ADHD Overload
My oldest struggled last night with those overwhelming feelings those of us with ADHD brains know all too well; they were mentally paralyzed, feeling like they couldn’t do even small tasks. I describe this as short-circuiting. My circuit breaker gets overloaded and trips, shutting all the power off.
The ADHD brain can be a wonderful thing, allowing for expansive creativity and the ability to hyperfocus, but it is certainly prone to overload.
Find What You Can Control
My ADHD brain gets distracted easily and often. To stay productive, I must be intentional about my internal and external environments. Mindfulness techniques and meditation effectively set the internal state for focusing on a task. However, the external environment can have a more significant impact on me personally. You can do a couple of things to help restructure for success.
Use Tools To Find Focus
First, understand that your ADHD is a superpower. True, it can feel like a liability, but the trick is to find ways to focus that superpower. As discussed in the article “How To Focus Your ADHD Superpower!,” I discuss how my noise-canceling headphones help me put my ADHD in a “bubble” of sorts to tap into that hyperfocus ability that usually comes with an ADHD brain.
Additionally, I let my family and co-workers know when I have these particular headphones on, I’m in The Zone and need to be left alone, if possible. With one external device, I am intentional about my internal state and can communicate my needs to others.
Tidy Desk, Tidy Mind
Second, your physical environment should reflect your desired intentionality of focus. I’m reminded of a quote from Marie Kondō in The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizingwhere she says, “The space in which we live should be for the person we are becoming now, not for the person we were in the past.” This speaks to the effect my environment has on my goals.
I’m a busy person, no doubt, and often, the state of my desk reflects the state of my mind in times when projects are hitting hard and fast. I learned that time spent tidying and organizing my desk typically pays off in increased productivity.
🚨 WARNING!: It’s so easy to get sidetracked cleaning your space. This act should be a concentrated, intentional effort. For instance, set a timer for 10 minutes and put all your energy into tidying up for that specific amount of time. Make sure to deal with things in your line of sight first, then work your way out. Even a cleared pool in the middle of a sea of clutter can help considerably.
Setting Up a Next-Level Environment: Mise En Place
If you find success in tidying up, and your productivity can use an extra boost, research the concept of mise en place (pronounced mi zɑ̃ ˈplas), a culinary philosophy of organization utilized by successful chefs worldwide. It’s a French term that translates to “everything in its place,” but its usefulness extends beyond the kitchen.
The concept of psychological mise en place can revolutionize your productivity. A paper titled Mise en place: setting the stage for thought and action states:
A psychological, rather than a culinary, mise en place refers to how one’s stance towards a given environment places constraints on what one feels able to do within that environment, and how these assessments and predispositions impact the process of preparing to act.
In other words, Where a chef will organize cook stations and lay out ingredients for maximum efficiency in a commercial kitchen’s intense and fast-paced environment, you can use psychological mise en place to organize your personal environment for maximum focus and productivity.
Mise en place can be broken down into a few key steps:
Preparation: Organize your workspace with the tools you need close at hand but not in the way of current tasks. When you’re in the thick of it, you shouldn’t have to think about what you need because it’s within easy reach.
Prioritization: Understand what you need to accomplish and estimate how long it will take. Reordering these tasks for efficiency could help you gain more ground as you go through the day.
Clean as you go: As you finish tasks, put things back where they belong so you won’t have to think about where they are the next time you need them, and so you don’t end up with a pile of things to clean up, adding to your stress level.
Reset at the end of the day for the next day: Give a gift to your future self and set up what you can for the next day. When you sit down to focus the next morning, you’ll be grateful that you don’t have to spend more mental fuel to get today’s rocket off the ground.
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