Post by ozadd on Mar 30, 2024 17:37:52 GMT
1. How exasperated to I need to get before I can discover a way to deal with this? I’ve stopped doing a task this afternoon and started writing this as a release. I’d be thrilled if anyone has something beneficial to comment. Apologies for the ridiculous length – it's what I do. I've numbered the paragraphs in a vain attempt to make it readable()
2. I’m 75, quite bright, fairly creative, not well educated but a lot of life-skills. Late-diagnosed with ADHD. Ten years on very high dose atomoxetine (120mg) - which doesn’t seem to have achieved a lot for me beyond a mild amount of being a little calmer. Currently taken off atomoxetine due to manganing coronary issues.
3. I have been very disorganised for my entire life but always had an awareness of the problem - along with a naively optimistic view that there must be a way I could overcome the issue. This optimism has generally met with failure and still does.
4. I am involved in a small research project (with one friend) which is recovering the story of our lives in care as children (generally a very positive experience). This is an undertaking which, based on my personal history, is ridiculous to attempt: I rarely, ever complete tasks.
5. There are two factors that lead me to keep going. One is the emotional connection with the story - the experience for many of our group is that the place we lived in became our surrogate home - it is pivotal to my life’s experiences. The loss of the story means the loss of our identity. I must not let this happen.
6. The second factor is my pal who does this project with me. Because he is involved, I cannot let him down. (So, it’s implicit that if I was doing this by myself, it would probably never get done.)
7. This doesn’t mean I get stuff done any better - it just means that I keep going and don’t give up, because it’s not an option. However, it is exhausting and, sometimes, utterly dispiriting. I still take too long to do things and I still create a mess and I still forget things and I still end up with piles of crap on my desk, on the floor and in the spare bedroom. I am an exasperation to my pal (although he recognises my dysfunction). But it’s no good saying “Why doesn’t he do some of it?”
8. The trouble is, I’m the one with the limited IT skills who has built up the project material - on my computer. My pal struggles with IT, which I understand. Also I have not set the project up in a way that effectively allows us to easily share the material. (For example we use Dropbox but, a) I haven’t organised it well and b) my pal’s Dropbox account is so full and he can’t get any more into it. We’ve looked at it together, without finding a solution.
9. It’s important to mention here that paying for others to get the work done isn’t an option. We got a small lottery grant ten years ago to get our project started but that money is long gone. I can be confidently brazen at times and have asked people with specialist skills to donate help. We have been incredibly fortunate with people’s generosity in specific areas - but there’s a limit to that.
10. So all this preliminary guff is to ask how the hell do I get around the same problem that occurs, day after day, year after year, decade after decade?
11. Now it’s become an issue, towards the end of my life where I’m trying to achieve something for my family and for my care-home ‘siblings’ and their families. I’ve tried to explain the problem here by describing just one issue, below - it’s reflective of almost every single thing that I attempt to do – and fail at.
12. I should say that I have the ability to articulate ‘how to do things’. I’ve been on some seminars to help with ADHD and have got really involved in participating. I have a background as a military instructor and can present ideas and techniques credibly. The trouble is that ‘impostor syndrome’ creeps in - I can talk the talk but, when it comes to walking, I tend to fall over.
13. Here's the description:
a) I have a project webmail which contains a few thousand emails. It’s been going for about 11 years.
b) All the mail comes into the Inbox. My replies, along with other emails that I initiate are automatically stored in the Sent box.
c) Over the years, at different moments, I’ve created my own additional mailboxes to sort and store correspondence. Some of these mailboxes have sub-boxes for more specific sorting.
d) Some of these boxes are not organised in the best way – for example I will occasionally discover that I would have been better off using different titles. That doesn’t mean that they actually get changed.
e) The Inbox currently holds about 1,130 messages - the Sent box has over 1,400 messages. Many of these messages are important and worth keeping (plus many are connected to each other) but quite a few could easily be chucked. The ones to be kept would clearly be better off in organised folders (I think!).
f) When I attempt to undertake a part of this task, I become quickly overwhelmed. I can see the point of doing just a part at a time and gradually hack away at it (swiss cheese method!). For some reason, that rarely works for me and I don’t understand it.
g) I will usually start by creating a simple process - say, move all messages related to the same topic into their correct folder. This sounds eminently sensible, straightforward and organised.
h) However, I will easily become distracted by a “problem” - for example, I might be dealing with a message related to a particular subject, when I see that it may be connected to another topic. Am I now creating a problem by placing the message in the nominated folder and not moving to the other locations as well? If I don’t do it now, it will get forgotten! This becomes an “issue”: deal with it now or later?
i) RULE I HAVE DISCOVERED: IF I CAN’T SEE SOMETHING, IT DOESN’T EXIST !
j) For me to remember something, it has to be in front of me. And, of course, once I apply that to a lot of ’somethings’ I end up with a visual overwhelm, with the same results.
k) So do I now create a new sub-folder - and does that mean there will be other messages that will need to go into this sub-folder? This actually becomes a distraction from the basic (simple?) task I had planned. Going off at a tangent will mean difficulty getting back on track.
l) Surely I should just make a note that I need to attend to this later, after I’ve completed the actual task at hand! But where do I place this note?
m) I have a range of apps, dozens of mind maps, outliner notes, sheets of paper, notebooks, a white board, sticky notes and a desktop with dozens of folders, each containing a myriad documents. - literally thousands of pieces of information (some useful, some utterly useless).
n) I’m aware that some types of data-recording systems work better for different types of records - but the one consistent thing for me is that I rarely stick to any system at all. I tend to fluctuate between them - and the data frequently gets ‘lost’.
Re-reading these notes feels quite disheartening. It feels that I don’t have the psychological capacity to deal with the problem. The confusing bit is that I feel that I cannot give up on trying - even though that feels almost pointless at times. The awful part of that is, if I give up, what else is there? That is the scary part.
2. I’m 75, quite bright, fairly creative, not well educated but a lot of life-skills. Late-diagnosed with ADHD. Ten years on very high dose atomoxetine (120mg) - which doesn’t seem to have achieved a lot for me beyond a mild amount of being a little calmer. Currently taken off atomoxetine due to manganing coronary issues.
3. I have been very disorganised for my entire life but always had an awareness of the problem - along with a naively optimistic view that there must be a way I could overcome the issue. This optimism has generally met with failure and still does.
4. I am involved in a small research project (with one friend) which is recovering the story of our lives in care as children (generally a very positive experience). This is an undertaking which, based on my personal history, is ridiculous to attempt: I rarely, ever complete tasks.
5. There are two factors that lead me to keep going. One is the emotional connection with the story - the experience for many of our group is that the place we lived in became our surrogate home - it is pivotal to my life’s experiences. The loss of the story means the loss of our identity. I must not let this happen.
6. The second factor is my pal who does this project with me. Because he is involved, I cannot let him down. (So, it’s implicit that if I was doing this by myself, it would probably never get done.)
7. This doesn’t mean I get stuff done any better - it just means that I keep going and don’t give up, because it’s not an option. However, it is exhausting and, sometimes, utterly dispiriting. I still take too long to do things and I still create a mess and I still forget things and I still end up with piles of crap on my desk, on the floor and in the spare bedroom. I am an exasperation to my pal (although he recognises my dysfunction). But it’s no good saying “Why doesn’t he do some of it?”
8. The trouble is, I’m the one with the limited IT skills who has built up the project material - on my computer. My pal struggles with IT, which I understand. Also I have not set the project up in a way that effectively allows us to easily share the material. (For example we use Dropbox but, a) I haven’t organised it well and b) my pal’s Dropbox account is so full and he can’t get any more into it. We’ve looked at it together, without finding a solution.
9. It’s important to mention here that paying for others to get the work done isn’t an option. We got a small lottery grant ten years ago to get our project started but that money is long gone. I can be confidently brazen at times and have asked people with specialist skills to donate help. We have been incredibly fortunate with people’s generosity in specific areas - but there’s a limit to that.
10. So all this preliminary guff is to ask how the hell do I get around the same problem that occurs, day after day, year after year, decade after decade?
11. Now it’s become an issue, towards the end of my life where I’m trying to achieve something for my family and for my care-home ‘siblings’ and their families. I’ve tried to explain the problem here by describing just one issue, below - it’s reflective of almost every single thing that I attempt to do – and fail at.
12. I should say that I have the ability to articulate ‘how to do things’. I’ve been on some seminars to help with ADHD and have got really involved in participating. I have a background as a military instructor and can present ideas and techniques credibly. The trouble is that ‘impostor syndrome’ creeps in - I can talk the talk but, when it comes to walking, I tend to fall over.
13. Here's the description:
a) I have a project webmail which contains a few thousand emails. It’s been going for about 11 years.
b) All the mail comes into the Inbox. My replies, along with other emails that I initiate are automatically stored in the Sent box.
c) Over the years, at different moments, I’ve created my own additional mailboxes to sort and store correspondence. Some of these mailboxes have sub-boxes for more specific sorting.
d) Some of these boxes are not organised in the best way – for example I will occasionally discover that I would have been better off using different titles. That doesn’t mean that they actually get changed.
e) The Inbox currently holds about 1,130 messages - the Sent box has over 1,400 messages. Many of these messages are important and worth keeping (plus many are connected to each other) but quite a few could easily be chucked. The ones to be kept would clearly be better off in organised folders (I think!).
f) When I attempt to undertake a part of this task, I become quickly overwhelmed. I can see the point of doing just a part at a time and gradually hack away at it (swiss cheese method!). For some reason, that rarely works for me and I don’t understand it.
g) I will usually start by creating a simple process - say, move all messages related to the same topic into their correct folder. This sounds eminently sensible, straightforward and organised.
h) However, I will easily become distracted by a “problem” - for example, I might be dealing with a message related to a particular subject, when I see that it may be connected to another topic. Am I now creating a problem by placing the message in the nominated folder and not moving to the other locations as well? If I don’t do it now, it will get forgotten! This becomes an “issue”: deal with it now or later?
i) RULE I HAVE DISCOVERED: IF I CAN’T SEE SOMETHING, IT DOESN’T EXIST !
j) For me to remember something, it has to be in front of me. And, of course, once I apply that to a lot of ’somethings’ I end up with a visual overwhelm, with the same results.
k) So do I now create a new sub-folder - and does that mean there will be other messages that will need to go into this sub-folder? This actually becomes a distraction from the basic (simple?) task I had planned. Going off at a tangent will mean difficulty getting back on track.
l) Surely I should just make a note that I need to attend to this later, after I’ve completed the actual task at hand! But where do I place this note?
m) I have a range of apps, dozens of mind maps, outliner notes, sheets of paper, notebooks, a white board, sticky notes and a desktop with dozens of folders, each containing a myriad documents. - literally thousands of pieces of information (some useful, some utterly useless).
n) I’m aware that some types of data-recording systems work better for different types of records - but the one consistent thing for me is that I rarely stick to any system at all. I tend to fluctuate between them - and the data frequently gets ‘lost’.
Re-reading these notes feels quite disheartening. It feels that I don’t have the psychological capacity to deal with the problem. The confusing bit is that I feel that I cannot give up on trying - even though that feels almost pointless at times. The awful part of that is, if I give up, what else is there? That is the scary part.