You Mean I'm Not Lazy, Stupid or Crazy?!: The Classic Self-Help Book for Adults With Attention Deficit Disorder (41 page)

An interesting experiment to evaluate your time sense is to jot down your “starting time” guess before you go
through this process. After you make your list and complete your backward time entries, see how close you were to your guess. Our bet is that you’ll discover you were pretty far off!

Compile Master Lists of Reminders:
Consider making a master list for recurring appointments. Put the babysitter’s emergency phone list in the kitchen cabinet so it will be there every time you need it. Keep a vacation
checklist in your file so you don’t have to start from scratch each time.

A lack of planning usually causes overwhelming feelings of disorganization. Although this preplanning may initially take extra time, it will ultimately save you time, aggravation and the wrath of a boss who impatiently sits in the conference room waiting for your late arrival. When you think things through and make detailed
lists, the readiness steps become more automatic. Over time, you’ll probably discover that you can accomplish the planning steps more quickly as they become habits.

Compile “Everyday Get Out the Door” Master Lists:
How many times do you spend your car trip across town trying to remember whether you turned off the iron and turned on the porch light? Rather than relying on your memory, make a list
and post it at your door. Include the things you need to do whenever you go out: put the dog in the basement, turn off the computer, turn on the porch light, leave a note for your son, and so on.

Taking the time to think through your routine and write it down will save much time and aggravation in the long run. You won’t need to remember these details every time you get ready to leave. You won’t
need to waste time racing back home to
save your computer from getting zapped by the thunderstorm and lightning that hits. A quick look at your list as you head out the door will shave precious minutes off your preparation time.

Prepare Duplicated “School” Master Forms:
If you have school-age children, you undoubtedly write many notes for field trip permissions, absences, special after-school
bus changes, and so forth. Make some master forms for as many of these activities as you can. A generic “please excuse Zachary’s absence” can be made with spaces for name, date and reason. A quick fill-in-the-blank later, your task is finished sooner than if you had to compose a new note for every occasion. Your forms may not be personal, but they will save you time.

Buy a (Waterproof) Watch with an Alarm:
Alarm watches are wonderful. Depending on the style, you can set alarms to ring every hour or at the same time every day. You can use an
alarm watch as a reminder for appointments or to keep yourself on track.

Set it to ring in a reasonable amount of time and then make a decision to work at least until the alarm rings. Plan a break at that point and reset
the alarm. You can accomplish the same thing with an alarm clock, but your watch is portable.

If your watch is waterproof, you won’t have to take it off. It’s one less thing you have to keep track of, and it can prevent cold showers. You know what happens—you hop in for a quick five-minute shower and emerge shivering thirty minutes later when your hot-water tank is empty!

Use Stenographer Pads and Large Index Cards:
Aren’t index cards the awful things we were instructed to use when we had to write a research paper? They were supposed to help us organize our ideas but often ended up being used as paper airplanes! In spite of any negative experiences you may have had using them, index cards can help with organization of thoughts and daily details.

Even the best system in the world is
put to the test by distractibility. Many of us get sidetracked because ideas keep popping into our brains. With some ingenuity, one ADDer we know uses steno pads, index cards and his distractibility to accomplish wonderful things.

He keeps a supply of steno pads at his work site and also by every telephone and chair where he may sit. He uses one exclusively for the phone calls he receives. Whenever
he makes or takes a call, he jots down the name and phone number, the time and date of the call and any notes that apply. He checks off each call after he returns it. He starts a new dated list every day. This steno book is a permanent record he can refer to whenever he needs to remember the details of a particular call. More than once, he has been able to access a phone number he would otherwise
have lost.

He also uses steno pads for jotting down ideas. His work is only briefly interrupted as he captures the essence of his ideas on paper. At the end of a work session, he transfers his random thoughts to index cards, categorizing them as he goes. He files his index cards alphabetically until his next work session, when he adds new ideas to existing cards or creates new ones.

Our photographer
friend’s system may be helpful for you. The steno telephone record can act as a backup to your phone number directory and “to do” list. And the index card system can enable you to use distracting thoughts to your advantage without interfering with the task at hand.

The key in using steno pads, a planning notebook or Post-it notes is to use them to keep yourself on track and to regulate your impulsivity.
In the middle of writing checks, don’t stop to make the hair appointment you just remembered. Instead, jot yourself a note as a reminder and immediately get back to work.

Schedule Telephone Callback Times:
Schedule specific times to make or return phone calls. If you don’t have a secretary to screen your calls, you will have to come up with your own screening script. Tell the caller that you’re
in a meeting and will call him back. Don’t worry about lying. You
are
in a meeting—a meeting with yourself! Better still, let voice mail pick up when you are busy.

Discover “Found” Time:
Take another look at your time diary. Are there periods of lost time? What about the waiting room in the doctor’s office? How about the commercials during the TV program you were watching? See how much time you
can find.

We aren’t suggesting that you schedule your life to excess. That could be quite depressing. You don’t want to carry your pending file around with you to work on while you wait for the red light to turn green!

But what about the time you spend in the waiting room? You’ve been wanting to write a letter to your friend who moved out of town. It’s been on your “to do” list for weeks. Rather
than reading outdated magazines, why don’t you write your letter while you wait? It’s something you’ve been unable to find the time to do.

Structure Procrastination to Your Advantage:
Procrastination is the number one enemy of Time Management. Although ADDers tend to procrastinate more than our non-ADD counterparts, no one is immune from the Peril of Procrastination! What if we make this enemy
our friend? What if we make it an advantage rather than a disadvantage?

We really do need to preface this suggestion with a warning to use it at your own risk! It’s possible to capitalize on procrastination, but it involves
very
careful planning.

The unfortunate reality is that many people work best when deadlines loom. As the deadline gets closer, the adrenaline starts flowing, energy goes
into overdrive and tasks are cranked out at astonishing speed. If you know your limits and are fairly good at estimating time, you can structure your task by purposely waiting until the last minute.

This is contrary to conventional wisdom. It’s usually better to plan extra time rather than less time to get things done. So you probably ought to try using structured procrastination for a job that
won’t yield disastrous results if it doesn’t get finished!

This is how it works. Figure out the absolute shortest time you can reasonably expect to be able to accomplish a particular job. Get out whatever time organizer you’re using and write down the deadline for your job. Then add a second deadline—the absolute latest time you can possibly start working on your task. You absolutely must have
everything else cleared off your daily time sheet for the starting deadline you’ve established. Then be prepared to do nothing else but use your pumped-up energy to finish the job.

We’ve used many “absolutes” in this discussion of structured procrastination because this is a risky strategy. We would suggest that you try this only as a last-ditch effort. The safer strategies should be your first
line of attack. Check out the meditation chapter for information on why adrenaline surges are not a great idea.

We’ve considered time and space as distinct organizational processes. If you recall from the diagram at the beginning of the chapter, you know that organization is dependent on memory and attention. They’re all interrelated—organization
strategies depend on your remembering. And to remember, you must be able to attend in the first place. In the next chapter, we’ll continue our discussion by examining the other two parts of this interrelationship.

Chapter 12
Dynamics of ADD in Memory: Mechanics and Methods

T
wo hundred years ago, the English author Samuel Johnson wrote,
“The art of memory is the art of attention.”
Does an impaired memory and its negative impact on organization skills result from an inability to focus?

Although debating this question would be interesting, we don’t think we dare make this book any longer! Since we’ve already
explored the organization piece of the puzzle, we’ll focus now on the interrelationships of attention, memory and learning. In the first part of our discussion, we’ll look at memory apart from associated learning problems. Later in the chapter, we’ll consider the impact of specific learning disabilities.

Memory functions as the
starting pitcher
of a
learning team
that collectively processes language,
organization, thinking, social interaction and
doing
. Models of both anatomy and neurochemical brain metabolism have been used to explain the process of memory. Since we can’t control these aspects of memory, we won’t examine them in this book. Instead, we’ll consider memory as sensory information stored according to how well it is first acquired, or learned. Since we
can
control some aspects
of learning, we can control some aspects of memory processes.

In Chapter 2, you learned that memory is a complex system of acquisition, registration, storage and consolidation, access and transfer. Since this isn’t a textbook, let’s put those terms into ordinary language.

Memory is the system for getting information in,
hanging on to it for a while
and getting it back out again when you need to use it.

In her book
Don’t Forget!
, author Danielle Lapp explores the concept of memory as a
conscious
and
subconscious
process with a potential for breaks in its chain. This is an important idea. It means that you don’t have a
bad
memory. It means that you have a break somewhere in your memory chain. And it means that by understanding how the process works, you can strengthen or bypass the
broken link. The following chart, adapted from Lapp’s book, illustrates the memory chain.

P
ROCESS OF
M
EMORY
F
ORMATION
:
G
ETTING
I
T INTO
M
EMORY

sensory input - need/interest - motivation - attention - concentration - organization - depth of processing

T
IME
F
RAMES OF
M
EMORY
S
TORAGE

instant recall - working memory - short-term memory - long-term memory