So today, I was eating my lunch, minding my own business, when I looked at the clock and [...]]]> So, I had a doctor’s appointment today. Since I always wind up being late getting to this particular doctor, I frequently mark my calendar so that the appointment reads as 15 minutes earlier than it actually is.

So today, I was eating my lunch, minding my own business, when I looked at the clock and realized it was 12:35. My appointment was for 1 pm. It takes 35 minutes to get to the doctor and deal with their parking ramp, which is so narrow that a Geo Prizm and Prius can barely pass each other in the traffic lane. So, I was already running 20 minutes late, and I still had to run around the house finding my shoes and stuff like that, so by the time I got out the door it was 12:45.

“Well,” I thought to myself, “at least I know I have an extra fifteen minutes padding my schedule!”

But no. When I arrived at my doctor’s office I was told that my appointment really, truly was for 1 pm.

Now, the weird thing about my clinic is that they actually stick to a schedule there so you know you won’t be there all day. That means that sometimes I screw myself out of my appointments. The bitch of it was that this appointment had to be made 2 months in advance, and my insurance would be changing at the end of the month (again), causing a whole new healthcare drama in my life.

Fortunately there was another practitioner with an opening at 2 pm this afternoon, so I wasn’t completely screwed.

But I clearly need to rethink this 15-minutes-early strategy.

One of the things on my to [...]]]> If you’ve ever wondered why the ADD adult in your life can’t seem to get things done in a timely manner, perhaps the following tale will shed some light.  The moral, for those of you who want the Cliff’s Notes version, is that sometimes it pays NOT to optimize.

One of the things on my to do list today was to order some slides online.  There’s a cool site called iPrintFromHome that does digital slides (and prints, and giclees, and stuff like that) if you upload your jpegs.  My art teacher is requiring us to show slides this term, so I had to make some, and since I have to show them next week, I needed to place the order today.

I was uploading about a dozen high-resolution jpegs (at least, I HOPE they were the high res versions … and that can take awhile for a computer to do.  I wouldn’t have ADHD if I tolerated boredom, you know, AT ALL, so I decided to do something else with the time — namely, start building a blogroll for this blog.  I congratulated myself on taking advantage of some dead time, and started building a blogroll.

Time passed, as I clicked through the blogs I like, looking for relevant content and links to other relevant content.  Then my browser crashed (Firefox doesn’t like it when you’re running 35 tabs in two windows, apparently) and I had to restart my computer to get it running again.  Only it didn’t start running again; it rebooted and instantly froze.  I tried closing the windows several times, and eventually I guess it thawed enough to actually quit … and then I restarted my browser, again.

By that time my husband was online, and we got to discussing his upcoming job change, which reminded me that since his new job will require him to take a pay cut, I’ll need to hustle for a day job to make ends meet.  That, in turn, reminded me I should really work on my resume.  So I did that for awhile.  After saying that I possess Excellent Written and Oral Communication Skills (doesn’t everyone say that?) I went looking for a different word to use to describe my “visual and artistic skills” … and opened thesaurus.com in a new tab … and realized that I was supposed to have my slides done three hours ago.

I got my pictures uploaded and the slides ordered.  I looked up when I can expect my order to arrive.  I found out that they do same day shipping if you place your order by 6 pm Eastern.  If I’d just patiently waited while my jpegs loaded the slides would have shipped today.  I hope that that it won’t cost me too much time to have them ship tomorrow, but I’ve been burned by FedEx Ground before.

I’ve been hanging out on the Women with ADHD Ning, and recently one of the members mentioned that she’d never really fit in with “the girls”.  Several more of members chimed in about how they’d never felt “feminine”.  It seems that a lot of women with ADD are just no good with the girly stuff.

It’s [...]]]>

I’ve been hanging out on the Women with ADHD Ning, and recently one of the members mentioned that she’d never really fit in with “the girls”.  Several more of members chimed in about how they’d never felt “feminine”.  It seems that a lot of women with ADD are just no good with the girly stuff.

It’s not surprising, really.  A femme has to be organized.  She needs to get her hair cut regularly, and she needs to leave time to style it every morning, and then she needs to do her make-up.  She needs to shop for coordinated, fashionable, flattering outfits, which can mean buying more bras than I’ve ever seen in one place to go with different necklines and silhouettes.  Then she has to get up in the morning early enough to put all of this together.   If you have ADD, you’re lucky to be heading off to work with matching shoes.  We need to keep it simple just to stay sane.

For instance, take my wardrobe (please!).  Clothes are one of the areas of my life that I streamline for time-management purposes.  I don’t spend a ton of time shopping or dressing.  To this end, my couture consists of five t-shirts and a single pair of jeans that are all way too big.  But what the heck, I have a belt, which means my pants stay up.   It’s all good.

Most of the time, this works pretty well for me … except that I’m going to France next month, and people there dress up a little more, and I don’t want to stick out like the Ugly American.  On a more practical level, I need some clothes that dry quickly, and my giant pair of jeans is not that.

And that means it’s time to shop for Pants.  The dreaded, dreaded pants.

Allow me to digress into an anecdote.  I used to work for a major outdoor retailer.  Many of the women who shopped with us were marathoners, triathletes, and century cyclists.  What I’m getting at here is that they are not your stereotypical chubby Americans.  They are not marshmallows.  They are athletes in prime physical condition.

And yet, every single woman who shopped at the store where I worked would come out of the dressing room with a dozen pairs of pants.  “I’m really sorry”, she’d say as she handed them to me. “I don’t want to make you restock all these, it’s just that none of them fit.  I’m sorry.  I must be a mutant or something”.

At the time, I was a good sixty pounds overweight, and pants shopping was a nightmare.  I assumed that it was because I was fat; for some reason, a lot of stores — my employer included — seem to assume that fat people don’t exercise or go outdoors.  By their standards, I was the mutant.  Right?

But if that were true, why were all these fit, athletic women struggling to fit into pants?

The answer is that Pants are Evil.

Pants, you see, don’t fit any woman, at all ever.  At least, not until her spirit has been broken by trying on the 30th pair in four hours, and even then, only if she’s lucky.  It has nothing to do with how fat or thin a woman is.  It has to do with the fact that she’s a woman who dares to shop for Pants.

Back then, I was a size 20.  When I started working at that store, nothing we sold off the rack fit me (I had to go to the website for extended sizes, and even then it was a maybe).  Shopping for pants was a miserable, horrible experience that made me feel like a short, fat blob of blobbiness.  I was sure that if I could get into shape, lose some weight, everything would be different.

Now that I’ve gotten into shape, shopping for pants is a miserable, horrible experience that makes me feel like a short, fat blob of blobbiness.  I’m a size 8, or 10, or 12, depending on who’s asking.  There’s actually one retailer’s size chart where I’m an 8 in the hips, a 10 in the waist, and a 12 in the bust — except of course that size 12 shirts haven’t fit me in six months.  Except that one time, when it did.  And I recently had to return a size 8 I ordered because it was too big.   Of course, it should go without saying that whatever pants I get are 5 inches too long.

Talking to those athletic women who came out of our fitting rooms with armsfull of pants should’ve given me a clue.

Being on time has always been a struggle for me, and it’s an area where I’ve made great strides in recent years.  I’m still not perfect, but I used to be late for absolutely [...]]]> I’ve been back from my holiday trip for two weeks now, and since then I’ve managed to be on time exactly once.

Being on time has always been a struggle for me, and it’s an area where I’ve made great strides in recent years.  I’m still not perfect, but I used to be late for absolutely everything all the time.  It got to the point where my friends would just plan on seeing me half an hour after we were supposed to meet up.

Over the last few years, I’ve managed to get better at it, but I couldn’t quite tell you how — possibly this has something to do with why things have gotten chaotic over the past few weeks.  The trip caused a disruption, and then being sick caused another disruption, and I just lost my grip on my routine.

Routine is a scary word for a lot of adults with ADD.  By its very definition it threatens the spontenaity we ADD types love and excel at.  “Routine” conjures up bad memories of school, or the job we hate, or the structure that was imposed upon us by others — often, we were told, because we are too careless or scatterbrained to manage our own schedules.  Like “organized” or “neat” or “schedule”, it’s a word that makes us feel like screw-ups.

It took a long time for me to even want a routine, let alone to know how to build one, but starting last summer I began to create a schedule for myself.  One thing that helped, of course, is that it was my schedule; it wasn’t something imposed on me as a punishment for handing in my assignments late, or bring home a bad report card.  The other thing that helped was changing the way I think about routine.

You see, I realized that routine, far from being an inherently boring monotony, is actually a way to streamline the boring stuff and give myself more time for what I enjoy.  If I know that I clean my kitchen from 1:30 to 2:30 on Wednesdays, and I know what order in which I do each part of that task, I don’t have to waste time thinking about how to clean my kitchen.  I don’t have to waste time wondering how long it will take.  I don’t have to set aside all afternoon and evening on Friday because company is coming on Saturday and the entire house is a disaster.

Likewise, if I know that I get the same items at the grocery store every week, I can have a copy of that list on my cell phone.  My list has items to buy every week, like bread, and another section for things to check on every week, like olive oil.  I don’t have to waste time each week making up a brand new grocery list.  Furthermore, if my list takes the store lay-out into account, I don’t have to wander around backtracking or looking for items on my list.  I start with the bread, then the dairy, and so on.  I can be in and out of the grocery store in under 20 minutes.

My routine leaves me more time to be spontaneous.  If I want to make an unplanned stop on the way home from the store — no problem, I have the time.  If I want to go out with friends on Friday night — no problem, the house is clean.  The time that I used to spend writing grocery lists and doing emergency cleaning is time that I can now spend making art, blogging, or just watching TV.

I guess now I just need a routine for leaving the house in the morning.

Well, my perfectionism was not in vain, because I won the contest!  Yay!  You can check out my lens here.

Why tabby cats?

Well, a Squidoo community that I’m a part of has been having weekly contests, and last week’s was to write a lens for the “animals and nature” category.  I figured this would be good for me; all of my lenses to date have been [...]]]> This weekend I wrote a Squidoo lens about tabby cats.

Why tabby cats?

Well, a Squidoo community that I’m a part of has been having weekly contests, and last week’s was to write a lens for the “animals and nature” category.  I figured this would be good for me; all of my lenses to date have been about my various cognitive issues, and some of them have been pretty heavy.  I chose “tabby cats” as my topic for two reasons: one, I have two tabby cats; and number two, I am such a nerd that I have actually phenotyped my cats.

That’s right, I was reading about cat genetics several years ago on the internet, and armed with the information I found about dominant and recessive alleles, I figured out which genes both of my cats express.  I did this for fun.

Anyway, I figured that I’d be able to write this lens in my sleep.  But then I decided that I wanted to illustrate the lens with photos of my actual cats.  So I had to take pictures of them, and then download them, and then crop them, and then upload them, and then write blurbs about what they illustrated …

And in short, the lens took me twenty #%*@ing hours.  Gah.  Actually, a lot of my lenses, and my blog entries, and anything else I write, tends to take me way longer than I feel it should.  You may have noticed that I can’t write a blog entry without writing an essay.

I know I’d be more productive if I could let it go sometimes.  One of my MFA profs liked to tell a story about a pottery class in which half the students were told that they’d be graded on the quality of one perfect pot, so they spent the entire term on that one pot.  The other half of the class was told they’d be graded on the number of pots they produced; the quality of the pieces didn’t matter.  Those students spent the term madly making pots, as many as they could.

Guess which group produced the best ceramics?

If you know anything about the creative process, you won’t be surprised to learn that it was the second group.  They felt free to experiment and make mistakes, because the only thing that mattered was that they made as many pots as they could.  They felt free, and it showed in their work.

What does this have to do with ADD and organization?  Well, I’ve been reading a lot about time management lately, and it turns out that perfectionism is a common ADD trait. It’s also a huge drain on productivity.  It certainly tell you that it messes with my life.  I don’t update my blogs as often as I would like, because I feel like I have to say something profound, and I feel obligated to add graphics (that takes quite a bit of time, actually).

So I am hereby resolving to write my blog posts without worrying how “good” they are.  It’s a blog, dammit, not a New Yorker article or a PhD thesis.  Some posts will be extensive and detailed.  Others, well, they’ll just be blog posts.

For example, [...]]]> Last week I wrote about making up a gmail calendar schedule, but as you’ve probably already learned, it isn’t enough to just get yourself a gmail account and open up the calendar feature.  You have to create a schedule, and then you have to notate it in a way that makes sense to you.

For example, here is my gmail calendar:

My gmail calendar

At the beginning of the summer, I realized that in spite of all the work I’d put into organizing my space, it was getting cluttered and dirty because I wasn’t maintaining it. There are some people in this world who will notice that their space is spawning giant dust bunnies, realize they need to clean, and make time to do it.

I am not one of these people.

I realized that I’d been using my gmail calendar for awhile, and I liked a lot of things about it — it gave me my schedule in nice blocks of color, and I had a number of options to set up reminders of appointments. So why not create a few blocks of time on my schedule called and errands things like that?

Here’s the google document version of the schedule:

Nice and vague.

On the first day that I got a chore reminder, I stood in the kitchen and went, “uhhhhhmmm …”. I knew I was supposed to be doing chores or errands or tasks or … something. I’d gotten a text message that said so. But what was I actually supposed to DO?

After staring at the wall for awhile, I got distracted and wandered away.

I was working with an ADD coach at the time, so at my next meeting with her we talked about my schedule. I told her that I felt overwhelmed by housework when confronted with a vague schedule segment called “chores, errands and tasks”. I knew there was stuff needing to be done, but I was damned if I knew what it was.  I honestly don’t know what people do when they clean.

My coach helped me to make a list of housework that needed to be done on a daily basis, a weekly basis, a monthly basis, and a quarterly basis:

A bit more specific

We eliminated “errands” from that part of the schedule, because they varied too much to fit neatly into one hour chunks. Then I went home and decided what chores to do on what days:

Monday: vacuum kitchen area, mop food prep area, clean microwave

Tuesday: vacuum main room, clean bathroom, put away clean laundry

Friday: vacuum bedroom, wash bedsheets, put away clean laundry

My Monday chore calendar block looks like this:

Monday Blues

I get that text in my SMS reminder, my pop-up reminder, and my e-mail reminder if I chose to have one. Now, instead of getting a text that tells me to do “chores”, which sends my brain off into outer space, I get a text that tells me exactly which chores to do.