Slowing Down: Task Management (Memory)
Hey team, this week we’re going to keep up our discussion of slowing down, but we’re going to be focusing on memory - well, kind of. With ADHD, it can be hard for us to remember all of the things that we need to do, so what comes into play is the good old to-do list.
Because when we’re talking about memory, what we’re really talking about in this context is task management. How we’re going to remember the things we want to do and how we’re going to go about doing those things.
What I’d like us to think about here is how this is really also a way that we’re performing memory management. Because what we’re talking about is basically just creating a to-do list, and a to-do list is just a way for us to externalize our memory. If we could just remember and sort everything we needed to do in our heads, a to-do list would be completely unnecessary. However, I’ve never found that strategy to be especially effective, and it is, in fact, one of the primary ways that I end up in that cycle of urgency and only doing the things that need to happen right now. Because if I’m not able to keep track of all the things that I need to be working on, then I’m only going to be working on the ones that demand the most attention, and those are going to be the urgent ones.
But in the context of this episode, it’s important for us to work on understanding why we even want to use a to-do list. I think the biggest benefit we can expect from our lists is that they can help us from trying to do everything all at once. We often overextend ourselves because we do have that assumption that we’re going to forget to do the thing, so we better take care of it right now.
And to some extent, this can work, but when we start working on projects that are too big to fit into a single work session or require multiple steps, we start running into issues. It isn’t going to matter how much time I make for these projects if I don’t have any way to organize how I’m completing the steps. And this is the value we get from creating a to-do list; by externalizing what we need to remember, we can better organize what we need to do. We can let ourselves come back to these tasks when we need to rather than just doing things as they come to us.
But we also all had experiences with to-do lists failing us - I mean, I found a post-it from a couple of years ago with things I still hadn’t managed to finish… and also, amusingly, with things that I needed to do again, so, hey, at least it was effective as being a reminder again, right?
The issue we most often have with our to-do lists is that we end up not trusting them - however, this issue is a symptom of how we’re using the to-do list rather than the lists themselves.
So why don’t we trust our lists? Well, the easiest answer is that we are not doing the things on the list.
This leads us to the more important question of why aren’t we doing the things on our lists. The easy answer being, well, we have ADHD; what did you expect?
But I think we can do better than that, don’t you?
And what I often find with my abandoned to-do lists is that they are just massively long. It just became this massive dumping ground of ideas that I felt needed to go on the list. And, of course, at the time, all of those things either felt like they were important. Things that I definitely needed to get to.
Now I do think there is a place for us brain dumping all of those things in our head that we want to get done because we don’t really want to be keeping all that stuff up there, but often our brain dump to-do lists are simply too much. And not only that, they aren’t created in a way that we can actionable work on them.
To be fair, I’m sure I knew what the next steps were when I added “garden project” to my to-do list, but right now, I’m not even sure which garden project that is referring to.
And that is really what one of our biggest issues with our to-do lists is, we add entire projects as a simple to-do. And then, over time, our to-do lists become these massive lists of projects that are overwhelming for us to even look at. We pull up the list, and there are so many things to do and think about that we just click over to social media to look at some memes to try and help our brains calm down.
But without creating these lists, we tend to forget about those projects as well. We find ourselves months or years later looking at the list and going, “you know I never did put that shelf back up.”
So I’m not saying that we have an easy fix here either way - as my friend Brendan Mahan likes to say, “ADHD is life on hard mode,” and this is one of the things that can be really hard to deal with.
Our first step here is that we are going to want to accept that we have ADHD and that we are going to miss some things. That no matter how much planning and list-making we do, we’re not going to be perfect. I know this doesn’t sound like a particularly important step, but how many times have you sat down and decided that this time it’s going to be the time that you get your system right and this time you’re not going to let anything important slip through the cracks? This time you are going to get it figured out. This time you’re not going to be embarrassed by a silly mistake because this is it. The ultimate, perfect solution. Because all we have to do is just sit down and make the perfect list, and then everything in our lives will fall into place.
So let me start off by stating no system is ever going to “fix” your life. No to-do list is going to cure your ADHD.
But just because something isn’t perfect doesn’t mean it isn’t going to be worthwhile, so let’s give a try at good enough.
Before you get started on this process, make sure you’re giving yourself enough time to really work on all the parts. One of the reasons to-do lists can get unmanageable is that we don’t give ourselves enough time to process everything. - maybe move this section?
Our first step here is going to be working on getting all our to-do’s out of our heads as best we can. Don’t worry about dates or listing all the steps out yet; we’ll get there. Right now, we want to just get as much out onto the paper as we can. Doesn’t matter if it’s important or just that you remembered that your friend wanted you to check out a new TV show - get it out of your head and onto the paper.
If you’re anything like me, I’m sure you’ve already got quite the list going, and not only that, but it’s also already feeling a bit overwhelming. Do I really have to do all that stuff? Nah. But it is good to get it out of our heads, and now we can get into the fun parts of making our list functional.
What we can focus on now is organizing our list, and what we need to first look out for are all of our projects that are just listed as tasks. We are also going to want to organize things by context - and what I mean by this is we want to separate tasks that we do at work from tasks that we’re doing at home as well as separate out things like errands and appointments.
Our next step is going through our projects and fleshing them out - the main things we want to know are what done is going to look like and what our next steps are. One of the reasons that we don’t want amorphous projects on our to-do lists is because defining what to do on the project is a task in and of itself, but when we’re looking at it on the list, that might not be what we’re thinking about, we’re seeing component parts and not necessarily in the right order. Spending the time to flesh out what the parameters of a project are can make them a lot more approachable to do. As well, often times we’re not going to have time to do the entire project all at once. By separating it into its component parts, we can do the parts we have time for.
Once we have our list of projects and tasks, we can work on adding in other information about our tasks like their priority, time estimations for how long we think it’ll take to complete, and the due date - and one other piece I like to add on as well is the do date - as in the “d” “o” date, or when I plan on actually completing the task. And I think the D O date is great because there are a lot of things that either don’t have a real due (that’s d u e) date or that have parts that you are going to want to have done before the whole thing is due.
Now while we’re at this section, we also should be looking for things that we can also take off of our lists. Remember, this is supposed to be an episode about slowing down, and part of that is going to be just reducing our lists. And I know taking things off of our lists is hard. So hard, in fact, that our best strategy is working at keeping things from getting on our lists in the first place, and this comes from saying no to more things.
Now telling people no isn’t always easy, but the person I have the most trouble saying no to is actually myself. Just the other day, I found myself saying that I should learn how to program in Unity so I can make my own video games. I mean, that sounds like a fun thing to do, and maybe it would be, but it would also be a huge investment in time. And the most important thing to remember about saying “yes” to things is that we’re then saying no to anything else we could be doing during that time.
My interpretation of this is that means I have to be careful of what I’m saying yes to because what I’m saying yes to is going to define what I’m saying no to. And by saying no to more things, I am then giving myself the option to say yes to the things that I really want to do. One of the most important things I’ve learned from doing more time management is that I’ve only got so much time in the day, and I know, yes, that’s very obvious, but what really struck me was honestly how little time I actually had in a day.
This is where the importance of doing those time estimations in our task planning are so important. When I’m planning out my day using my task list, I can see that “oh hey, this is going to take 2 hours, and this is going to take another hour,” and then I’m also adding things in like lunch and all the other stuff I’m going to be doing that day, suddenly I find that I can’t cram anything more into that day. I mean, sure, maybe I could squeeze in a couple of small things, but the big blocks are going to be dominated by 1-3 tasks at most. Suddenly that to-do list for the day with 23 items on it seems completely unreasonable. Like how did I honestly expect to get 15 hours of tasks done over a five-hour period, no wonder I wasn’t getting through everything on my list.
Again, it’s important that we’re protecting our list and only letting the important stuff get on there. When we just let anything get onto our to-do lists, they are going to become unwieldy and again become a tool that we don’t trust because we’re not following through on our to-do’s.
This is how we want to be using our to-do list; it’s a way for us to plan our day and work through all those things that we want to be doing. The point of our to-do list is to give ourselves something to work with when we’re planning. But we also have to remember our day isn’t only made up of task after task. Additionally, it’s important that we’re remembering the three parts of a task - the set-up, the doing, and the clean-up. Hopefully, we’re accounting for all these parts when we’re creating our task estimates, but even with that, we’re going to be wanting to add transition times into our calendars. Just because I can jam more stuff into my calendar doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.
One of the issues we can see from planning our day is that we just can’t get to everything we want to when we’re planning, so we ask why plan at all. But not getting to everything is an incredibly valuable data point; it is telling us not that planning itself is bad but rather that we’re trying to do too much. If we’re consistently finding that we’re not getting to everything on our daily schedule, the solution isn’t to try and do everything faster; it is to reduce what we have planned for the day. I ask you, what’s better, finishing everything you had planned and perhaps not doing quite as much or being unable to finish your plans and having to scramble to figure out how to fit everything in? Our productivity is not a measure of our value - we don’t always have to be doing more.
So cut down on the plan for the day, and give yourself the breathing room to complete the things you really want to complete. What we get done in a month is more important than what we get done in a week and that’s more important than what we get done in a day. We don’t have to always be sprinting to the next task, we can slow down and work on building the systems so that we can trust ourselves to get to the things we need to.
Top Tips
To-do lists serve as a way for us to externalize our memory - we don’t have to mentally keep track of all the things we write down. But if we don’t properly use and curate our lists, they stop being a trusted source of information.
We can use our to-do lists to help plan our days, but if we find ourselves constantly not finishing our daily plans, that is a sign that we need to cut back on how much we’re trying to accomplish in a single day. Part of slowing down is accepting that we don’t have to do it all.
To help keep our to-do lists from becoming overwhelming, it is important we’re saying no more. One of the most important people we need to say to no more, however, is ourselves.
