Hacking Your ADHD

This week we're going to be deep-diving into multitasking - this is one of those topics that I frequently mention in episodes, but I've never featured before. Not because it doesn't deserve its own episode, but because multitasking is actually a fairly complicated issue and is going to take a bit of time to dissect. So this is actually just going to be my first episode in a series on multitasking and we'll really try and dig into the nitty-gritty of it. In today's episode, we're going to be talking a bit about what multitasking is and what it isn't - then we'll work on some ways to really drive home the time costs of multitasking and well finish up by looking at some of the ways that multitasking can actually put us in harm's way. Support me on Patreon Connect with me on: Facebook Twitter Instagram or ask me a question on my Contact Page Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/multitasking This Episode's Top Tips There are three kinds of multitasking - Classic Multitasking where we're trying to perform more than one task at the same time. Rapid task switching where we're just going from one task to another in quick succession. And interrupted task switching where we're interrupted from one task and switch what we're doing without finishing what we were doing. When we're talking about multitasking we're primarily concerned with doing two cognitive tasks at the same time that require sustained attention. This means something like walking and listening to a podcast is fine to do because neither carries a huge cognitive load. We often try to multitask with things that we're already fairly practiced at, but this means that we're going to suffer even more of a penalty as we try to combine doing them with other things. Don't text and drive - or even just play with your phone while behind the wheel. When we're mentally juggling all of these different things we're dividing our attention and it takes time for us to refocus on what we need to be doing.

One of the questions that I frequently get is how people can actually apply what they're learning - in this podcast and from all the other things we learn. I know this is a particularly pernicious problem for ADHD because often we see things that we think would really make a difference in our lives, and yet we can't seem to get ourselves to apply these ideas. Today we're going to exploring how we can start working on getting a better understanding of what we're learning, why we might want to start limiting what we're consuming and how to solidify those learnings into our lives. Check out the next registration event for ADHD reWired's Coaching and Accountability groups on Thursday 2/18 at 1:30 PM CT - coachingrewired.com Support me on Patreon Connect with me on: Facebook Twitter Instagram or ask me a question on my Contact Page Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/learningtoapply This Episode’s Top Tips When writing notes from books, podcasts or videos create summaries and write them down in your own words to solidify your learnings. Be discerning about the media that your taking in so that you don't overwhelm yourself with too many topics. We can only work on a few ideas at any given time, so you've got to be choosy about what you want to work on. Create a plan to follow through with what you're learning and use an accountability system to help you stay on track with your plan.

When it comes to understanding our ADHD it can be a bit of a minefield to navigate - one of our most pernicious problems is that often we're never really educated in what it means to have ADHD. And to top that off, what we learn from pop-culture just reinforces stereotypes that don't really reflect what ADHD is actually about. One of the most important ways to help manage our ADHD is to accept it, but that can be really hard to do if we don't actually have a good grasp of what having ADHD means. So in today's episode, we're going to be diving into the ADHD subtypes (or presentations as it's now being called) → there are the 3 kinds of ADHD that you might be diagnosed with, hyperactive-impulsive, inattentive, and combined. Today we're going to be exploring these presentations of ADHD and working on understanding how this can help define our own ADHD. Check out the next registration event for ADHD reWired's Coaching and Accountability groups on Thursday 2/18 at 1:30 PM CT - coachingrewired.com Support me on Patreon Connect with me on: Facebook Twitter Instagram or ask me a question on my Contact Page Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/subtypes This Episode’s Top Tips ADHD is a spectrum disorder, which means that it includes a wide list of conditions and severity which means that your ADHD is just that, yours. No one is going to have the exact same symptoms that you do, so don't worry about comparing yourself to others even if you do resonate with a lot of the stories you hear in the community. The three presentations of ADHD are Hyperactive-Impulsive, Inattentive, and Combined. We can roughly estimate that about 10% of diagnoses are hyperactive-impulsive, 30% are inattentive, and 60% are combined. I know this was basically in the first tip, but it bears repeating - we're all going to be ADHDing in our own way - make sure you're not going to struggle with all the same things that everyone else does so focus on what's going to make the biggest difference for you.

 All right everyone, we've got another listener Q&A episode coming your way today with questions looking at ways we can declutter our phones, re-establishing our routines when life is in flux, and how to recover after taking on a heavier workload. Be sure to checkout ADHD Diversified with MJ Support me on Patreon Connect with me on: Facebook Twitter Instagram or ask me a question on my Contact Page Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/buildingtouchstones This Episode’s Top Tips A lot of our digital clutter comes from stuff that we just build up over time - one of the easiest ways to reclaim some of that space is to go through and look for those Keepers, Maybes, and Rejects. It's easy to get rid of the keepers in the first step and then go through and decide on the maybes after we've cleared some stuff out. Once we've clear out that space it's also important to back our data up - and the name of the game while backing up that data is redundancy. I use Google's Cloud service for my first level and then also have an external hard drive that I keep more of my files. Routines can be really helpful for creating structure for our ADHD brains and so when our structure needs to change for things like school or work we need to look for touchstones in our schedule that we can keep the same and then build out our schedule from there. Remember that when we're trying to do new things that we're not always going to be 100% successful at implementing our strategies. That doesn't mean that we failed, it's often actually a sign that we're heading off in the right direction. We want to think about iteration and what went well and what didn't and then try and build on that stuff that did work for us.

Did you think I was all done with tabs last week... well I wasn't because there's actually a ton we can still talk about. Tabs are one of those small things in our life that can have a fairly outsized impact. Don't think so? Well, keep listening to find out why. Today we're going to be talking about how tabs can literally change the way our brain works, some ways we can cull having all those tabs open, and then talk a bit about those precursors to tabs... bookmarks. Support me on Patreon Connect with me on: Facebook Twitter Instagram or ask me a question on my Contact Page Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/tabstabstabs This Episode’s Top Tips Tabs can serve as an easy way to try to multitask - however, multitasking is just task switching. As we switch from task to task to task we're actually decreasing our overall productivity, not increasing it. Switching tabs can give a hit of dopamine, which only increases our desire to switch tabs more often. We can work on this by being mindful of what kind of tabs we leave open. A great way to limit tabs is to use services like Pocket or Instapaper that allow us to save articles we want to read for later. By storing them in an external system we remove the temptation to just switch to those articles in the middle of other tasks. Another alternative to just leaving tabs open is to use your bookmarks for sites that you either visit frequently or just sites that you know you're going to have to come back to eventually. What we don't want to do however is create bookmarks for sites that we just need to keep open temporarily.

A few weeks ago I asked around on Facebook the number of tabs that my friends had open at the time. Answers I got included: 500 on their phone and 20 on their computer, 50-60 across 5-6 windows, 4-5, 16, 3, 80 across 9 windows, 2, 4, 7,  45, 112 over 17 windows… and of course, at the time of my asking, I had 70 across 12 windows, although as I mentioned earlier I'm down to just a few right now - oftentimes these episodes are just as much about helping me as they are about helping you. Clearly, a lot of people use their browsers in a lot of different ways. Now one thing that was fairly apparent to me is that my more neurodiverse friends tended to be those people who had the most tabs open, although to be clear having too many tabs open isn't just a neurodiverse condition, anyone can easily find themselves overwhelmed by tabs. Today we're going to be looking at why we tend to have so many tabs open and then some of the ways we can work on reducing that number. Support me on Patreon Connect with me on: Facebook Twitter Instagram or ask me a question on my Contact Page Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/digitaldeclutter This Episode’s Top Tips We tend to trying and use tabs as an extension of our working memory, but as we open more and more tabs we stretch our mental resources and it can become overwhelming to figure out what we need to take care of. One of the reasons we open so many tabs is that we're afraid of missing something - be it an article to read, a video to watch, or something in your social feed, our brains tell us we want to see it all. Unfortunately, we're never going to see everything so we've got to work on being choosier about what we focus our attention on and be okay missing some things. We can install extensions into our browsers to help limit the number of tabs we have open, or install a tab manager to help us keep better track of everything we have open.

We all have an idea of what clutter is - it's just all that stuff. It's that frustrating feeling when you can't find something just because there are too many other things to look through. Clutter is disorder. While we typically see clutter as a physical thing - the junk on our desk. The pile in the corner of the room. The stuff spread out all over our counters - we can also experience its digital counterpart because we also amass a lot of stuff digitally. Today we're going to start our journey of working on our decluttering our digital lives - in this episode, I am going to be focusing on email and the files on our computers - next week we'll be continuing this series with an episode on all those tabs we have open in our browsers. I also considered doing an episode on our phones, but for now, I'm just going to direct you to Episodes 17 & 18, How to Make your Smart Phone ADHD Friendly - although I'm definitely going to have to update those episodes at some point. Support me on Patreon Connect with me on: Facebook Twitter Instagram or ask me a question on my Contact Page Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/digitaldeclutter This Episode's Top Tip Digital clutter is just all that stuff that builds upon our devices. It can have a real effect on our mental health and is something to be especially aware of with ADHD because it can create a lot of distractions. To help manage our email we want to work on processing our email only a few times a day and then making sure that when we do that we're not treating our email as a task manager → don't leave things in your email to do later, either put them in a real task manager or deal with them right then. Work on creating actual organization for your files → by keeping your files in places that are logical for your brain to find them you make accessing your files easier when you need them. Back up your files. Seriously, you don't want to lose something you've been working on because your computer crashed. There are a ton of services that make this process easier than ever now.

#Adulting Now there's something a lot of us can relate to - or relate to the idea that adulting is something we sometimes do, but being an adult is not something we are. ADHD can make us feel like we're not really adults. An adult would get their bills paid on time. An adult wouldn't let their house get this messy. An adult would be eating healthy meals for dinner every night. Now it would be a stretch to say that I feel like an adult all of the time, but I'm certainly getting there. A big part of the is probably having kids - it can be hard to not feel like the adult when you are literally the adult in the room. Also, there's the whole losing track of what going on with slang - I mean I know what straight fire is and but I still have to look up what a VSCO girl was and I'm only mildly sure I understand what being on fleek means. Although really that's more of a confirmation that I'm old rather than I'm being an adult. Regardless - today we're going to be exploring those feelings of not being an adult and how that interacts with our ADHD. Support me on Patreon Connect with me on: Facebook Twitter Instagram or ask me a question on my Contact Page Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/adulting This Episode’s Top Tips No one has everything in their life together all of the time - instead of focusing on what your missing try giving yourself credit for the things you are doing. ADHD can amplify these feelings of not being an adult because we're not neurotypical - there are absolutely things that are going to be harder for us to do, but we can do hard things. To help celebrate everything that you do throughout the day try creating a ta-done list → this is just a list of everything that you do throughout the day, from filling up the dishwasher to making a call to a friend to sending those emails you need to send. It's easy for us to forget what we've actually accomplished in a day and a ta-done list can help remind us that, yeah, we actually did somethings today. At some point all of us find ourselves doubting our ADHD, it's okay - ADHD is a spectrum and you're never going to have all the symptoms that everyone else has. Be reassured that you're not alone in this feeling and that even if you didn't really have ADHD, you're still doing the right things to help your brain.

When I was in school, I always wanted to be the kind of student who able to finish a project well before it needed to be turned in. I loved the idea that I could write a paper and still have a week left to polish it. Of course, I was never actually that student. For me to get started on a paper, I had to actually be able to feel that pressure from the deadline building up on me. That usually meant that I was mostly working on papers the night before - I'm sure a lot of you can relate. Since I was still able to get good grades with this strategy, I never really changed it - but I always wished that I wasn't always riding by the seat of my pants. Despite having a good track record, there were times that I missed those deadlines. And a funny thing about it was that I always wanted more time to write my papers. In my brain, if the deadline was pushed farther out I would have had more time to start, and yet experience has taught me that it really didn't matter how much time I was given to complete a paper. Given a week or month, I would still procrastinate until the last minute. When those deadlines were moving in on me, I was able to focus like no other. The time pressure allowed me to block out all those other distracting ideas vying for my attention. Today we're going to be exploring how we can use this time pressure to complete those nagging tasks that we otherwise might not get done and also those things we want to do but just can't seem to prioritize. We'll also be looking at better ways to set deadlines so that we can follow through with our intentions. Support me on Patreon Connect with me on: Facebook Twitter Instagram or ask me a question on my Contact Page Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/deadlines Today's Top Tips Time pressure from deadlines allows us to focus on the tasks in front of us and distill our work down to the most important parts. When setting deadlines we want to make sure that they are relevant to either us or the project. A great way to do this is through accountability and getting someone else to check in on your progress. Deadlines need to be realistic if we plan on meeting them. Time blindness can make it hard to know how long something is actually going to take, but if we break down our projects into chunks we can work on hitting milestones with mini-deadlines.

In this week's episode, I am going to be going over the book The ONE Thing by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan - I was introduced to this book by Eric Tivers through the ADHD reWired Coaching and Accountability groups. I can't remember if it was required reading or just strongly encouraged when I took the groups, but the messages in this book were key to getting through the coaching groups. My first reading of the book was on audiobook and since then I've listened to it three more and read the physical version of the book twice. The subtitle of the book is, "The surprisingly simple truth behind extraordinary results" - and as I've mentioned before, just because something is simple doesn't make it easy. Each reading has helped me understand the concepts a little bit better and I was always able to pick up a few new things. Today I'm going to be going over the "surprisingly simple truth" in the book and discussing how we can better apply it for our ADHD brains. Support me on Patreon Connect with me on: Facebook Twitter Instagram or ask me a question on my Contact Page Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/theonething Today's Top Tips Use the focusing question to help you determine your one thing - the focusing question again is: "What's the ONE Thing that you can do such by doing it that everything else is easier or unnecessary?" Change your thinking and value your time by saying "no" more and time blocking time for your ONE Thing You can have a ONE Thing for each of your life domains, but they should all be working toward a common purpose If you liked this episode I'd recommend you check out the book the ONE Thing and read through it on your own - I skimmed a lot of parts for this episode so I'm sure you could get a lot more out of it. You can find a link to the book on the show notes page.