Skip to main content

Irony or Conspiracy? Tips, Tricks for the ADHD Procrastinator

I bought the time management book "Getting Things Done", read a couple of chapters with difficulty and put it down. It stayed down.

If you have problems following projects through, then the last thing you're gonna finish is a book about how to follow projects through. Right?

Not sure if the book is unintentionally ironic or an evil conspiracy against the self-esteem of practiced procrastinators.

I'm a procrastinator and I want my $15 back to buy some iPhone games.

Procrastination Tips and Tricks:
1. Sleep in.
2. Start the book "Getting Things Done." This book could be the answer to all problems.
3. A text comes in. Reply to it and to all other texts you have not answered because you are always so busy. Do the same for email and Facebook.
4. Comment on Facebook Posts. After all, they say relationships are the key to happiness.
4. Play 2048 on cell phone. One game of 30 minutes will seem like 2 seconds. After 6 games, you can already get to wondering what the hell you did with your day.
5. Stop this nonsense and do something else.
5. First, one quick round of "Scrabble with Friends"
6. Look online for procrastination tips and ideas.
7. Discover that procrastinators should start by throwing away all the clothes they have not worn in twelve months. Wonder why they say "twelve months" instead of "a year."
8. Try on all your clothes, decide you should start wearing the ones you forgot about, and leave them all in a pile to pick up after:
9. Your nap. You need energy for your afternoon of procrastination.
10. Clean a place in your house no one ever sees with a q-tip for several hours until it's sparkling - e.g. between the grooves of the dishwasher door. Feel very accomplished for the day and better about leaving the clutter where it is for another day.
11. Throw away all your socks. Buy some new ones. Not in that order unless it's flip flop weather for at least six months. Then again, if you don't do it in that order, you will probably never throw away your socks. Just throw away all your socks.
12. Explain to somebody else what you did with your day.
13. Flagulate (whip) yourself as many times as your age.
14. Go to bed. Tomorrow, things will be easier, better and shinier. Binge Netflix, knowing full well you will not get enough sleep if you watch another episode.
15. Finish the final season and fall asleep at 3am
16. Wake up. It's cold. Pick the socks that didn't get sticky out of the trash. Throw the sticky ones on the huge pile of laundry, but don't let the pile topple.
16. Step over the toppled pile of laundry to get your only decent work clothes out of the dryer.
17. Try to make it to work less late than usual.
18. Feel guilty about being late, until you have seen everyone at least once and can put it behind you.
18. Work late because of the guilt about your late start.

Some Half-Decent ADHD tips:
A) Read "Driven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder" by E. Hallowell.
B) Listen to ADDitude's ADHD Experts Podcast especially #204: How ADHD Shapes Your Perceptions, Emotions & Motivation
C) Move Facebook to the third swipe of your phone/devise, so that you don't click on it absent-mindedly...then, 2 hours later, you emerge with a shock. After doing C), I rarely look at FB and life is better for it.
D) Know that you are NOT lazy and NOT stupid. In fact, people with ADHD or ADD are some of the smartest.  We could actually do anything if we could summon our "hyper focus" for it. Not everyone can say they could do anything! The problem is our systems are motivated by interest, novelty and deadlines. And I've been told that even we can be helped using:
- Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

Good luck!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

NOT a Funny Story. Read "A Cockroach in Brooklyn" Below Instead

This is NOT a funny story. Do not read.  Seriously. This post will be boring (unless you know me maybe, like, if you are my mum)  Skip to the next post, or any of the others - those are my very funny short stories. "A Cockroach in Brooklyn" (https://sophieannas.blogspot.com/2009/06/cockroach-part-deux.html) is possibly my best short story ever. Seriously. It's very undiscovered. It's not that undiscovered. 94 people have read it, I see that from the analytics of Blogger.  Maybe 90 of those were me editing it. I have 4 people in my immediate family.  So it is, it's undiscovered. Go ahead, you can discover it. But don't read the rest of this. Really. Stop here. Bye. From Loss comes Gain. From a Victim emerges a Protagonist. From the ashes of burned life morphs a...movie! Leah is a pastor's daughter in a sparsely-populated desert town in California's San Bernardino County. She plans to follow in his footsteps, and attends college to study Christiani...

A Cockroach in Brooklyn: A Short Story to Bug You

Feb 21 Two nights in a row, a cockroach has appeared, happy-go-lucky, just dangling his antennae out on top of my mirror above the sink. The first time I saw him, I swatted at him with my lime green fly swatter. I could tell I just knocked him off his perch and didn’t kill him. But when I saw him in exactly the same place the next day – at the right-hand edge, facing north, just like before - I couldn’t believe it. Twiddling his little scrawny hands as if coating himself with sun tan lotion on a glorious day at the beach. I swatted him again, but I know I just knocked him over. For a second, I got really mad at this obnoxious cockroach, who wouldn’t go away, dodging my swats time and again. Then, as I was walking back to the living room, I realized that that little critter out there is my new roommate. Suddenly my feelings changed. I found myself looking for him in his regular spot when I brushed my teeth to go to bed. If I don’t see him tomorrow when I get home from work, I migh...

The Evil Pot-bellied Pig: Big Fat Pig Post

My sister Julie bought a pig. Not a puppy. Not a kitten. Not even a hamster or a rabbit. A pig. It was a black-haired Vietnamese pot-bellied piglet. She lost all claims to creativity by naming him Pig-Pig. Not Ham-ster, not Boar-Butt, not Baby Back Ribs, but Pig-pig. Pig for short. When I first met Pig-pig, he had outgrown his cute, bunny-sized stage: he had left his stubby, wet piggy-snout behind – a snout which Julie kissed lovingly and repeatedly. Maybe I would have warmed to him more if I had memories of holding his apple-sized belly in my palm, interlacing my fingers between his tiny hooves, listening to his baby-sized snuffs while he nuzzled against my chest. But I didn't have the pleasure. When I first came nose-to-snout with my porcine nephew, he was already a 200-pound, honking, snorting, beast-borne-of-the-devil, complete with dripping nostrils and an underbite of sharp beige teeth. Now, I love animals to the point where I’ll sob if the horse falls over in a ...