How ADHD Makes Me Excel - And Fail - At Everything

ADHD versus Too Many Things

I am a grown woman and I am capable of many things. I am capable of producing compelling artwork. I am capable of managing multiple social media in order to promote that artwork. I am capable of preparing healthy balanced meals for myself and my family. I am also capable of coming up with and keeping up with a reasonable fitness schedule that will support my good health. I am capable of supporting my child in his difficulties with school and making sure I spend quality time with him. I am capable of keeping my household running reasonably smoothly. I am capable of remembering to water my plants. I am capable of having meaningful relationships with friends and finding time to spend with them.

What I am absolutely NOT capable of is doing all of these things at the same time.

I’m not entirely sure if this is an ADHD thing or a Living In Modern Society thing, but I find there are just too many things to juggle at any given time. I try to tackle one thing at a time and come up with systems and habits that will help it run more smoothly, but invariably I find that one thing shoves the other out - if I am on top of the meal preparation, I’m probably missing workouts. If I’m making progress on a new piece, I am probably skipping coffee with friends. If I’m making a lot of material for my social media, I’m probably behind on my drawing.

Two Fish - giclee print from a pencil drawing

One thing we ADHD enjoyers often hear is well-meaning advice such as ‘just make a calendar’, or ‘you just need to organize your time better’. Any ADHD person can tell you that this works not in the slightest. I have a calendar. I like my calendar. Most things are not in it because I forget to add them in. Most days I forget to even look at it.

The things that do tend to work are simplifications of life. What has been immensely helpful for me personally is popping a reminder in my phone for every appointment I have. I set them to alert me on the evening before the actual event, because I want to be able to plan out my day in advance, and minimize the possibility of catching myself by surprise with plans some other, previous me had made without my knowledge.

Another thing that has helped me a lot is pairing up things that don’t clash with each other. One big problem I have in my more productive periods is that I come to the end of the day and feel there has been nothing in that day that has fed my soul, so to speak. This pulls me to stay up too late and try to have a ‘moment to myself’, which, as we all know, roughly translates to ‘three hours of doomscrolling and falling asleep late enough to totally wreck the next day.’ So instead of that I try to line up listening material that can feed my brain and scratch that content itch while I am drawing or formatting files. Visual work doesn’t occupy the auditory processing section of the brain, so these two tasks happily coexist - a rare case of actual multitasking.

Conversely, I try to line up activities that contrast each other too. On my drawing days I spend endless hours glued to my chair, so sticking my workout right in the middle of that long drawing stint tends to help me a lot, but I have to force myself to do it, since my natural tendency is to just keep barreling on with whatever I’m stuck into at any given moment.

I firmly believe that ADHD people naturally follow the laws of Newtonian physics - just as an object will not change its motion unless a force acts on it, so too will an ADHD person not change their activity unless some outside force pushes them to do it. Thus we have a hard time both starting and stopping individual activities. If an alarm doesn’t do it for you, consider getting a family member to pop in and nudge you towards whatever you want to transition to next. Transitions are hard.

Blue Ringed Octopus - giclee print of pencil drawing, digitally colored

Finally, the thing that helps me absolutely the most is just accepting the fact that I will be failing at juggling all the different aspects of my life CONTINUOUSLY. I will keep dropping balls as I try to pick up others, that I have already previously dropped. I will have good stints of hitting all my workouts, having all the meals ready, making great progress with my work, and each of those stints will at some point end. But that’s ok, because when I get other things under control, I can just go back and pick it up again, without any guilt or shame. I’m not an inadequate person. I just have to handle an inadequate number of balls.

The fact is that we are asked to do too much, and then it is implied that it’s our own fault that we keep failing to do all the things. One thing that has helped me pick some tasks over others is the old ‘priority’ trick. You have probably heard of this before, but if you are not using it I heartily recommend it. When you’re trying to decide what you have time for in a certain day, rephrase it into ‘is this my priority for today?’

And this is not a way to push forward the ‘useful’, ‘practical’ tasks - it’s a way to help your brain reconsider what it wants to do. Instead of saying ‘I don’t have time to go out with my friend today because I have to finish my project’, I’ll say ‘Finishing my project is my priority for today, so I’ll do that instead of going out with my friend.’ That can sound correct, if the project is urgent and I want to get it done. Or it can sound less correct, if the project isn’t due yet, and I haven’t seen the friend in a few weeks. The priority at any given moment may be going for your workout, because you don’t want to fall out of rhythm, or catching up on your sleep, because you had a few restless nights. I find it a very helpful way to decide what I actually want to do when I can’t do all the things, instead of feeling like I’m being bullied by my own to-do list.

In the end, whatever we manage or don’t manage to get done today, we can always start again tomorrow. Which reminds me of that Samuel Beckett quote, one of my favorites of all time.

“Try Again. Fail Again. Fail Better.”