Silverknife - Writing and Productivity

So, last week I posted my three-part story about discovering I have ADHD. I titled it "I have a mental illness" because I wanted to convey the impact of the realisation that I'm not, and will never be, like everybody else.

I want to rebalance that idea a little before moving on with this series of posts, because although ADHD people are fundamentally very different from those without ADHD, these are really quantitative rather than qualitative differences - the problems I struggle with affect all of us at least occasionally. It's only the degree and frequency of the occurrences that make ADHD different from "normal" mental functioning.

Like autism, Aspergers and several other disorders we've only recently started to understand, ADHD is a spectrum disorder. It presents in a wide range of degrees of severity, and with different combinations of symptoms. It's only called a disorder because there is strong evidence for a genetic/biochemical cause underlying all these symptoms.

There's a strong argument, supported by a loud and vocal community, for avoiding the medical categorisation of ADHD as a disease or a disorder entirely. Its proponents claim that ADHD is merely a difference between people, a different way of seeing and dealing with the world which our society just needs to learn to cope with. Often this argument is driven by those with fears about the consequences and side-effects of medication for ADHD, particularly in children.

Actually, I'm pretty much entirely behind this argument. After all, ADHD is estimated to affect 5% of children and recent evidence indicates that those symptoms generally continue into adulthood. 5% of the population is a lot of people.

The problem with "learning to cope with" ADHD individuals comes when the environment just cannot, or at least will not, be altered to fit our needs. The reason why I support the medical diagnosis of ADHD is that the established methods of learning, working and communicating we have grown used to in modern society just do not always work for someone with ADHD.

This is especially the case for children, where regular classroom routine can become a huge problem for ADHD students with short attention spans, serious distractability, an often violent and unpredictable response to boredom and repitition, and great difficulties sitting still.

Adults can choose a lifestyle that fits their special characteristics, in which case the "just different" tag works just fine. Children rarely can, and getting special allowances made for them requires that ADHD be taken seriously as a condition.

What's more, for children and adults with ADHD, it's important to be able to identify the causes, and therefore the specific manifestations of the condition, so as to plan and target strategies for working with it.

I'm not going to talk about medication on here, at least yet, because I don't plan to use it. I believe that with good information, observation and strategy, I can work with - and indeed benefit from - with my condition in pretty much every aspect of my life. In the future, if and when I feel ready to ask for a medical diagnosis, I may keep a small reserve of medication in case of situations where I absolutely cannot shape my environment to fit my differences.

To return to the point of these posts, it's a fact that everybody struggles with distractability, inattention, procrastination, boredom and disorganisation at least some of the time, and it's hampering many people from achieving all the things they're capable of. This is particularly true since creativity and independent-minded intelligence so often go hand in hand with some degree of ADHD, or at least aspects of the spectrum.

I've spent half my life developing strategies to deal with these problems, (even without knowing why they were so severe), and a great deal of time seeking out the best information from other people with the same problems - ways to make oneself more productive, beat procrastination, organise oneself better in all kinds of simple ways. I'm going to share them here, in the hope that they'll be of use to others who are trying to achieve amazing things with their lives.

Labels: ADD and ADHD, Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, Mental disorder, Mental Health

One night about two weeks ago I had reached the point of total desperation. Since the end of last year, I had been searching for a job. I went all out, signing up with five agencies, reading seven different websites a week, two email listings and three news-feeds a day, plus following up whatever opportunities I could find directly.

But my fear was that the next job would be like the last job, and the one before. Unfulfilling, stressful, ultimately doomed. When I left a year and half ago to travel round the world, my intention was to come back with a new perspective and new self-discipline born of experience and challenge, and make something happen for myself. I'd openly stated my intention that I would never work for a boss again.

But once again I was back to looking for conventional work to pay the bills because I still couldn't manage myself. I'd come back with a new energy, having honed my writing skills and with a number of ideas for new projects, as well as material for at least one travel book. I had written the first draft of a novel in November, started a new article-writing process, had big plans.

But my focus kept drifting away from my projects, the novel lay unattended as a first draft and I couldn't get back into it, two other writing projects I'd taken on were already slipping through my fingers. I couldn't keep my head down. And now my job searching was getting harder as dullness eroded my motivation. I was starting to drift again.

I had suspected for a long time that I might have some kind of developmental problem that was the root of my inattention, but I had always suspected it was classic geek Aspergers that made me withdrawn, distracted, apt to swing from obsession to total disinterest.

Now, as I stood at 1am in front of my parents' house, smoking, trying to ignore my rising panic about my situation and calm my mind so that I could catch some sleep, it struck me that my problem had always been one of attention, and when I went back inside I started reading.

In the ADHD diagnostic listing in the DSM-IV (the international bible of mental disorder diagnosis) and a host of articles by doctors and researchers, many of whom suffered from the same problem, I found a pattern that fit my life to a tee. Not only did it perfectly explain my current situation (and some of the personal statements and journals felt like somebody reading my own life back to me), but it began to extend tendrils back into the past, digging up flashes of "So that's why..." and "Of course!" and "Now I understand..."

I still didn't sleep much that night, but that's because I spent two more hours learning who I was, and had always been.

So what's been different since then? Only everything, sooner or later. Initially there was just the relief of knowing this was real, and with it a new perspective on myself. My greatest fear, guilt and self-doubt has always come from the suspicion that I was just lazy, weak, undisciplined. Understanding that I'm genetically predisposed to lose attention, forget things and be distracted by new ideas has been like a redemption, the effects of which are still rewriting my view of myself and my abilities.

Out of necessity, over the years I've developed numerous systems to organise myself - to-do lists, reminders, alarms, in-piles and out-piles, plans and routines to trap things before they escaped the reach of my disorganised mind. At one time I used to timetable all my activities, from work to watching a DVD, by the hour, every day of the week. Almost all these systems ultimately failed because I lost interest in them.

Now, understanding what makes me lose interest, the crucial breakpoint when a system starts to slip out of my consciousness, I've found new ways to organise and discipline myself. As a result my productivity has gone through the roof; I've already finished half a dozen projects that have been lingering and nagging at me for weeks and months.

I'm learning to channel and use that obsessive energy, that hyperfocus, to hammer through projects in immensely satisfying sustained bursts of four, six, eight hours - and how to turn it off again so I can actually get some sleep and keep my life on track.

Most of all I now see the shape of the thing I'm struggling with, and now I know it, and I know its name, I have power over it. When I start to get that feeling of can't-be-bothered, or that mild panic that rises up when a task becomes too complex and overwhelms me, I know to step back, see the shape of it, change my approach, and suddenly I'm making progress again.

When the fog descends and everything I'm trying to achieve seems like one blurred mess with nowhere to start, I know how to bring it back into focus - to knock out the easy tasks until I feel capable, and rearrange my lists so that I can clearly see the next step. Suddenly everything's manageable again.

It's been a long road getting to this place, and not everything is going to magically become easy now. There's going to be struggle ahead, but I'm ready for it, in a way I've never been before. I have a mental illness, it's a part of me, it's not going to go away. But now I know it, it's going to work for me.

That's the end of my three-part posting about ADHD. I'm going to take a break and repost a few of the better items from my old blog, which many of you probably haven't read, while I work on getting the site more complete. In the future I'm going to come back to this topic and post more about ADHD, but also about creativity, productivity and lifehacking, and the blurred (and interesting) area between what an ADHD person needs to be productive and what can help a "normal" person achieve great things with their time.