You Mean I'm Not Lazy, Stupid or Crazy?!: The Classic Self-Help Book for Adults With Attention Deficit Disorder (40 page)

Your planning notebook also comes in handy when you need to stop working
in the middle of a task. Use it to jot down some notes about what you’re working on and what still needs to be finished. While the process of the particular job is still clear in your mind, write a short description of how to restart the job tomorrow. Otherwise, when you get back to work next time, you may have forgotten that the job wasn’t finished. You may also waste time reconstructing what
you were trying to accomplish and how you were doing it.

Use a System of Color Coding:
Another prompt that might help you work more efficiently is color coding. Your color-coded system can vary according to the categories of paperwork you handle. You might use green labels or green folders for banking and financial information—green for Money items. If your house is yellow, you might want to
put all house-related items—mortgage papers, warranties and renovation expense documentation—in yellow files.

Using the color prompts of a traffic light works well for the hot files you keep on your desktop. The green folders can store your get going/must do now files. The yellow folders can store your
slow down/should think about doing files. And the red ones can store your stop/already done
and waiting for response folders.

You can probably dream up many other color-coding systems. The rationale for using colors or similar ideas you come up with is that they support the memory part of organization. They prompt you to remember.

Use Post-it Notes:
We’re not sure what people did before the arrival of these wonderful things. They can’t replace a filing system but they’re great as reminders
of important “to do” tasks. If you want to be really creative, you can use color-coded notes. Your
phone call reminders
could be on red notes, your
bills to pay reminders
on green and your
appointments
on yellow. If you want to make your own Post-it notes, you can buy a special adhesive stick that works on any paper.

Removable color tags are another useful prompt. The colored end hangs off whatever
you stick it on and is easily seen. If you’re working on something and are interrupted, mark your spot with a color tag. When you come back to the task, it will be easier to know where to start.

Keep an Ongoing “To Do” List:
You can use several of the ideas we’ve suggested to keep track of the pending “to-do’s” in your life. Regardless of the method you use, it’s essential that you don’t rely
on your memory. Write things down in some fashion, and keep your reminders where you can see them. If you’ve ever participated in a meeting without an agenda, you know the importance of a plan. Your “to do” list is your personal agenda that keeps you focused and productive.

There are a variety of ways to organize your agenda. You can keep one running list or group things as timeline items—things
to do today, tomorrow, by next week, etcetera. You might prefer to separate your agenda in categories of
Phone Calls to Make, Letters to Write, Appointments to Schedule
, and so forth.

Keep your system up to date. It’s a good idea to review your list every day, congratulate yourself on completed tasks and plan for the next day. It would probably also be helpful if you date-stamp your list as you did with your sorted paperwork.

One little trick that’s great for the morale is to use the same “to do” list for a couple of days. Seeing the crossed-off tasks you’ve already completed
is self-rewarding as you add new items to the list.

A final note is in order here. Don’t get carried away with your daily “to do” list! As an ADDer, you probably overestimate the number of tasks you can accomplish in a given time. You will be frustrated and discouraged by an impossibly long list and might abandon your entire organizational system. Don’t become a slave to your list, losing sleep
and leisure time as you pursue the
impossible goal of crossing everything off of it. Remember this axiom and learn to be content with keeping up with your list just enough to make your life manageable:

You will never get to the bottom of your list!

Time Management

As a framework for our discussion of organization, we arbitrarily began with space and stuff management. In the real world, of course,
it doesn’t work this way. Regardless of what you set out to do, it is framed within the element of time.

Many people have little problem handling the time details of their lives. Sometime around the middle of December every year, they make a trip to their local store and buy calendars for the coming year. Armed with their purchases and their pens, they’re prepared for their Time Management for
the next twelve months.

Calendars and their close relation, appointment organizers, are things an ADDer loves to hate. Everybody uses them. They are the basic, number one tool for time management in this busy world of ours. It’s virtually impossible to get along without them. We bet that many ADD adults with shelves of organization self-help books also have numerous unused or partially used calendars
and appointment organizers!

If calendars are such great organizers, why don’t they work? It seems so simple. If you need to remember an appointment, you just note it on your calendar, right? Well, for an ADDer, it’s a bit more complicated.

First, you have to remember to add items to your calendar. This presupposes that you can find your calendar! You could hang it on the wall or on the kitchen
cabinet as your mother did, but then you’ll be out of luck when you take a message in the TV room. During your trip to the kitchen, you’re distracted by the
doorbell or a crisis in the kids’ room and completely forget to jot down the appointment with your boss.

Of course the problem isn’t with the calendar per se. It’s a problem of poor planning or a faulty time sense. Noting an appointment on
the calendar may help you remember an event, but it doesn’t help you plan what you’ll need to do to get ready for it. Scheduling several activities in one day is fine as long as you have a realistic idea of how long each one will take.

If you’ve compiled the various inventories we’ve talked about, you’ve already started working on Time Management problems. At the heart of the discussion of balance
were issues of simplifying the complexity of your life. The goal of the more practical inventories of the stuff in your life was to reduce the quantity of things you have to handle.

Many of us are too overwhelmed to manage all the details. Before you waste your time seeking the perfect daily organizer, you need to take a studied look at your lifestyle. Cut out everything you can, to make your
life more manageable. Then start thinking about some of the strategies that follow. We can’t promise that these ideas will work, but they may help you design others that will.

Keep a Daily Time Log:
We know that the inventories you’ve been making are adding to your paperwork pile. But we’re going to suggest that you do just one more. If your One-Rat Study or your inventory from Chapter 5 includes
the details we’ll mention, you can use them instead, adding anything that you haven’t included.

For a day or two, keep a diary of how you use your time. Jot down everything you do, including eating lunch and taking a shower. Note starting and stopping times for anything that takes more than a minute or two. Keep your diary in a small pocket-size notebook you can carry throughout the day.

Your
time log can provide information about productivity, wasted time and interruptions. You might spot time periods that seem to work better for you than others. You might be able to make some decisions about grouping certain jobs together in a time slot that affords you the most uninterrupted focus.

Electronic Stuff:
Calendars and appointment organizers are the backbone of a time management system.
Today, however, many of us have replaced the paper and pencil versions with electronic devices of various kinds. Computers and PDAs can keep your calendar and appointments handy, and even send an alarm when an important deadline looms. There are wonderful software programs available to help you manage and prioritize your “to do” list. Even our cell phones are beginning to take on the organizing
function—for example, it is possible to record voice memos on your phone. Who knows what dazzling devices and programs will be available when this book has been on the shelves for a few years?

Personally, we are holding out for the ultimate in organizing tools—a robot, powered by artificial intelligence, who will organize our lives for us and just tell us what to do! Better still, little Jeeves
can just do all the tedious and boring stuff for us.

We can pay our bills, send electronic mail and even shop online. All these things have the potential for saving time. Our time-saving devices, however, can also become time eaters. E-mail boxes fill up with spam, time disappears as we surf the Net and that computer requires maintenance. Electronic, human and ADD error can all bring down the
complicated systems we use to keep ourselves organized.

PR:
“Years ago, both of us had our ADD meds prescribed by a psychiatrist who also had ADD. On a routine visit, I was astonished when I walked into a waiting room filled wall-to-wall with people. An hour later, when I went into the consulting room for my appointment, the doctor sheepishly filled me in on
the reason for the packed waiting
room. A few months prior to my visit, he had obtained a new gadget—the Wizard, an early version of the PDA. He had happily booked several months’ worth of appointments in his new toy, only to discover sometime later that his Wizard had two points of data entry and that he had double-booked all his time slots!”

We don’t intend to try to talk you out of using helpful electronic organizing devices;
just be cautious when you use them. We know this may be hard, but take time to get up to speed when you upgrade your electronic tools. Watch your impulsivity when you punch those buttons, and keep your system as simple as possible. The latest bells and whistles can be fun, but not if they add too much complexity to your life. Also, be aware that using multiple devices for tracking time and appointments
can create problems if you don’t take care to put
all
your critical information in
each
device.

KK:
“The key to my system is a simple week-at-a-glance planner that I use to plan my weekly responsibilities. Of course, there are tasks that require longer preparation. I handle this problem by breaking the job into smaller, weekly segments that I pencil in as weekly tasks.

“I have trained myself
to look at my planner several times a day but have also developed a system for reminding myself to look ahead to the next day. I pencil ‘see AM’ in my planner the day before any important event. Without a cue for upcoming events or deadlines, I would fail to plan for them.

“When I check my planner at the end of the day, my cue reminds me that my daughter has a field trip the next day. I avoid
the inevitable morning scramble by organizing the night before. Before I go to bed, I pack her lunch, pull out the permission slip from the appropriate folder, sign it and put her money in an envelope. I leave everything on the kitchen counter so I’ll see it, even in my early-morning foggy state.

“I use the same cuing system to keep track of birthdays and other important dates. Entering these
reminders in your planner at the beginning of the year is a great idea, but it doesn’t solve the whole problem. Without an advance reminder, I would regularly read the current day’s entries and discover that TODAY is the big day. Unfortunately, it’s too late to send a card or gift!

“A portable planner works best for me. I’m always on the go and need something I can take along on my travels. When
I’m out shopping, I can remember to buy the cookies for the classroom party tomorrow.”

Structure Your Planning with Daily Time Sheets:
Time sheets are highly structured daily calendars that manage time by the hour rather than by the day and date. Many computer software programs offer preformatted daily calendars and time sheets. If you don’t have access to these, you can make your own.

Although
we suggest that you start with half-hour time segments, you’ll need to decide how much structure you need. Your time sheet can help you compensate for a faulty internal time clock.

Whenever you schedule something that involves preparation, get out your planning notebook and make a list of everything you’ll need. Will you need to wear a particular outfit? Add it to your list. Will you need to
make provisions for the family while you’re gone? What about calling a babysitter? And how about the emergency numbers the babysitter will need? If you frequently hop into your car only to discover that the gas tank is empty, add a note to your list to get gas.

Put your reminder list in a logical order, estimate how long each item will take and double your estimate. If you tend to grossly underestimate
preparation times, triple your estimate! Write the time of the event on your time sheet and work backward,
entering each item on your list in an estimated block of time. When you’ve finished this process, you’ll know precisely when you need to begin getting ready for your appointment.