Too Much
More isn’t always more - or at least it isn’t always what we should be striving for. It’s easy to look at our schedules and what we’re planning on doing and see the need to do more. It’s easy to look back on what we’ve accomplished in a week and wish that we’d done more. But just doing more isn’t the panacea that we make it out to be.
A big part of the problem with ADHD is that it can often be incredibly hard for us to prioritize. For me, this feels like a consequence of time blindness. When I don’t really understand how long something is going to take it’s hard to give it the weight it deserves. And with my classic traits of having trouble finishing things, there are always more things that need to get done. This leads me to having a plethora of things I can work on at any given time and that most of them feel like they have relatively the same amount of importance… which of course means that I’m only going to be working on the things that need to get done the soonest instead of what actually might be the most important. And it’s important to remember that urgency does not equal importance. I mean, it absolutely feels like it does, but when we look at doing only the most urgent things we are always going to find ourselves letting other important things fall through the cracks.
For example, we all know that maintaining our friendships is an important thing to do - but when was the last time that it felt like it was an urgent thing to go hang out with your friends. Or how about anything related to our health - sure I should be eating a better diet and exercising more, but that hardly feels urgent right now. And of course, when those things do fall into the urgent category they are much harder to deal with.
This means that our priorities often fall out of sync with what we would actually want them to look like. And so when we are taking on more for the sake of taking on more we tend to let our priorities get even more out of whack because we were never building from a solid foundation in the first place.
This is why things can often feel like they are just too much. We get into this routine of doing all these things that “need” to get done, but really we’re just overloading ourselves.
With ADHD we often take on a lot more than we can realistically do. There are a lot of reasons that this can occur. It can stem from being a people pleaser and taking on every request that comes our way. It can happen due to perfectionism and trying to make sure that absolutely nothing slips through the cracks. It can happen just as a natural consequence of ADHD and us having a ton of different interests. I mean if I want to work on learning the saxophone, practice some pixel art, keep up with my TV shows, … That’s more than a full day of stuff before I get to any of my actual responsiblities.
What this means is that our best solution is often just doing less.
Let’s just sit with that idea for a minute here.
Yeah, it doesn’t feel great. It feels like I’m embracing being lazy… or that I don’t know, maybe, perhaps that I’m not living up to my potential. Sigh. I wonder where I might have picked up that idea?
Now, of course, if you’re familiar with my stuff, you’ll know that this isn’t a new concept for me, but for the very observant you’ll have noticed I also used a word there that I think isn’t all that helpful, that word being just. And in this case, yeah, just doing less isn’t exactly an easy prospect. For many of us, doing less isn’t as simple as “just doing less” because we do have responsibilities. There are things we have to do. There are dishes that need to get done. There are bills that need to be paid and there are podcasts that need to be recorded. I can’t just not pick up my kids from school because I’m trying to pare down how much I’m doing. Regardless of how I feel I’m going to need to feed myself three meals a day - I mean, admittedly they don’t have to be fancy, but do in fact have to feed myself something and you know some days making those decisions does feel like a lot.
Another aspect to consider that often gets overlooked is the time not spent doing the task that is still relevant to the task.
I may not have said that well, but that’s partly because it isn’t a super obvious concept. And it’s something that we with ADHD don’t always particularly like to admit.
The time we spend around a task is part of how long that task took us to do.
For example, let’s say you had to write a paper - classic thing those of us with ADHD procrastinate on - and we do procrastinate. We spend 3 hours at our computer doing something else and then see that deadline approaching and then punch it out in 30 minutes.
For many of us, we’ll see that and say it took us 30 minutes to write that paper. But in reality, it took us 3 and 1/2 hours.
And this isn’t saying that those 3 hours were us psyching ourselves up - no what I’m saying here is that from the time that we “started” writing that paper, to when we finished, it took us three and half hours.
Could we have done it in less, yeah absolutely, but the point is looking at the actual absolute time it took us to complete that task. And that information is important because when we are planning out our day and we go, well that task is only going to take 30 minutes but we don’t acknowledge the actual amount of time it will take us to complete we are setting ourselves up for trouble.
But what if we just didn’t procrastinate?
Sure, that would be awesome... but... I don’t know, maybe we shouldn’t be planning for the absolute best-case scenario. Because what if we do plan that way and we do end up procrastinating. Yeah, then we’re going to be in trouble.
But even knowing all of this it can still feel like, well, what’s the problem with having too much on my plate? I mean sure I’m not going to get everything done, but I’ve got ADHD, that was going to be true anyway.
Well despite some of that negative talk, it does feel like there is a point in there, because in reality, it shouldn’t be our goal to always get everything on our lists get done.
I know, what? Why not?
Well, there are always going to be some of those things that make it onto our lists that aren’t have-to items. Things on our lists that aren’t really all that important.
Now, I know, it feels like if it made onto our list, well, yes, then it must be important. But let me ask you, is this the first todo list you’ve created, or do you have old todo lists that you haven’t looked at in years. I recently found one of those lists and there were a bunch of items that I never got to. Some of the items on the list were things I still might want to get to, but most of the things that I hadn’t gotten to weren’t relevant anymore.
And we’ve all experienced not getting something done and there not being any consequences. Or at least not consequences that we really care about.
Now I do want to be clear here that just because something doesn’t have an immediate consequence doesn’t mean it has no consequences. For example, it’s easy to feel like not exercising doesn’t really have any consequences because, hey if I skip my workout tomorrow, well nothing bad is going to happen. But if I decide to just stop working out altogether, well down the line I am going to have health consequences because of that decision.
But there are always things that just don’t really need to get done. Meetings that you don’t have to be a part of. Emails you don’t really have to follow up on. Things that will resolve regardless of your intervention.
Those things that have been on your to-do list for more than a month and yet you haven’t even thought about making progress on them? Those are things that you either need to pick a date for or think about just letting them go.
And yes, you can absolutely have tasks that are overdue that still need to get done, but it’s at least worth looking at those things that you aren’t doing and figuring out if they even need to get done.
And this is absolutely the first step in doing less, is finding those things on our todo lists that we don’t need to do.
Now a quick aside here while we are talking about todo lists, which can be somewhat of a double edged sword for ADHD. A todo list cannot just be a dumping group for us to list everything that we “could” do - a list of 1000 things to do isn’t going to help us get any more organized. To get the most out of a todo list we need to be very specific about what we want to be putting on it. First we want to be specific about how far in the future the list is going to go - often we don’t need to go out more than a day or week. Yes, there are going to be things beyond that scope but the more things that get put on our lists the harder it is going to be for us to actually use those lists. We want our todo lists to be things that we can specifically take actions for and we want to be able to prioritize them the best we can. For things that you need to be reminded of further off in the future, use your calendar. For things you want to focus on this week, use your list.
There is a lot more I can say about todo lists, but that’s a bit beyond this episode so I’ll save that for a future date. The point I just want to make here is that if we don’t take the time to curate our todo lists it is incredibly easy for them to become overwhelming and then for us to simply stop using them.
But that still doesn’t answer the bigger question of why we care about this - if we’re accepting that we’re not going to get everything done why do we care about how much we’re taking on.
Well let’s start by talking about cognitive load - which refers to the amount of information that we can hold in our working memory at one time.
I think you can see where I’m going with this, but first lets visit the idea of open loops. An open loop is simply a commitment we’ve made that hasn’t yet been fulfilled. It can be a commitment to ourselves or it can be to someone else - it can be big or small, all that matters is that we’ve left this commitment unresolved. First discovered by psychologist and psychiatrist, Bluma Zeigarnik, the idea here is that our brains tend to remember and focus on incomplete tasks more than it does on completed tasks. Which makes sense, once we can mentally check something off as done we don’t need to think about it anymore.
But this also means that we keep these open loops running inside our heads and this has an effect on our cognitive load. We only have so many mental resources that we can dedicate at any particular time - and if we’re stuck with open loops taking up some of that cognitive capacity we’re making it harder for ourselves to focus on the things that we want to focus on.
And realistically we know that we’re not going to be able to always be closing all of our loops, but what we do have more control over is the number of new loops that we’re creating. And while it often feels like we can take on so much more, when we chose to focus on doing fewer things it can paradoxically help us do more of the things that we actually want to do.
This Episode’s Top Tips
Prioritizing with ADHD can be difficult and that is only made more difficult as we add more and more to what we’re doing. When we’re able to pare down the amount we’re doing we can then better prioritize all the things that actually need to get done.
We don’t have to do everything that ends up on our to-do lists - it’s okay to cross things out even if we haven’t completed them.
We only have so much cognitive capacity to focus on any given thing and the more open loops we the more we are going to be drawing on that cognitive capacity. Our best bet for dealing with open loops is to work on simply opening fewer of them by taking less on.
