I feel stressed and overwhelmed with the constant amount of stuff I have to do all the time. There’s work, there’s family, there’s chores, there’s personal finances, there’s my health, there’s personal relations, there’s a thousand little things that screams for my attention. Somewhere in there there’s also the desire to one day relax and maybe do something because I want to do it instead of it being something I have to do.
There’s just so much and the pile of tasks keeps growing and growing. I don’t have the time and energy to do half of what I feel I’m supposed to do and almost no time and energy to do what I have to do. I’m exhausted and stressed and I feel guilty all the time for letting people down.
I feel like I never have the time to do things right or to handle the problems that are draining my time and energy. Instead I’m constantly running around and putting out fires. If I were to put enough time and effort into actually improving some of the things that are stressing me it would mean I would have to let go somewhere else and suffer the ramifications.
I was diagnosed with ADHD a few years back. I got meds and they have improved things a lot but nobody helped me figure out how to organise daily life with ADHD. I don’t even know if time management would help, I don’t waste my time, I get things done, I just never get enough things done. And besides, what good is a schedule if there’s constantly some external factor demanding a change of plans?
How do you manage this?
ADHD is such a slippery condition to work with because of how difficult it is to establish and maintain routines/habits.
I’m not going to condenscend to tell you that you just have to change your thinking to an abundance mindset or that buying a planner is going to fix things but I can guarantee you that you’ve seen the difference between reactive and responsive action (imo you see this especially in regards to the workplace and in parenting). Unfortunately this concept has the stink of business student all over it so hold your nose, we’re diving in!
Being reactive is where you respond immediately to a situation without forethought or planning. This is the “crisis mode” approach.
Being responsive is where you take the time to consider the situation, check your assumptions, seek further info, develop a strategy, gather the necessary resources and then you act on it. The angle I’m going to take in this reply is that when you find yourself in a reactive mode, this is typically a symptom of living in a way that isn’t optimised to accommodate your needs.
I get exactly what you’re talking about in your post and I know all to well the feeling of being in an absolute tailspin because the ostensible solution to the kind of problem you have described is to have more energy, to do more planning and organising, to put in extra effort to maintain habits and routines etc. when the problem itself is the lack of time and energy and executive function.
Most advice on this subject has the same energy as those tone-deaf newspaper pieces about how it’s actually possible to buy your own home at the age of 21 or how to have a comfortable retirement; “Just put aside $50k a year into stable investments that mature!”, “Just live at home with your parents for 3 years to save up for a deposit and get them to cover the leftover 75% of the deposit so you can secure a mortgage!!” 🙄
But this is what I’d do:
Do an audit of where you spend your time and energy
“Investing” your time and energy
Target the easiest of the low-hanging fruit
Identify friction points
Look for easy alternatives
Avoid “task stacking”
Be gentle with yourself and aim for a 60% success rate
Do an audit of where you spend your time and energy
So this sounds huge but it’s really not. It can be as simple as thinking through how things went at the end of the day. You might want to write stuff down if it will help you stay on track. But don’t turn it into a huge thing, please. And don’t itemise every activity or every 15 minutes either.
You basically just want to get a bird’s eye view of where your time and energy is being used up. Don’t even think about examining your downtime in this - robbing yourself of this time is only going to drain your battery faster and you’ll end up burning out.
Instead, see if there’s anything that you can do to trim down wasted time or energy. If you buy a coffee every morning on the way to work, a simple change is to make coffee at home. This will save you driving/walking time and while you’re waiting for your coffee to brew you can spend a couple of minutes doing something else like catching up on the dishes, getting lost in that task, and then returning to your coffee to discover that it’s already gone cold (I kid, but we all know this is real).
Or maybe you could do prep some cold brew at the start of the week instead. Or maybe it’s not about the coffee for you but it’s just about the caffeine and you might consider buying caffeine tablets to make things even quicker.
You get the picture, I’m sure. Basically you just want to spot small opportunities where you are losing time and come up with a viable alternative which will afford you a few extra minutes here and there.
This applies similarly to energy. If I know that three times a week I go racing around the house in a panic trying to find my wallet and keys and stuff, and doing this burns through a ton of energy needlessly and, by being in a panic and running late, it sets me up for a miserable day where I’ll get home and fall into heap due to exhaustion instead of maybe tackling a task or two that evening.
Solution?
Create a landing strip for all the things that I take with me when I leave the house. Make this as low-impact on your executive function as you need. I’m talking like using separate bowls for each item so you can tell when one is missing, going wild with a label maker, creating what amounts to an aesthetically pleasing shadow board so you literally put your wallet on the place where there’s an image of a wallet etc.
Whatever it is, make it super streamlined and work on accomodating your needs rather than putting effort into you personally trying to accommodate a system that is unsuitable.
“Investing” your time and energy
We goin full business school today!! (Ugh)
But try to think about this stuff from the perspective of investing time and energy into your lifestyle to reap dividends. I’m justifying this because there’s no exploitation or alienation or speculation involved in this type of investment.
So if it takes me 15 minutes to set up a landing strip then that’s gonna pay off in about a week or two, purely based on saving me from wasting time running around the house tearing everything apart. That’s a good investment.
Use this small, positive change and try to parlay that into another “investment” where you can create a system or a strategy to manage another time/energy suck.
Continue on with incremental adjustments until you find yourself less snowed in.
Target the easiest of the low-hanging fruit
The morning coffee -> caffeine tablets idea above is a perfect example of low-hanging fruit. I don’t have to do anything but buy caffeine tablets and find a spot for them and I might be saving myself 15 or 20 minutes each day.
Always go for the low-hanging fruit because 5 minutes here and 15 there can add up to a lot, and the same can be said for conserving one spoon here and another two there.
Leave the bigger stuff for when you have already freed up enough time and energy that you can tackle them.
Identify friction points
I’ve already described a friction point above with the landing strip as a solution.
These are points in your life where it just saps your energy, your motivation, your momentum etc.
One good example here is doing the dishes. If you’re dealing with a rolling crisis of the sink overflowing with dirty dishes, that’s a friction point.
You can’t just jump in and start getting the gratification from making progress on the task - first you probably have to scrape food off of plates, empty the dishes out of the sink, fill the sink with water… and all of this might be 10 or 15 minutes or longer of doing the stuff around the task before you can even get started on the task itself.
That’s a big time commitment and it’s going to sap your motivation. You probably have the energy to deal with this when you don’t have the time and you probably have the time to deal with this when you don’t have the energy. It can be a feel like it’s a really intractable problem.
Solution?
I think this is Hawaiian-style dish washing but what you do is you get a small, shallow bowl or plastic container and fill it with very soapy water. Apply the soapy water to your dishcloth or whatever you use and then wipe the dish down with the soap, rinse, and set aside to drain as per usual.
You can also get dishwashing spray and do virtually the same thing. (Pro-tip: this is usually just a solution of water, dishwashing liquid, and maybe a bit of washing soda or baking soda if you have some on hand - if you have an empty spray bottle, you don’t even need to buy shit in order to make your own)
The benefit of this is that you don’t need to empty the sink and commit to 30-45 mins of washing dishes. You don’t need to commit to anything - you could do 2 or 3 dishes while you’re waiting for the microwave to reheat your coffee that went cold because you forgot about it and then stop doing the dishes as soon as your coffee is hot. You get momentum and gratification virtually instantly.
Obviously this is just one example of a friction point. You probably have quite a few but of course it’s impossible to list them and provide solutions without knowing your situation and your needs directly.
Look for easy alternatives
The caffeine tablets are one example here but if you’re really struggling with the dishes then just get some disposable plates and cutlery just use them for a while until you’re on top of things again. Or buy some ready meals so you can skip on making dinner. That sort of thing.
Avoid “task stacking”
This one is a bit more controversial so take it or leave it but neurodivergent people often get tangled up in stacking tasks one on top of the other until you have one giant snowball of tasks that immediately zaps all of your executive function.
Neurotypical people tend to advocate for stacking tasks as a productivity hack but I’m unconvinced that it’s suitable advice for a lot of neurodivergent people, especially outside of limited applications.
If your task is to do the dishes but first you have to scrape off the food from the dishes but first you have to empty the bin but first you should really do something about that shrub you have to squeeze past which scratches you up every time you move the bins and then there’s the dog shit in the yard that needs to be picked up… suddenly you’re scattering your focus across a dozen different tasks and you’re probably exhausted before you even get started.
Obviously there will be tasks that will necessarily bring other tasks along with them, that’s normal. But I’d at least try to avoid consciously adding to task stacks and see if that helps with the drain on your executive function.
Be gentle with yourself and aim for a 60% success rate
You are tired. You are overwhelmed. Beating yourself up for “failing” to put your wallet and keys back on the landing strip is a perfect way to crush your motivation and to discourage habit-formation.
If you put your stuff where it belongs on your landing strip 60% of the time then that’s infinitely better than 0% of the time and, all things being equal, you’re going to cut down on those panic moments where you can’t find your shit by nearly ⅔rds. That’s not a defeat, that’s a victory.
If 60% is too much then drop the bar lower - nobody is keeping score. The point is to make incremental improvements and that means that even a 20% hit rate is a big deal.
Be gentle with yourself. Celebrate your wins, however small. I like to intentionally foster Stockholm Syndrome with the systems that I have in place - I will consciously dwell on the fact that I’m grateful to my past self for setting up that landing strip and for putting things in their place last night because this morning, when I woke up late, I managed to rush out the door with everything I needed and I caught the bus just in time, thus saving my day from being a disaster. I will also dwell on what it was like in the past before the system or what my morning/day would have looked like without the system. This helps me to reinforce to myself why I bother with the system in the first place.
So the spirit of this entire comment is to encourage you to make your life more accessible to you and to create systems that will help you shift from being reactive (“Shit, where the hell did I leave my keys!?”) and into being responsive because a lot of the time rushing around and doing things in crisis mode causes fallout elsewhere in your life and you can end up in a spiral of counterproductivity. But imo the trick is to make your life work better for you which will naturally bring about a change in mindset gradually rather than trying to change your mindset or pushing yourself to make a massive, unsustainable overhaul to your habits.
I hope some of this is useful!
(Btw, I’ve heard lots of reports that the book How To Keep House While Drowning by KC Davis is a really good book especially for neurodivergent people. I haven’t read it yet but I suspect that there will be strategies in there which you could apply to other domains of your life outside of just cleaning.)