and the weird, right? We're not always we're not always fine. So here's me. I am doing so much better than the previous weeks. I think the scales have tipped in my favor. Thank the Lord. That was a really dumb, depressive episode, and shorter lived than some of my more deeper ones. It felt situational, brought on by a letter from the government. Oh, our dear friend government, the Troy in all of our lives. Fucking Troy. Apologies if your name is Troy. It's just such a good name for representing like an asshole guy, doesn't it? Doesn't it just like fucking Troy? Oh Troy! What's this deal? And oddly, all the Troys that I know in real life are really good guys. And I like them. So make sense of that. Troy's can take it. Troy's get it. It's fucking fucking Troy. Good at everything. But I sank. Oh man, I sunk. What has helped? Uh guys, I did it. I just about I was gonna say I did it all through hydration. I did it through water. Drinking water turns out, turns out water's the answer for everything. Uh no, I'm just kidding. What helped truly are the daily walks that I've been going on. Only reason I did those is because I created a challenge for myself inside uh Adiation Big Brother. 30-minute walk for 30 days in a row. I believe maybe it didn't lift me, it but it didn't sink me anymore. It felt good to have some healthy thing that I did for myself. You know, I'm not walking around saying, like, look who's doing a walk. Self-love, words of affirmation. Here's here's Russell taking care of Russell. Uh that wasn't happening. I was pissy about it half the time, uh, having to do the walk, feeling chained to a challenge that I just but I didn't want to have to start it all over again. Um, and then afterwards, I maybe I didn't feel as bad. But in hindsight, I'd say if I wasn't doing the walk, I would have felt worse. And being like depressed, I'm I'm just so willing and able to sabotage what's going well in my life. And I just I didn't want to add on to that. So um, so the walks I think helped. And I've talked about this quite a bit, but man, I'm not a big affirmations guy. I mean, I get it. But man, when you're in a depressive episode, do you guys believe anything that your brain says that isn't you suck? I mean, we know it on paper, right? We know it on paper that we don't suck, but the brain is so powerful. Uh, it's like the smartest lawyer in the room, you know, that has all the data, all the historical data on what a piece of shit we are. So it'll just be like, oh, oh, you love yourself? Is that what you're saying? Well, what about all these things that I'm about to show you in your mind's eye? What about this, and what about this, and what about this? No, clearly, as the jury will see, you're full of shit and you're a piece of shit. So I'm a big fan of task formations, you know, just clever wordplay, you know, just tossing around some new kinds of words. These are just the tasks that someone who does believe the affirmation, what do they do? You know, what does a person who loves themselves do? What's that task? Go for a 30-minute walk? Okay, well, let me just be in a low mood state and do one of those things, and my brain can suck it. So that helped. And that is me. Uh, how are you? Feel free to reach out, adhibbrother.com, click on the contact share. How are you doing? Uh, I'm not gonna fix anything, obviously, but I will reply to your email. Sometimes it's good just to get it out. You know what I'm saying? So feel free, bring it on. Speaking of task formations, let us talk today about the life cycle of a task. You we were doing these conquering your turd mountain events inside the community. They're super fun. Um, if you're new to the term conquering your turd mountain, I have an episode back in the day called Turd Mountain. You can search for it. Uh, basically, tasks uh that we don't want to do. They're like dog turds piling up in your backyard. That's the metaphor. Um, it's not a pretty metaphor, but you know what? Guys, life isn't always clean and pretty, is it? The events were super fun. And I'm gonna add a couple more for later in the month. But oh my god, they were like they're super helpful, they were fun to facilitate. This is clearly the world that I love. I'm just so into talking about our school spaghetti. Like, how do we do stuff? So if you're worried that maybe you missed out, join the community. We'll get a couple more going. And I'm loose about it, dudes. You know, I'm here to help. So we'll maybe we put out a doodle poll and we'll make sure you get it in. You just gotta join. You know, so if you're done talking about why you can't, if you've read every fucking book and you can write three dissertations on, you know, dopamine and ADHD, and you still aren't activating or doing your laundry, it's time to join. You know the work you need to do, but you're not doing it, you gotta join. I don't mean to tell you what you need to do. God, I don't, I don't even know you. How arrogant am I right now? But here I am, confidently telling you, this is what you need. If you are ready to start doing, we have created the implementation engine for you. It's funny because like a lot of people get surprised when they were. I can't believe this works. Join and lurk. Join for a month and just go into the daily accountability every morning and just see what people are posting, see people failing, succeeding, trying, learning, growing. It's fucking amaze balls. So, anyways, the reason that I bring up this all up is because basically, this is what we kind of cover in those workshops is the life cycle of a task and how an ADHD adult handles the task through the life cycle. When you openly discuss your current way of handling tasks, you often see where in the life cycle there's a hole in your bucket. So today we're let's zoom out. And I now we'll share with you. Like I'm gonna present it like a school. Okay, this is ADHD Big Brother life cycle of a task. All right, Troy, kill the lights and roll the projector. Okay, here's how I view the life cycle of a task: it's an energy that you birth. This is gonna get all heady, right? The universe manifests it first and foremost in your cranials region. No, so like, but it just it appears, right? It comes from nowhere. Respond to the email, call the person, do the errand, laundry. First, it comes into existence in your brain as an oh I gotta, right? Oh, I gotta do that, oh, I gotta run that errand, oh, I gotta go to the store. The task is born and it lives in the recesses of your brain. At first, it's top of mind, then the task somehow makes its way into your day where you take action on it. Ideally, right? Like we're talking about how a task goes through its existence. We're not we'll get to the ADHD part. And then ultimately the task lives until it reaches the final stage of its existence, known as completion, where it is then brutally eradicated from existence, usually through a black sharpie or a delete button, or sometimes a cute little check mark. It seems pretty easy, doesn't it? It's like great, that's a task, everyone. You're welcome. Thanks for coming to the presentation. According to science, task is a thing you do. That's science, guys. Read it, it's in a book. Unless you have ADHD, right?

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And then you don't do the thing. And then the normies all like, just do it, just fucking do it. You know how to do it, just do it, you lazy bones.

SPEAKER_01 9:08

But we all know uh that it's not a character flaw. We read that book and we saw that video and took that course, so we already know. So when I have like my ADHD coach's hat on, we typically, this through this process of getting you on stuck and consistent, we see where there's holes in your task process. I'll go through them really quick. But again, if you need the deeper hands-on help with the stuff, I can do this through one-on-one and we do this in the consistency crew, adhbrother.com, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. There are five things that we dug into in conquering your turd mountain event. And the task is born, right? So, how do you capture it? You have to capture it. You need an external place device thing to capture your tasks. Because those babies, they will find the deepest, darkest hole in the back of your brain, and they won't come out unless the shit is hitting the fan. And then it or and if it doesn't, like we will usually just say, Oh, well, we're not, I don't need you right now. Go back to the forest of forgetfulness, young task. I'll deal with you later. So, first and foremost, you need that way of capturing the idea externally, never internally. And then you need a methodology of determining what of all your tons of tasks are you going to do. Some people use the term prioritization. Um, I do have some diverging uh views on this one. I like to honor our brains, you know, and it's not always about what's important. Um, if a task makes it onto your brain dump, your externalized list, you have told the world, me, you, yourself, that this is something worth getting done. So, what is your method for chipping away at them and deciding which one you're gonna do? There has to be some methodology for wrangling your chaos. I use a symbol system that I created because I don't like to see a whole bunch of words on a page. Um, it's literally called the system. That's what I named it. It's an acronym. Sort your shit, then engage mindfully. And it works. Yeah, it works well for me. Um, thirdly, you need a calendar. Some of this stuff, if you're saying you want to do it and you're not doing it, at some point, by God, it deserves a spot on your calendar. It deserves to become an appointment. Thursday, 12 to 1, send goddamn email and then you work on it for an hour. ADH years are just screwed if they're not using a calendar of some sort. And this isn't the time management episode, but I'll tell you, if you get your time management figured, 85% of you, this is a number I pulled directly out of my ass. It's probably even higher. But uh, you will find you have more time for your whims. Your whim chasing. Don't I mean we love chasing our whims. Let's go. I love it. I hate structure. So, but with a little bit of structure in our lives, we get to have more or less structure time. Put that in your how does that make sense pipe and smoke it. You know what I mean? Or at the bare minimum, imagine having some structure in your day, and then the second part of the day, you don't have any guilt about what you should have done, could've got done, wasted your day and didn't do all that stuff. Man, just a little bit of structure goes a long way. I think Julie Andrews sang about it. Something like, uh, just a spoonful of structure helps the to-do list go down. The to-do list go down. I'm not on American Idol, okay? Back off. Then we have to talk about out of sight, out of mind. Like, are there components to this task that you need to put in front of your eyeballs to give you permission to forget? We're gonna forget. That's who we are in our natural state, in the wild. We are those who forget. So, our jobs as adults with ADHD is how can I set myself up so I have permission to forget? You know, maybe I put the bills by the door underneath my car keys. So the next time I go out, I'm gonna swoop them up. That's how I'm gonna get it to the mailbox. It's that kind of a thing. How do you keep it in front of your face? And then finally, no task is complete until we complete it. A time will come when you have predetermined that you are gonna do that thing. And at that time, your brain is going to either throw a tantrum or it's gonna find every fucking loophole that it possibly can to make this not now. How many of us in the moment can rationalize something else because something else is really important? And I really should get to that. This deserves this deserves to be done. I'm actually being brave and making a choice right now. I can't do the thing that I said I was gonna do because this other thing is more important, and I'm making a strong choice right now. That's the brain, man. Doing what the brain, whatever it can to get you out of it. But you said you were gonna send that email, or you said you were gonna work on that email. No, but there's so much tension in the moment when I have to sit down, I have to think about it. So there has to be a plan or a methodology or a community, and I keep spoon feeding that one to you guys, um, where you get the felt accountability, the body doubling. And like in one-on-one work, uh, we systematically chip away at all the obstacles until you become consistent with honoring your word to yourself, even though, right? Even though that other thing, God dang, that other thing was really important, though. Could have been more important. So you try this. Here's a challenge for you. Most ADHDers, I would say, don't typically put in the calendar a thing like uh send that email. Because it's like it's a it's a task, it's a to-do item. So I'm gonna challenge you to put a thing on your calendar that's just a dumb task, slot it for a very specific time that you have predetermined that you have time for. What's an hour block of your day that you do have time to send that email, quote unquote. And then at that time, watch yourself. Get a big fat jug of curiosity, guzzle it, and watch yourself. See what kind of stuff your brain points out. The brain's gonna say all kinds of stuff, like, oh yeah, but you really know, you know, the kitchen, you know, yeah, somebody coming over later. So you should probably do the kitchen. The kitchen, that's that's important right now. Or yeah, you know, I know you have to send that email, but when are you gonna get to that insurance company call? That should probably be on the that's more important. Let's do that one first. The brain's gonna find every fucking loophole. Um, or it's just gonna feel like now I feel resistance, I don't want to do it. Mm-hmm. Interesting. Watch yourself, see what you're see what happens. Typically, when we have these conversations, especially in a group, you see where you have inefficient ways of managing your ADHD. Like we want to be able to just do stuff, but for us to just do this stuff, we do require scaffolding, some structure. And the beauty of it, uh, this is to me, the beauty of it is that it's usually different for everybody. There's a million different ways to do things. But I think if we zoom out at the core, we got to capture ideas, we need to determine what gets our attention, like whatever the priority system we choose is, and we need to become proficient at doing what we said when we said we were gonna do it. And this isn't a question of will, it's like a it's a question of skill, it's tools, right? You're not gonna become a master chef cooking a meal. You have to cook. Gotta get in the fucking kitchen and cook. Try these things. Try these things even though you don't need them. Try them even, you know, try them on a train. Try them in the rain. Try them here, try them there, try them everywhere. The doing of the thing in the moment, it's a lot of times this is a little hack for you. It's it's about getting started, it's about breaking through that tension of getting started. Um, and so get that PDF, uh, the ready set go PDF. It's in the show notes. That is the formula for getting started. Um, so where is the leak in your system? I'm curious. I'm soups curious. We've spent decades trying to be like a normie and wondering what the fuck was wrong with us in this next chapter of our lives. We already did the whole grief thing, right? Are you guys done with that part where you're like, oh, I coulda, woulda, shoulda, what I could have been, what I could have done. That's that part's over. It's not too late now. Let's just practice some skills, right? When you're done learning, when you've read your final book, when you're ready to put the books down and get to the growing part, and let's do this shit our way. Let's team up, do it together, so much better that way. We we've got this implementation engine. I think I mentioned that earlier. And when people join now, I give you a complimentary one-on-one call. So you'll get a coaching call to help you find the I'm a fucking bucket leak master. I will find the leaks. We'll get you patched up. All right. Nope, to see you in there. And that's gonna do it. That's gonna do it for me. I hope you guys found this uh helpful. As always, I appreciate you guys taking the time to share these episodes with anybody that you think would benefit from them and the flank ya. Um, okay, that'll do. I hope you guys have a fantastic week, and I shall talk to you later.