Normies give bad advise to people when they talk about how to do work with adhd. If you don’t know, you don’t know.
Wake up early, they say.
Write down your goals, they say.
Plan ahead, they say.
“When there’s a will, there’s a way.”
None of that shit works for me.
I work in waves.
Then I chill.
Like the ocean.
For me, that is How to do Work With ADHD.
Telling Facebook I’m going to do something doesn’t shame me into doing the thing.
It makes me feel like I already checked off the box.
“did that thing I was just talking about.”
For me, that is How to do Work With ADHD for me,
Is getting obsessively involved
with the subject matter at hand.
I like to choose a yearly theme as it helps me get in the deep end.
In my corporate days, we called it being a “SME”. A Subject Matter Expert.
Soaking in the subject matter as if I am a raw piece of chicken, and the information is the marinade.
The juices that carry the different flavors that later combine, AFTER I COOK IT, into a delicious sweet & savory meal.
Just kidding.
I don’t cook at my house.
I’m the eater.
And the cleaner.
And I’m on the “This is so yumm, thanks so much for cooking— it’s really good & so are you” Crew.
Due to what I know of How to do work with ADHD, I start with an overview. Starting from the beginning with an overview before analyzing the parts is what works for me to learn with my ADHD.
Many Coaches have broken down the information into individual lessons. Which works well if theres’a skill transfer involved. Some coaches think a hail mary pass is all they need to teach a subject, but there’s a process to transfer a skill. It’s Explain, Demonstrate, Practice with Coaching, Observe, Feedback. You can’t really skip a part or you don’t actually transfer the skill. Many coaches are just like “rah rah, you can do it!”.
If you’re going full-out and have 10,000 hours to spend, go down the rabbit hole … super deep … for like 5 years & you’ll be good to go. You’ll know this things. Right?
Not me.
I’m hiring a coach. Hopefully a good one that knows how to transfer a skill. And practicing til I get it. I’m trying new things. I’ve learned, and now I implement.
My mom told me once
“You can do whatever you want when you grow up, but you’ll have better luck if you play to your strengths.
I’m a writer. What are you? What’s your core? What do you do when no one’s watching? Just because you like it. What do you tend toward?
In the end, everything worth a damn costs between $10,000 and $100,000 dollars. Million dollars for a house. Every business you’re going to start. Hell, every hobby you’re going to be into is going to be $10,000. Every business you’re going to start is going to be $100,000.
That’s on the cheap end.
Can you start a business for $5000? Sort of. You can purchase a jumping-off point for $5000, but that’s not really going to get you anywhere. Just to the starting line.
You’ll use what you make to keep going and likely you’ll use the money you’ve made or the skills you’ve acquired from other jobs or roles to make this one thing work.
In the end, you’ll use what you have learned to create something you like. Or you won’t.
It might be a business, a family, or a life that you love.
And it doesn’t really matter.
What you choose to do, or to do with it.
But no one else is going to do it for you.
When I’m feeling stale, I go through a season of trying something new every month.
Click the banner to join the club for $27. We’ll remind you to keep trying.
I have ADHD. It means … I don’t systematically check off the items on a to-do list.
That is so boring.
I veer off track.
I’m more interested in the possibility of the to-do list, like what could we do?
An unchecked box is not urkin me. Let it live it’s life.
I’m going this way.
Hah.
My Methods for Working in Waves
I choose a true north. Refer to my mission. Implement an overarching theme for the year. I keep moving in the same direction. I visualize the paths I’m going to take. I’m open to others, but I’ve taken a survey of the land, and I know which way I’m moving.
Me? I’m a writer. Writers going to write. I know I’m a writer because I write. It comes naturally.
I do not sing in the shower. I’m not a singer. Not that that’s the thing that makes you a singer, but if you consider yourself a singer of sorts and you sing in the shower, jus tknow that I don’t. I take a shower, aside from the obvious hygne part, to switch contexts. If I’m trying to get into writing, I can take a shower to settle into the idea.
Settling is is a big part of ADHD for me. I. need transition time.
I’m also hella sensitive to clanging or cacophonic noises, and interruptions. I’m very project-based. I recommend noise-canceling headphones. My small head is a problem sometimes, but the Sony WH-1000MX4 is perfect for me. It helps me feel like I’m stepping in to my corner office.
Listen to the same information from different people.
The truth will repeat itself, and the bull-chit will get drowned out.
I listen to lots of people say the same info, I find the source info whenever I can. I read the book. Hell, I’ve even Saved My Own Cat.
One way I know how to do work with ADHD is to listen to the same information from the voices you like the most more than once. The main big ideas will imprint themselves on my brain and I can use them to learn more tactful lessons.
No one told me to put my blog template into my text expander program. I just know that I need as little friction between me and my blog idea as possible to get it down. If I have to click a lot of buttons before eI can start tippy typing my rambuction thoughts down, I will miss the story. Just as Elizabeth Gilbert mentioned Ruth Stone said about her poetry. That sometimes she would be out in the field and she would hear a poem on the wind and have to run back to get a pencil and capture the tiger my the tail, the tiger being the poem, and pull it back in from the tail. Sometimes the poem would come to her backwards. The last line first, the first line last.
MY ideas whip around me all the time, too. If the idea doesn’t’ catch flame from me, it will go looking for someone else. And the idea is free to do as it needs to find it’s way to publication.
Entering my blog template into Text Expander gives me the option to have my blog template at my fingertips any time I’m on my Mac. I use the same base template for blogs, youtube vids, and podcasts.
A Blog Template REduces Friction Between Me & The Task
If I can’t get to the template in under a minute, I’ll never get the blog going. My mind will start narrating something else. There are too many buttons on my computer to get distracted with. I need to jump right into the curious part of blogging. Which is not usually the keyword part. Sometimes though!
Using a blogging template allows me to start the writing project at anypoint in the story and finish it tomorrow or next month. Really doesn’t matter. Someties I hyperfixate on fixing all the blogs at once. I could spend a whole day just publishing drafts. Sometimes I even publish a draft before it’s really done. Before I have all the visuals done. Because the visuals are a whole damn can of worms. You can do so much with a pretty little can of worms or you can do nothing.
But if I’m a write, my words should have some ability to stand on their own, right. I mean, I do actually read books. It is very block y text and yet, there I go. Reading one word in front of the other.
And I forget about all the images and the branding.
I can catch up with those later when I’m having a Notion Day. Nootion is where I track all of my blogs. I track a bunch of stuff in Notion. Inter-related databases. It’s perfect for me. I use Workflwy to capture my ideas and Notion to track my outputs.
Proverbally speaking. It’s not set in stone. You can just go change it. It is helpful to get the slug right on your first try so you don’t have to do redirects, but everything else, just change it. Especially when your blog is young. If there are not thousands of peopel coming to your blog every time you post, then there’s not much to worry about getting it right on the first try. There is plenty of room to reiterate and then even reiterate again later.
On my blog tracking database in Notion, I have follow up appointments with each blog, no matter what brand I’m writing for. I’m going through checklist after I’ve hit publish that will have me updating each blog to make a it a bit better each time. Whether I’m working on making sure I’m following each step of my blogging template, which you can check out here. Or to be sure I’m delivering consistent branding.
Repetition is one of the psychological triggers that works very distinctly for me as a person that has ADHD. Like, if I’m in a bad relationship and someone is repeatedly telling me that I’m bad, bad, bad … That shit will stick with me. There will be a lot of telling myself I’m pretty good, doing okay, not bad, and stuff like that to get me out of the hole that I put myself in by staying somewhere that was bad, bad, bad for me.
Use Psychological Triggers to do work with ADHD
Repeat the same songs, rewatch youtube videos, repeat the part that resonates with you. Let it resonate with you again.
And again.
If you’rea wondering how to do work with ADHD or how to work with someone wiht ADHD, you’ll want to start by allowing the ADHD person to follow curiosity.
A checklist of 100 things to do? Boring AF. Choosing where to start from 3 options? Less Boring.
Work towards a choose-your-own-adventure type of situation rather than a “like this, with that, by then” mentality. Deadlines do help, but not if I have them all laid out in front of me. If it’s a yellow brick road of to-do’s, I’ll probably want to take a deer trail through the woods.
I let my mantras develop, rather than choosing someone else’s.
If you want to learn how to do work with ADHD, meet people who do the thing. Get in cahoots with them.
You don’t want to be the person you know that knows the most about this thing. Find people that know more than this about you.
Cross-study & learn from what they’re not teaching.
Look for the lessons of what else the teacher knows.
Is this person that’s speaking about [obscure topic you’re learning] a fantastic orator?
Yeah, okay, [dark matter is 95% of what’s out there and we don’t know anything about it]. But WHAT are you doing with your hands, and where did you [learn that maneuver]?
Try a lot, right off the bat. Your brain will throw out the failures when you sleep if you stop thinking about it after you try your best.
Celebrate when you figure out how to do work with ADHD.
V
Create your own template
I am happy to give you my blog template for free. If you’re finding yourself reading to the bottom of my blogs or emails, then it will probably work for you, too. Let’s just try it. Email me at Daisy@dobedo.io and I will ping it over to ya. Read about it at my blog branding checklist in notion.
You got this.
See ya.
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