238 - How I Manage My ADHD; Productivity Edition

I do a lot of talking about what works, things to think about, things to try. In this episode I share some of who I used to be, better known as "what doesn't work" and also "what does work" for a 50 year old single dad solopreneur with ADHD and depression. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

I've been spinning my yarns here for a number of years. This is back to October of 2020, I believe, is when we started. How to get your shit together when you have ADHD. So maybe I'm gonna focus on this one and like what exactly do I do? Am I even walking the talk here? What if I what if I just told you things that you had to do? I don't need support. I've mastered the art of just doing it. Oh, but for you, young and naive ADHD. Oh, you need a timer. Now let's peel my productivity onion and see what's at its core.

SPEAKER_00 0:38

Do onions even have a core? We're about to find out. Let's go.

SPEAKER_02 0:50

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 loot. I'm your host and your ADHD Big Brother, Roger Jones. I've got ADHD too. I've got depression as well. It's crap tastic. So let's learn some stuff. Let's laugh at some stuff. Let's make some commitments to do some stuff. Ladies and gentlemen, here's some stuff. Welcome to the podcast. Yes, they do. They at least that's what AI thinks. Onions have a core, and AI is never wrong. Am I right about that? Yes, onions have a distinct, often tighter and more fibrous center or quote unquote core that acts as the growth point for the plant. Kinky. Get me a nice tight fibrous core. Ew! Okay, interesting, isn't it? Onions are fascinating. Okay, uh, today is gonna be uh interesting. I'm not really gonna do an ADHD Big Brother update. Um yeah, I'll proflize the community all day long, but the um uh I don't need to do a mental health report this time either. Um, because guys, it doesn't make sense. I literally just wrote the other one. Um I'm writing this one literally a couple of days after the last one. I'm going out of town, so I needed an episode for Monday. So if you want to know about the coaching openings or my school spaghetti update, give a listen to the previous episode. It's been no change. Mood state is good. Okay, so let me tell you um maybe my journey of managing my ADHD. It's an ongoing journey, but there are certain skills I'd say that I've become proficient in and some that I continue to practice and work on. I am currently as a baseline here, I am a successfully running a solopreneur operation known as ADHD Big Brother. Uh I'm single daddy, I'm boyfriending, uh, I'm Dungeons and Dragonsing uh with my friendzings. And I do all this while having ADHD and all the craptastic comorbidities. Um here's some of old me and new me, if that helps you. This is as an overall blanket statement. I believe sharing things like this. This is how adults with ADHD improve their lives. Sharing insights, sharing struggles, visibility that can be inspiring to others, or warning signs, or things to watch out for. That's why I'm such a big freaking community nerd. Alrighty, I used to buy a planner every every six months to a year. That was my thing. Franklin planners. Oh my god. Oh, those are so good. They're so well made. I like the idea of the whole ABC 123 prioritization thing. It didn't work for me though. Um, but the idea of it is so good. Categorizing and prioritizing, that works. But like the letters and the numbers, for some reason, they don't pop out at me. But I regardless, I would only ever fill out the planner like one or two days and then just forget about it. You know, you know the deal. Um, I also had addictions that I was dealing with. Uh nicotine, big one. I wasted a lot of time on video games. Uh, drugs were a part of my 20s. Uh, and alcohol has been just off and on uh as an escape for just forever. But as of right now, I do not partake in nicotine of any kind. Uh, that was successfully accomplished through uh guess what? A community. Uh you know I love a good community, and I do not drink alcohol anymore, and that was because I joined up a quit a quit effort out of solidarity with some other ADHD Big Brother members. Uh, and I am about 300 days now, no alcohol. I still have times when I would really love to have a whiskey with Emily or like, but I track my days that I haven't had a drink in my daily accountability group. So um just knowing that I would have to update that number in the community from like 300 to one, it adds just the right amount of tension to for me to be like, nah, it's not worth it. I don't want to do that. And honestly, you know, as many of us know, nobody ever regrets not having had alcohol. No one's ever said, like, God, I really wish, I really wish I would have drank more. I really need to pick up my alcohol drinking. No one says that. And also, I don't do uh drugs anymore. None of the escapes for me now. I still get sucked into video games from time to time, but um not in a big way like it used to be. When I got serious about managing my ADHD, that's when I really started uh to make changes. So I'm 50 now, and I'll tell you where I'm currently at, uh, what my what maybe a day in my life looks like and how I'm managing from a productivity standpoint. Sleep is good for the most part. I get pretty much a consistent seven and a half hours of sleep. Sleep always finds its way into the a one-on-one coaching conversation at some point. Bad sleep is such a disservice for a disorder that gives us very little executive function juice, right? The mental capacity to make decisions and connect dots and get started on things, it's already malfunctioned. Being well rested is important. You know, I'm not your science guy, so feel free to Google. Hey, Google, what's up with ADHD sleep? Huh? If you want more juice in your day, fixing your sleep might help. Uh, I fixed my sleep for the most part. I go to bed ideally around 9.30 p.m. I usually read a physical book for a while until I'm ready to not read anymore. So that bedtime and the reading time, it's pretty loose between 9.30 and 10:30, and that before I'm lights out. And I wake up at 6 a.m. And I will discuss that uh morning, you know, routine in a minute. So you guys know that other people in the form of, you know, peer coaching, really, is uh I'm a big fan of that. And so this is how we do it, in my opinion. So Louvet created a community challenge called From FOMO to no fo. I don't I can't remember what the what it means now, but it was basically a challenge to not use your phone in bed and not reach for the phone in the morning. So the way that I played this particular challenge was for 30 days, I'm not allowed to bring my phone into bed. That's a black and white rule, and I have a I have to read a physical book. And then in the morning, I'm not allowed to look at my emails, something that I would easily do first thing in the morning. I'm not allowed to look at my emails until my morning routine is done. Challenges to me are it's these games that we play in our community asynchronous. It's uh we don't all start at the same time or finish at the same time, but we keep it all visible by posting about it in our daily accountability club. So for me, this is how I personally initiate what I would like to be new habits. The goal here of managing ADHD really seems to be getting proficient at the art of experiencing tension and having enough self-awareness about it in the moment to stick with it, even though. And it doesn't mean sucking it up and just do it, it means enough self-awareness to understand that when you are in the moment of I can't or too much tension, and you have the opportunity then to create scaffolding for those moments so that you can. Classic example for me, the PDF that I give you guys uh in the show notes, the ready set go deal, that's the method for me. That's for getting started on anything. Self-awareness when we have it, it's a big deal. Okay, so morning routine. We hear a lot about this stuff in ADHD town. You know, I want a morning routine, I need an evening routine, I want to get into that routine for that. What that actually means in reality to me is that there's this thing that I want to do on repeat and I want it to feel routine. I want it to feel easy to do because it's a routine. When we have something just locked in as a routine, oh man, I'll just do it. It's part of my routine. Wouldn't that be rad to say? But unfortunately, routine, this routine stuff, it's not gonna feel like a routine for many, many rotations of the earth on its axis. Therefore, it will remain something that we have to decide to do, and deciding sucks. So, in order to have the executive function juice to do that, we have to have our hacks, our tips, our tricks, our strategies to execute it every single day. We don't just get to say routine, activate, because we're not Power Rangers. We are an adult with ADHD. So it's gonna suck because our brain doesn't want to do anything different that has tension to it. It wants comfort, it wants easiness, and you know, a routine, trying to get started on routine, you're taking that away from the brain, that easiness and that comfort, and you're instituting some rogue routine idea. Brain does not like. I'm a big fan of using whatever currency is most prominent with me. So I really want to look at my emails in the morning. I'm chomping at the bit to get to those emails, like who got in touch? Oh my god, who wants to connect? Who's angry with me? Let's find out. I want so badly to dive into that soup. So, because that's my currency, I can institute some routine ideas uh and front load them. One is reading in the morning and also my morning journaling. So I have a thing that I do where I'll write uh every morning, which is none of your business what I write. I don't care. I write my want list. I don't mind telling you. I type out all the things that I want. It's like a nice paragraph. It's fun to think about the things that I want, you know. I don't approach it from a place of lack. It's just it's like I'm making a Christmas wish list every day. It's it's a nice way to start the day. Um, and then also doing some reading. And then also posting my accountability in, you know, the ADHC Big Brother community. And in that post, it's about the one thing that I want to make sure I get done that day. Only then am I allowed to look at my emails. And this was made possible because of Louvet's challenge. The reading in the morning and the journaling, they were both community challenges that I adopted to help me start the process of the routines. For productivity, I have this audit that I do that makes its way into coaching when people are struggling with productivity. It's what I did in the Terd Mountain workshops a couple of months ago, if you guys were remember that. I'm doing another round of these workshops inside the community in April. So if you want that, um, you know, get in the community. And here's the audit in a brief form, um which is just what I do. Okay, so for being productive, you need a place to capture your thoughts and ideas. I use a bullet journal. I like the physical thing that I can see and touch. Apps are popular in our community, but for me, they wind up like it's just buried in a sea of apps. So I end up forgetting. So my choice is the bullet journal. I use the famous bullet journal, but I have my own way of using it. Once an idea is captured, you know, like you do your brain dumps, we have to decide what gets our time, what order we do things. And so for me, I use a system that I created. A mountain of a to-do list becomes too overwhelming to me. It's just like a blur of words and phrases. Uh, and I cannot read through all of it all the time. It's too big of a list. I'd go crazy. So I use symbols that I created to delineate work, home, personal stuff. And then I have a symbol for best guess at times, 15 minutes or less, two hours, uh, or like a project, you know, something that's multiple steps. I believe that we know what is most important. Whether or not we want to do the thing, we know how to decide what's important. So thoughtfully looking at the list once a week, that's enough for me to determine the big priorities of the week. And I have a symbol on my big brain dump that will really separate out the main priorities. And so those are the ones that I do. And then everything in those high priorities, if they get done, then I just go based on the category and the time. 15 minutes for work? Okay, great. Let me scan for work things that are 15 minutes or less, and I'll crank out one of those. It doesn't matter to me if it's right or wrong. This takes away the paralysis of picking right or wrong. What's the most important in this list? If it's on my list, who cares what's next? If I'm successfully beyond the urgent things, then who cares? This is how I put a black Sharpie to a lot of things on my list. Beyond that, now we have appointments. Uh, I use a Google Calendar. ADHDers must have a calendar that's non-negotiable in my mind. Um, I check that in the morning to see what's coming. I check it throughout the day. If I have a client, I look to see what's next. When the client session is over, I look again to remind myself what's next. That is a habit for me now. I do it all the time. I've been doing that for easily more than a year. And every once in a while, something will fall through the cracks, might miss a thing, it happens. Next comes the out of sight, out of mind. Like, how do we plan for things to be forgotten, right? We know that if we can't see it, we'll forget. I seek permission to forget. I'll use using whatever, a reminder in my phone that goes off at a certain time, putting things by the door so I can see them as I'm leaving, when I'm working on stuff. I sometimes will ask myself, like, what can I do so that I can forget this confidently? Because I'm going to forget. So instead of trying to get better at remembering, why not give myself permission to forget, knowing that I have supports in place? And then finally is the moment of the task. Like just because I said I wanted to do it at 3 o'clock p.m., it doesn't mean it magically happens. ADHD is one of those things where all of our good intentions, they don't really mean shit, do they? This is where we think that we have a character flaw because we can't just do stuff. The way that I do things, I bet you can guess, it's other people. If I'm really struggling to move the needle forward on something, I create a challenge for it to gamify it. If I'm really struggling, I can also put it in daily accountability and put my day streak on the line for it. I can also go into our 24-7 body doubling room, make things happen there with somebody else. The purpose of the community for me has been to have make create an implementation engine for doing the things, ways for us to stack the deck in our favor to make it more likely that we can do the thing. And I'm a game nerd. I like getting points, I like seeing how many in a row I can do of a thing. I like that stuff. Makes it less of a slog for me. If you guys are interested in how I do the symbol thing, uh for my brain dump and the prioritizing thing, I put a link in the show notes. I wrote it as a short ebook Thingamabob, and it's uh, I think $4.99 at as at the time of this writing. Oh, but what episode on how I do things would be complete without my favorite tool of them all? I use a timer for many, many, many, many, many, many, many things. I don't believe in subscribing to anybody's like scientific timer, like, oh, you gotta do the Pomadoro. It's a 20 minutes on it, a five minute off, and then a 20-minute on it, then you gotta make sure you take a 10-minute break. I don't do that, or the 10-3 or whatever. 10-3 would suck for me, but I believe in adopting whatever seems right for me in the moment. More often than not, that's 45-15 for me. I'll do 45 minutes of deep work and then 15 minutes of something else. Like if I have a client for 45 minutes, then the 15 would be something where I'm moving and doing dishes or cleaning or something. When it comes to big cleaning type stuff, uh, I've I created a card game for that. Actually, I have the cards made, and they are various rooms to be cleaned. And I lay them out, uh, flip the cards upside down so I can't see what room it is. I roll the dice. Whatever card that I flip over, I set a timer for 10 minutes and I clean that room for 10 minutes. And then when the timer goes off, I stop and I go roll the dice and draw another card. So this is how I clean like a motherfudge in under an hour. I can just do five sets of 10. Cleaning to me is can be paralyzing. Um, like I can't get started cleaning. I don't know what room to start on, I don't know what I want to do, it all seems too much, I don't want to do any of it, so I'll stall. So if I can't decide, I just let fate decide. If I don't need the help, I don't use it. If I think to myself, go do the dishes, and somehow I can just go do the dishes, then I just go do the dishes. I don't need a timer, I don't need a game. The the game and these hacks and tips and tricks are for when we can't. When we can, when we are able to follow our whims without anything being debilitated, oh my god, hit the whims, baby. The difference for me with unmanaged ADHD and managed ADHD is that I'm not ruled by an inability to get started. So many times, like in our past, like if I can't get started, I just don't. And then I'll avoid, I'll put off, I'll ignore, I'll wait for things to become fires, and then my brain will gift me motivation to do a thing. Managed ADHD does not rely on shit hitting the fan. We have tools and strategies, and it requires just a teaspoon of self-awareness, just a cup of curiosity, and in my case, a community of ADHDers. So that's me. The timer for me, I do not wish to see it. Uh, many people use the time timer. That's the famous one, you know, where you can see the time pass. Oh god, I hate that. I don't want any part of that. If that works for you, that's great for you. I love that for you.

SPEAKER_01 18:55

I I hate when people say that. It's basically like what you're telling me is insane. I would never, that is so dumb. I could never even ever do. I love that for you. I love that for you.

SPEAKER_02 19:11

I want to forget time. I want to be in the moment. I want to embrace the moment. I want to get back to my comfort zone, which is that time doesn't exist. But time is torturous and slow for things that I hate, and it goes by too fast for things that I like. I don't want to know. I treat my timer like an assistant. I just just tell me when the time is up, and then I'll decide what comes next. I don't want to check in. I don't want to watch time pass. I want to forget. I just want to exist and be in the world, but I also don't want to not have an endpoint. You know, that's where things that are torturous feel like too big and infinite and impossible to get started on, and where things that are hyper focus prone, that's where we lose time and we forget other things. So I just use my phone. It's just the clock, no biggie, just no crazy fun app. Just 45 minutes, tell me when it's up. Um, and that's me. Did I cover it all? This is actually a long ramble. This is how I operate and how I get shit done. A big part of my success is the ADHD Big Brother community. It's why I discuss it at length. You are invited to join us. Um, if you're not sure how to use a community to get shit done, if it feels like, oh, this is an extra chore and it's just adds to your overwhelming chore pile, I really do encourage you to try it for a month. Experience it. Show up and just see people who are active and how they're using daily accountability, myself included, to keep what's important visible. And you get a front row seat to that and to the possibilities and to the how of it all. And the bare minimum is just show up and look. Log in. There's peep people are active there every day. Here's what's possible. We have a new member, Thomas. This is a shout out to you, first of all, Thomas. He wrote this in uh we have a post your win section. He gave me permission to share this, by the way. Um, he says in a post titled ADHD Big Brother is working. Man, I overplanned with what I wanted to get done, but it mostly all happened, all caps, exclamation point, before 6 p.m. And earlier today, my wife said, Hey, what's up with all the productivity lately? It's ADHD Big Brother, baby. And he just shared that he knocked his inbox down from multiple thousands to 89. And I love that for him. I'm not gonna do that. I'm not going after my email box. I love that for him. Um for people that stay beyond the seven-day money-back guarantee deal. I give you a complimentary coaching call. It's 45 minutes, and I can help you point your compass. I am gifted at inspiring you, and we can talk about how you specifically can utilize what the community offers. Daily accountability, it's not gonna be for everybody. Uh, it is where most of the members hang out, but some people want the weekly support call. Some people want to just body double or be, you know, be a part of a book club. I can help you. If getting shit done is eluding you, this may be the sweet secret sauce you need. But you do have to try it. It is gonna be a $49 gamble uh as of right now to experience it for a month. But if it's not right for you, after seven days, all you have to do is email me and say, hey man, let me out of here. And I will help you. I will pack your bags for you and I will give you your money back. I do not have RSD for that component. I get it. Not everything is for everybody. Anyways, I'm here to help if helping is the help that you would like help with. Uh, and I will leave the rest to you. Alrighty, guys, that's gonna do it for this week. Don't forget to head down to the show notes, click on the links, and share this podcast with anybody that you think it would help. Um, we're all about the helping out here. Um, all right, and that's it. Hope you guys have a fantastic week, and I shall talk to you later.