Productivity

One of the most annoying ADHD superpowers is many ADHDer’s are able to easily adapt to new techniques and systems, but that nothing seems to work forever. In one of the many ADHD books I have read recently, there was a specific callout that the brain craves novelty so much that it’s healthier to expect routines to work for a limited time. The recommendation was to give yourself a lot of grace for when your habits start to fall apart and instead use the flexibility to pick up something new, or old to keep evolving your system. ...

In part one of this post I talked about what I feel the hardest part of every system is, maintenance. I talked about identifying tasks that take up large amounts of mental stress and what you should maybe do with them. Hint, throw them out or defer them. What if you really need to do this thing though? ...

I’ve spent a lot of my time over the past years evangelizing the power of having a system and the David Allen Getting Things Done (GTD) method. One thing I haven’t talked much about is that while having a trusted system has huge advantages it doesn’t come for free. Like all systems it must be maintained or it breaks down slowly until one day it either stops working completely, or you’ve given up on it for it’s inefficiency. Having a system isn’t unique to GTD but it is my favored variant of system. There is a lot of GTD flavor and verbiage here but absolutely nothing in this post is unique to GTD, this will apply to most of the systems I have used. ...