“I ought to get back to blogging about writing,” I complained to my accountability buddy this morning, “But… I’m not writing. And I don’t want to write just another apology piece about that, because I don’t want not writing to be a stick I’m beating myself up with.”
And, huh, I thought. Actually, that’s worth talking about.
So here I am, on my author website, writing about choosing not to write.
After such a solid run of ADHD/mental health posts, this week I fully intended to switch topics – but apparently my brain had other ideas.
This past Sunday I crashed hard. Without warning, I suddenly couldn’t find it in me to even get out of bed. Everything in my life felt meaningless. My emotions retreated, leaving me with flat, grey nothing.
It’s hardly the first time I’ve felt like that. I would call it depression, except that the clinical description of depression requires those feelings to go on for at least two weeks. In me they rarely last more than a day or two – as suddenly as they arrived, I’ll wake up the next morning ready to get up and face the world again.
So what’s going on when I get like that? Now that I have the added perspective of my ADHD diagnosis, I think I might finally have the answer – and maybe even a solution.
Here we are: the final post in my series on looking after my ADHD brain and still getting things done during self-isolation.
While I have no illusions about being my best or most productive self while living through a literal pandemic, the wonderful thing about these techniques I’ve been putting into practice is that none of them have to stop there. If I can make them my new normal, even as we all collectively figure out the world’s new normal, then I hope they can keep on helping me to be healthier, happier, and better able to get things done.
If you’re reading this, I hope some of them can help you too.
Anyway! Last week I wrote about using daily lists to keep myself focused on my the tasks I want to accomplish today, without becoming overwhelmed by options. But how do I know what tasks those are?
Tasks that are simple, or at least familiar – whoops, I need to get to the supermarket again before we run out of milk! – are easy enough to add to a daily list, get it done, and tick it off. The same can’t be said of the tasks required to achieve longer-term goals, or goals that take me out of my familiar routine. Those big goals, like move house or learn to make my own clothes contain far greater complexity than my daily lists can encompass.
For big goals, I need something more – that’s where Trello comes in.
Continue reading “Surviving self-isolation part 6 – making sense of big goals with Trello”