First of all, I'd like to welcome you to our new host - HostGator! Yea!  I've shared with you before some of the problems I've had with our previous host, but now that we're with HostGator, we shouldn't have to worry about "down" time anymore.  You can click on the following image for more information if you're considering becoming a serious blogger.  We do need more ADDERS blogging!

A few weeks ago, I started working on getting things done by embarking on my own "get organized" strategy, hoping to help all of us with ADHD.  Sure enough, I learned some quick lessons that I hope will help you.

Operation Overwhelm:

The real lesson I learned was simply that I have too much going on at once, thus making my ambitions too high.  What?

When you have too many things to get done, you start making unrealistic projections on when these things get done, and therefore your projection on how long it will take until you get your results fails.

Enter the mystery time ... it's a well-known fact that people with ADHD often have an obscure sense of time.  Now for you this might be different, but for me ... you can take that obscure sense of time and times it by 1000!  It's been a little more than a year since I was diagnosed, but I'm now just fully realizing the true problem I have with time.  Hours turn into days ... days into weeks ... and I still can't figure out where all the time went!

Without the ability to estimate time (with a decent amount of accuracy), setting goals and taking on new projects logically would send any person into OVERWHELM! Does that make sense?

How do you combat this?

Well ... I've had to slow-down on certain projects, and push others off into the future.  The "do it now" mantra of the 95% just doesn't work for those of us with ADHD.  Stop and think about it for a moment ... the more you focus on "doing it now" and/or the old "don't put off for tomorrow what you can get done today," you soon find yourself in overwhelm, because your brain naturally finds 1000 things to GET DONE TODAY! Soon before you know it then, you're overwhelmed by all the stuff you gotta do. I don't know about you, but once my brain hits overwhelm, it brain goes into "shut-down" mode.

Do you always have a bunch of great ideas?  As you start to implement them, do even more, better ideas pop into your head?

My answers are both yes and yes. What about you?

Now ... if you run with each new idea, it may feel great at first, but soon you find yourself bogged down in minutia, and of course ... you end up never finishing anything all the way through.  You've got tons started though!  Whew-hew!

What you really want, is not tons of stuff started, but tons of stuff done.  Right?  The only way to resolve this ADHD crisis, in my opinion, is to focus on fewer things now while still keeping hope alive for those things you've pushed off into the future.  In other words, prioritize.  Then trust yourself to get back to the other stuff later ... after you've completed your current stuff.

This is why I like mind-mapping so much.  You can add all your new ideas, move them around how ever you want, and keep them in front of you as you work on your current projects.  It also creates greater inspiration to complete project A, so you can then work on project B!  The hard-part is "ignoring" the projects you feel strongly about, in favor of getting done the projects that will bring your "bigger picture" into focus much sooner.

Personally, I feel I've been neglecting this blog for the past two or three weeks. The blog is very important to me.  On the plus side however, I've accomplished a lot of other things that needed to get done, thereby opening up more time (long-term) for me to spend working on taking this blog to "the next level."

I hope this post helps you in your "planning" and "organizing," and I'd really appreciate your input as well! Please provide your insight in the comments section below. Advice directly from the ADHD community always takes me farther than any advice from the 95%.

Similar Posts:

• The Secret … Attention Deficit Disorder Follow-Through
• The ADHD To-Do List
• Building a Better Blog