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?
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.)