RULE #1:
YOU MUST MAKE PEACE WITH REALITY DONâT SHOULD ALL OVER YOUR LIFE
How many things have you done because you think you should?
As newlyweds, my husband and I split time over Christmas and New Yearâs with our respective families. We spent a long time away from home, but we were young, and we still felt our parentsâ expectations to participate in long-held traditions. Then my parentsâ divorce added another stop to our holiday travels. For our sonâs first Christmas, when he was nine months old, we spent 12 days out of town: four days at my momâs house, four at my dadâs, and four with my in-laws.
Because we should be fair, right? Our sonâs grandparents should be able to see their first grandson for his first Christmas. We shouldnât leave anyone out. We should, we should, we should.
But think about this from an organizing and ADHD perspective. Out-of-town travel, especially with a baby, requires significant coordination. I had to organize itineraries, packing checklists, and gifts. I maintained communications to plan three consecutive overnight stays. We had to prioritize well enough to fit everything â including a portable crib â into our car and leave room for gifts weâd receive along the way. It wouldâve been an impressive feat for someone with no cognitive deficits, let alone two adults with ADHD.
After that Christmas, I announced the end of multiple overnights and extended time away over the holidays. Everyone would take turns. People would visit us for a change. And you know what? No one stopped speaking to us. No one even called to complain. And I started to look forward to Christmas for the first time in years.
When you try to get organized, remember it isnât all about skill and habit development. We must also get real about whatâs advisable, or even possible. Even the most organized person can take on too much. For someone with ADHD, that threshold may be lower than you think.
Doing things because we think we should, rather than because we must or because they serve our Why, leaves little time and energy for our true priorities. Be especially ruthless with activities that require a lot of your ADHD. Most people with ADHD struggle with tedious tasks like filing, paying bills, and reading and answering emails. Even membership in a social book club requires a host of skills that may not come easily: keeping track of dates on your calendar, remembering to get and read the book, checking in on the groupâs preferred communication channel, securing a babysitter if youâll need one, and organizing a contribution to any potluck food and drink the group might share when it meets. Add up enough of these just-for-fun commitments and you may find yourself in complete gridlock.
This gridlock creates stress for you and your family, and it makes you feel like youâve failed â again. And not just at filing your tax return, which everyone hates and puts off until the last minute, but at something others seem to do with no effort at all. The no effort part is likely a façade, of course, but the hit to your self-esteem is quite real.
Donât be afraid to challenge assumptions and habits that âshouldâ all over your self-confidence.
WRITING EXERCISE: WE ALL HAVE OUR SHOULD
Your should can be the enemy of your Why. Sit down in a quiet place. Make your own list of shoulds, using the examples that follow as inspiration. Where are you feeling pressure from others, or from your own expectations, to stretch yourself thin?
Should | | Reality |
We should upgrade to a house with more space and bigger closets. | vs. | Our current home should be adequate for our family, but weâre struggling to keep it clean and organized. Excess storage and living space will only increase these responsibilities and set us up for more stress. |
Our homeownersâ association needs a secretary. I have the skillset â I should volunteer. | vs. | Iâm already barely keeping my head above water with my own email and record-keeping. Adding more will subtract from time I can spend on our family. |
We should see my mom more. Sheâs always talking about how her friendsâ grandkids visit every month. | vs. | Traveling with ADHD can be stressful, before even adding the kids to the equation. The time we spend preparing and packing everyone up, not to mention the weekend away, eats into our family time and leaves no chance to catch up on anything around the house. Mom is retired and in good health. We need to talk to her about visiting us more often and make sure she feels welcome. |
We should have credit cards with our favorite stores because they offer great deals and rewards. | vs. | People with ADHD generally dislike paperwork. Each new credit card brings its own set of upkeep responsibilities: paying and filing the bill each month, keeping an eye out for fraudulent transactions, handling the junk mail and email from these merchants, etc. Not only that, itâs easy to justify extra spending when we get special coupons and discounts. These cards may not be worth the cost to our time or our bank account. |
I should sign up for this e-newsletter. Itâs full of information about free online courses Iâd love to take. | vs. | I have over 4,000 unread emails in my inbox right now. Half of them are various e-newsletters that will either distract me from something more important, or Iâll never read them. The course information is available online. Iâll look it up if I need it. |
THE MANY SHOULDS OF MODERN PARENTING
Another biggie for my generation is balancing work and family. Women in previous generations fought for mothers to have a place in the workforce. We now enjoy extensive benefits and legal protections to ensure that having a family and having a career neednât be mutually exclusive.
Consequently, many women feel they should continue to work after having a baby. And the research shows that some of them are right. Children seem to thrive more not in one situation or another â in daycare versus at home with Mom â but when their parents are happy. In other words, a child of a mother who wants to work is probably better off if she does, rather than if she stays home out of a feeling of obligation.
But be careful. Some parents with ADHD may flounder as full-time caregivers, while others will suffer when asked to balance work and family. Liz, a mother with ADHD and the writer behind the blog A Dose of Healthy Distraction, writes, âI dreamed of having a baby and staying home.â12 And yet Liz ânever quite settled intoâ life as a stay-at-home parent. Expectations became overwhelming, and she ended up feeling âlike a rat in a maze.â
I, too, planned to stay home with my son. Before he was born, I had a job managing human resources and IT support for a small non-profit. Quitting made financial sense. If Iâd kept working, we barely wouldâve broken even after taxes and childcare. Emotionally and cognitively, I couldnât imagine dealing with othersâ problems (professionally, of course) all day, fighting traffic to get to daycare, and squeezing everything I could out of the few hours at home before I went to bed. Before having a child, my husband and I had struggled to balance work with household responsibilities. After? I didnât want to find out.
In fact, I wanted to write a novel. I wanted to turn The ADHD Homestead into a helpful resource for managing home and family with ADHD. I knew, deep down, that I could not do these things while raising a child and working full-time. My life as a stay-at-home parent hasnât been easy, but I wouldnât have done it any other way.
Liz and I are both mothers with ADHD. Iâm certain ADHD played a big role in each of our decisions, even though we ended up in opposite situations. Remember: ADHD symptoms exist on a spectrum, and people with ADHD are still individuals. As Liz writes, âEveryone has to make decisions based on what works for their family and personal situation.â Donât get caught up in societal pressures or mommy wars. Get to know yourself and do whatâs right for you and your family â not what anyone else says you should.
12(Lewis, 2017)
KNOW THYSELF
As we challenge ourselves on all those little shoulds, as we ask ourselves âwhy?â, we come upon another reality: who we are informs how we ought to solve problems and organize our lives. Donât overlook the many small decisions you make every day â decisions that should be informed by your unique brain and your specific situation. The tools you use to organize your life can make or break your success.
For example, do you care if an app on your phone is ugly? My husbandâs job, where he has spent up to 20 consecutive hours working on his teamâs web app, is to create attractive user interfaces. A bad user experience feels to him like a poorly-written book feels to me: grating and intolerable.
As the resident IT expert at a previous job, my boss called me into her office to see a great new calendar and task app sheâd discovered. When I looked at it, I was horrified. The app was so hideous, its color scheme so jarring, I couldnât focus on its features or content at all. But it was perfect for her. She didnât care about the aesthetics. Sheâd found an app with the feature set she needed.
Knowing which of these user types you align with most closely will help you narrow â or broaden â your search for the perfect organizing tool. If youâre helping someone else get organized, it will be critical to learn about their brain and recommend solutions that align with their needs. What feels perfect for you may be unusable for them.
In the following pages, Iâll introduce several ways of thinking about your behavior and tendencies. While itâs a good idea not to get too caught up on types and generalizations, they can help you get to know yourself. Iâve found it both helpful and liberating to be able to classify my behavior traits and adapt my organizing strategies to suit my brain.
Some of these classifications have their roots in scientific research and have been adopted widely. Others have not. All will provide some insight and help you get to know yourself and your brain.
RUBINâS â4 TENDENCIESâ
When we talk about getting organized, we must look at who we are. Not just as people with ADHD, but as individuals with our own sources of intrinsic motivation. The first step is, of course, finding our Why. But beyond our Why lies a complex web of character traits that tell us a lot about which approaches are likely to succeed â and which will not.
âIf we know ourselves,â writes Gretchen Rubin in her book Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives, âweâre able to manage ourselves better, and if weâre trying to work with others, it helps to understand them.â Otherwise, weâre stuck trying to swim upstream: a feeling familiar to many people with ADHD, not to mention those who live with us.
At no point has this been clearer to me than when I had a conversation with my husband about lists. Since I was a teenager, Iâve used them to calm down. Overwhelmed? Make a list! Anxious about forgetting something? Put it on a list!
As a human resources manager, I instituted several checklists in my office: a coversheet for our employee files. A new hire intake checklist. A first-day-at-the-office checklist. I dreaded leaving a key document out of our HR files, forgetting to set up someoneâs desk with the proper gear on their first day, or neglecting to collect all the necessary information to add someone to our payroll. A list was the only way to prevent that dread. Lists also helped when my boss asked me about my progress on these tasks; I knew immediately what Iâd done and what I had left to do.
My husband, on the other hand, is repelled by...