How to do Hard Things - Part 1
There tend to be inherent rewards in doing hard things. this doesn't mean that anything hard will always have a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. But when we do things that other people aren't willing to do, we reap rewards that few others get to reap, or at least rewards we ourselves would otherwise be unable to obtain.
Nonetheless hard things tend to be hard.
But before we jump into this, I want to slow down here because definitions are important when I'm talking about hard things specifically, what am I talking about? I'll admit my smart-ass side is supplying me with some great answers. Like diamonds are hard. So it was granite and quartz really most rocks, huh.
But as I often have to tell myself, that's not helping. Let's get back on track. We're talking about hard things, hard tasks, hard choices, hard habits.
Okay. I've said hard too many times here. Let's try, go the other way. What makes something easy?
I like the definition of it being something that requires little or no effort, something that poses no difficulty or perhaps my favorite causing little hardship or distress.
And I want to be clear as we go through this episode, that by no means, are these set things. What's easy for me, can easily be hard or impossible for someone else. It's easy for me to go on a walk. Well, right now it is a couple of weeks ago when I hurt my back it certainly wasn't.
And if you have some sort of mobility issue, I imagine going on a walk, wouldn't be easy for you either. There can be all sorts of reasons that something that some would perceive as easy would be hard for you or for me.
I mean, let's just take ADHD. ADHD can make a lot of things hard for us that probably otherwise wouldn't be. And the point here is that even if we have the idea that something should be easy for us, but it isn't, this can lead ourselves into a lot of judgment about ourselves.
Why can't I just clean out my car? It's easy. Why can't I just brush my teeth every day? It's easy. Why can't I put away my laundry - it's supposed to be easy.
Here's a fun quandary, oftentimes there are things that we can do to make our lives easier, but doing those things isn't necessarily easy in and of itself.
For example, if you get an adequate amount of sleep, it can make nearly everything you do so much easier. However, doing the things that will help you get that sleep can be incredibly difficult.
And here's where it's important to have that definition of what makes something easy. If something is easy when it causes little hardship or distress, well, when I have these things that I've been unable to get myself to do, they are then by definition, not easy.
This all comes back to that judgment piece because our self-talk is telling us that because we can't do these easy things where less than we're failing, because we can't do these simple things. We're not worthwhile people.
And right there, there's an important distinction we can make off the bat just because something is simple, does not make it easy.
This is a place where a lot of us get caught up because we get so frustrated with ourselves for not completing easy tasks. But in reality, we're just completing simple tasks with easy tasks, which is why it's so important that we settle on a definition of what easy actually is. And I think we can create a definition of hard things by using the opposite here, things that cause a high degree of hardship or distress. Things that pose great difficulty and require a lot of effort.
And of course there's going to be an entire spectrum of difficulty here. Just imagine carrying some weight across a room, 10 pounds might. 10 pounds might not be too heavy. And then 20 isn't so bad, but you know, certainly more difficult. but then if we start carrying a 50 pound bag, wow. that's really starting to get up there and as you can see, there's a lot of nuance in this degree of difficulty that we have. This also applies to everything else that we do. There are all sorts of levels of difficulty for everything we do.
But of course, it's all going to be individualized to you. What's important is that it's okay to find something difficult to do. Sure. It would be great if it was easy, but that's not always the case and layering on that judgment of what should be easy doesn't help anyone.
But why all that focus on defining what's hard and what's easy. The issue that I most often find in myself is that I'm choosing when to believe a task is supposed to be easy but what I'm not doing is accepting the reality of whether or not that task is actually easy or hard.
All of that to say, I think it's incredibly useful for us to look at how we use language around the task we do. And especially the things that we deem to be easy, because again, we often find ourselves mistaking, simple things for easy things. And the way that we describe our test also defines how we're going to approach that task.
This often happens for me when the task is fairly straightforward. It's not just that it's simple, it's that in my head. I think I already know what I need to do.
My garage is messy. I just need to get everything put away and then it will be clean.
And that there is where our problem lies in one specific word in my solution there. When I use the word just, I am hand-waving away everything that makes that task difficult, I'm ignoring all of the steps from start to finish and making the assumption that all of those steps are just going to fall into place on their own.
This is a trap. Think about all the times that we might hear that word.
Just focus.
Just do the dishes.
Just leave on time.
Just do the work.
But that's not how our brains work. If I could just do those things, I would. I'm struggling to find the right words here because of how much just ignores, especially in regards to the ADHD brain, it ignores my need for motivation.
It ignores. If I know how to do it. It ignores everything that goes into completing that task. Perhaps if a task was easy enough, I could just do it. But again, if that's all it took, then I would, but that's not what we're talking about here today. We're talking about the things that aren't happening. If we're going to do hard things, we first have to acknowledge that they are in fact hard.
We have to acknowledge the things around the thing that are going to cause hardship are going to cause that distress. And again, again, again, if we find ourselves struggling to complete something that we think should be easy, then it is in fact, not easy. We have the evidence that it isn't easy in the fact that we're struggling to do it. It's not because we're bad people it's because that task is actually not easy for us. And it's okay if something that we imagine should be easy, isn't.
I'm really trying to drill this point home because it's an essential part of doing these things. A big piece of why we failed to complete those easy task is because we aren't giving them the diligence that they deserve.
Our problems can't be solved until we acknowledge them as problems.
One of my biggest hangups here is that it is in fact hard to accept that some things are going to be hard things. I mean, yeah, of course there are things that are hard for me to do, but often I want to write them off as being really easy things that I'm just not doing for one reason or another.
So let's dive in with an example. I've talked about this many times before. One of the places I often struggle with is my laundry and specifically putting my clothes away. I mean, a big part of this comes from the fact that the consequences of not putting my clothes away are fairly low. It still gets washed and dried. So I'm wearing clean clothes, but I still think getting them out of the laundry basket would be nice.
And here's where things can get kind of tricky, figuring out why something isn't happening can be uncomfortable. And that's where we can draw in that definition of causing distress. So why don't I want to put my clothes away?
Well, let's see. It's kind of boring. I can get by without doing it, and it's never quite important enough to make my to-do list. But more than anything. I think that I don't put my clothes away because of that ADHD trait of out of sight, out of mind, it's an easy task that gets relegated to the idea of something that can happen sometime - I'll get to it eventually.
It doesn't find its way onto my to-do list. And it certainly isn't something that I carve time out for on my calendar. But of course, sometime doesn't exist. It's just this ephemeral idea of something that could happen, but never on a regular basis.
If I want to get my laundry put away, then I need to decide that it's worth my time., But I also have to figure out when that time is, it needs to become part of my routine because shockingly, it doesn't matter if I do it once there in fact, we'll be more laundry to put away next week because the reality is the difficult part of this task isn't that I have to do it, it's that I have to do it again and again, and again, solving for getting my laundry put away once solves that problem exactly once. What I really want to solve for is how, what I really want to solve for is how to find a lasting solution.
One of the reasons that I think accountability is often so effective is that it forces us to shine the spotlight of attention on an issue. If there's something I said I do, and a time that I said, I'd have it done by. And I know that someone is going to be checking in on me, I'm giving that task a fair amount of attention.
And it isn't just the big tasks that we can shine this attention on. When I spend the time to shine this light on folding and putting away my laundry, it's often something that gets done. So my question is how to consistently give it this attention .
And for every task, the answer's going to be different. perhaps you do need regular accountability or perhaps it's something that just needs to get onto your calendar or to do list. But what all these problems need is the acknowledgement that what you have been doing, isn't working and that something different needs to happen.
But I'm not quite done with my laundry here, perhaps I haven't defined the solution quite as well as I could have, because that second piece is also one that we tend to overlook. What counts is done? What I have been saying is that my laundry needs to be folded and put away.
But what if I didn't have to fold it? Which quite truthfully, I don't actually need most of my clothes folded. Sure. I have a few things that get wrinkly, but most of my clothes are fairly wrinkled resistant.
So I have this big, long section of folding that honestly doesn't need to happen, but is still some part of my definition of done. And a lot of that comes from how I've already done things. If I'm going to be putting those things in drawers, well, of course I'm going to want to fold them. That's that's the best way to do it, right?
But what if instead I tried doing something like the floordrobe - this is an excellent term I've learned from TikTok that cuts to this issue. Instead of having drawers that everything needs to get put away in. What if I instead just had bins that everything could be tossed in? If I'm not worried about folding it, that works great.
And perhaps you argue, but that's too messy, but let me ask you, is it any messier than just leaving everything in the laundry basket until I pull it out.
Because again, the point of defining our done point isn't that we're doing, what we think is the right and proper way to do something. Instead, we're trying to find the point where we have a functional solution that works with our brain. The point of having my laundry put away is that I want to be able to find my clothes easily in the morning, having them folded and put away the proper way doesn't help me find them any more than sorted bins would. And I think this is a lesson that we can easily apply to other areas of our life, where we're finding difficulty.
We're not spending the time to define not only what done might look like, but even what our actual end goal is.
One of the lessons I've learned over and over again, while doing this podcast is it doesn't matter what the normal way to do things might be. What matters is the way that I can do.
And so for this episode, I'd like to assign a little homework. I want you to take one of those nagging issues in your life and see if you can redefine what done looks like. Make sure to really think about what you want to get out of finishing that task. What, not only would make the task easier for you to complete, but what would make it more functional in your life?
And if you want to share your homework with me you can do so on Twitter or tag me on TikTok. Both are @HackingYourADHD. I'd love to see what you come up with.
And as we close out this episode, I also want to say, you know, there's a lot more to this and I'm going to try and really explore this idea more next week, as well as the rest of this year, because as I said at the top of the episode, hard things tend to be worth doing.
I hope this one helped you because I know it definitely has helped me.
This Episode's Top Tips
It is important for us to define what we find being hard because when we choose to believe something should be easy we tend not to give it the attention that it deserves.
Our problems can’t be solved until we acknowledge them as problems - but also can’t solve those problems unless we put forward the effort of defining them and acknowledging the underlying issues.
Define what done looks like for a task and be sure to be mindful of how that can be functional in your life.
