ADHD Hack - Find a New Rhythm to Beat Procrastination

In our world today, it feels like everything that is being fed to us, particularly online, is slowly destroying our attention span.

For those of us with ADHD, sometimes that attention span isn't all that long to start with. So what can we do to force ourselves to slow down and focus when our hyper-focus isn't coming to us and when we just have tasks that are going to take some time, some concentration, and we just can't seem to force ourselves to take it because we start to feel jittery or it starts to feel hard?

I've got I hate to call things a hack but I've got a hack for you to try, right after this a wise person once said everybody is a genius but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree it will live its whole life believing that it's stupid well fish quit trying to climb trees while getting advice from well-intentioned monkeys it's time to jump in the water and learn how to swim with the current of your life I'm Joy a professional organizer mom of four and fellow fish brain if

you're looking for a place to get understanding encouragement and ideas for your home that actually fit how your brain thinks then i'm glad you're here let's ditch the type a advice and embrace what makes our brains and our homes unique together we could have a joy loving home. We're going to be using a timer, which is a huge friend to those of us with ADHD, but we're going to use it in a different way than I think you're used to hearing about because timers are awesome for us.

They keep us moving. They prevent us from losing track of time. They enhance that need for urgency that we crave. But sometimes they work against us when it's something that needs to be done. We need to slow down. We've got to focus a little harder. And this constant quick hits of time can make us feel jittery and unable to focus long enough for a task that's going to take a little extra time. Or it's training us to defer, oh, I don't have time for that kind of thing right now.

Let me push it down the road, kick it down the road. And then all of a sudden you realize you're not getting any of the bigger stuff done because you're avoiding it with a lot of little things.

So we're going to try something. And if you would like, give me a shout back about how you feel about it. I will tell you one of the things, this is an aside here that tickled me, is that I had asked in a previous podcast for you to reach out to me if you resonated with what I was talking about. And I just said, email me joy at joylovinghome.com. I love to hear from you. I got your emails, those of you who reached back my way, and I am so tickled that you did. Thank you so, so much for that.

I have been horrible about working on email responses. So you will hear back from me, but just know I did get that. So if you took the time to reach towards me, just know it's so appreciated. So anyway, if you do decide to give this idea a try, give me your feedback. I'd love to hear how it's working for you or not. So what we're going to try and do is what I'm calling the reverse rumba. Not to be confused with a rumba, I did a whole podcast on rumba vacuums.

That's not what this is. This is the rumba. And if you are a fan of dancing with the stars like I am, you may know that the rhythm of a rumba is slow, slow, quick, quick, slow. And we, with our need for. Urgency, we're not going to do that kind of rhythm. So we're going to do the reverse of that, which is quick, quick, slow, slow, quick. So all you need to try this activity is a timer and ideally a pad of post-it notes or a scrap piece of paper.

If you have your phone, you are more than welcome to use the timer on your phone and your notes app. That will work as well. I just like to jot things down where I can like walk back over and look at them. Physically, I think writing helps our brain too, but you do you. Either way will actually work. So what we need is to break some time, and in this case, it's going to be an hour, and you may go, Joy, I don't have an hour.

You don't have to do this all in one setting. But if you have an hour, you can carve out. Kids are at preschool for, you know, by the time you drop them and get home and have to leave to go pick them up, you might have like an hour and 20 minutes. Take an hour of it and try this. So the first thing you're going to do is you're going to set the timer for five minutes.

And on that post-it pad or in your notes app, you are going to jot down some quick, easy, brainless things that would make your life better if you just got them into production. Things like making a bed or starting a load of laundry or emptying a dishwasher or filling a dishwasher or switching the laundry over or any of those like quick hits that it makes it feel like, okay, I did a little bit of something, those, you know, vast.

Tidy of a room, whatever. So just jot down the things really quickly that come to mind when you think of quick brainless activities that the whole point of the quick ones are just keep your body in motion. So on this five minute timer, you're jotting down things that your brain thinks of that would make your life a little nicer.

Okay, then you also need to jot down those things you've been kicking down the road and avoiding because they feel really big or very hard to concentrate or anything like that. So it may be making a phone call to an insurance company to figure out a bill or it might be getting a reply to an email that you actually have to stop and write and think about appropriate response.

It might be needing to actually gather and sort through that box that you had intended to take to two separate donation areas, but you just keep avoiding it because you hadn't thought through or like you threw a bunch of stuff into a donation box, but you now know a friend who needs some of it and you haven't sorted through. Things that take a little more of our brain power, and we keep avoiding them because of our time blindness. We believe this will take three hours to do.

We don't know how long it's going to take, but we're going to jot those things down that make us feel a little squirmy, like that you drank coffee, but you've had new food, and that jittery feeling, and just the thought of slowing down to do them, you're, you know, just activates something in you, just put them down on paper. Don't, don't feel any pressure about them yet. Just get them out of your brain and onto this piece of paper. Okay. The timer should have gone off pretty quickly.

First five minutes, done. That's your first quick. Your second quick, you're actually setting the timer for 10 minutes. And in that 10 minutes, I want you to feel that urgency. I want you to rush around. I want you to see how many of those brainless things. Can you run up and get the washing machine started so that that is working in the background in your favor?

Can you hurry up and make your bed? Can you zip through and get all the things that are in the kitchen over towards the sink, even in a sudsy load of sink, even if you're not going to wash them, just rush yourself against that 10-minute timer and see how many of those sort of brainless activities that would make you feel better about your home you can do in 10 minutes. All right, when that timer goes off, that's your quick quick.

All right, the next timer you're going to set is for 20 minutes, and 20 minutes is going to feel like an eternity. It's going to make you want to squirm. What I'm asking you to do is to say, I can do anything right now for 20 minutes. I've committed to this 20 minutes. And I want you to pick any one of your slow activities and just start. You're not racing against the clock. I'm not asking you to get it fully completed. Ask yourself, what would it take for me to call my insurance company?

I need to go find my insurance card. Great. You walk over. There's no pressure on this. You find it. You say, there's going to be questions. There's going to be notes. There may be, I might need information. How did I find the bill that I'm supposed to be talking about? How do I find the details on the car I'm supposed to be talking about? Whatever. You start to gather those things. If that takes the full 20 minutes and the timer goes off, fine. No worries. You have choices.

That sort of getting started on a hard task is now completed, which feels great because all of the needed information has been gathered together. And you can start the second slow, because remember we're doing quick, quick, slow, slow, quick. So if you're like, okay, I actually feel okay about this. I'm going to continue in the same task. When you reset the timer for 20 minutes, keep going. Keep going and see if you can make that call and actually complete whatever that one task was.

If you finish it before that timer goes off, look down at the next thing. Maybe the next thing is scheduling a doctor appointment. So you go grab your calendar, you grab the kids' calendars, you're trying to see what are possible dates, and you get the phone number together, and maybe the timer went off. And that's okay. You have forced yourself to sit through two slows and seeing how long things that feel like they're going to take forever take.

You've gotten started on something that's difficult for you to focus on.

Now, that last quick, so we've done a quick, a quick, a slow, slow. Your last quick is a five-minute timer because that's all you've got left to this hour that I've asked you to set aside. In your five minutes, and this is where it's really nice to actually have a post-it note. Is in whatever you started with the slow, your five-minute timer is for you to take your pencil and your post-it note and tell yourself where you left off or what the next step would be.

Because the hardest part when we sit down to these slow, painful things that don't always work out when we try them the first time, the number of times I build up my energy to make the phone call and then I don't get an answer and they have to call me back or I try and they needed more information that I had and now I've got to go find something else.

Whatever status you are leaving this slow task at, you are writing yourself a note so that you know exactly where to pick up again the next time you force yourself to slow down again. You're not starting all the way back at scratch. All of this work that you already did is going to build and your momentum is going to carry you to completing these slow tasks that you don't seem to have the attention span for anymore. And when that five-minute timer is off, your hour is done. Move on.

You go do what you needed to do. You rush off. You go grab the kids. Or if you're like, okay, that was sort of the most productive hour I've spent in a while, what if I repeat that?

Then start over grab your five minute timer write down the new things you want to try and get done do your 10 minute timer run through and do as many of the quick brainless tasks as you can then when you get to the slow down pick right up where you were and try and go through that same longer lasting task again again you get a second 20 minutes and then the most important piece of this is in that last five minute blip, you are reminding yourself where you're leaving off on that slow task.

See if this reverse rumba, and I'm giving it a name so that you can think about it when you're feeling stressed about what you're going to get done in a day, and you're like, what will get me up off this couch and get me moving? Go, oh, wait, I remember Joy talked about trying a reverse rumba. I'm going to try that. Wait, wait, wait. A rumba is slow, slow, quick, quick, slow. So we're going to do quick, quick, slow, slow, quick, and it's 5, 10, 20, 25. Give it a go. Let me know what you think.

I know you can do this. We're going to use the timers not just to keep us in motion, not just to help us keep track of time, but we're going to actually use it to stretch our attention span a little bit and slow down and do some of those tasks that we won't give ourselves the time to do. Another one that I happen to think of, was, I really need to sort of wipe down all of my kitchen cabinets. But to me, in my brain, that's going to take like three to four hours.

It probably won't, but in my brain, that's how long it's going to take. And I don't have three to four hours. And I think, well, if I start this. I got to get all the stuff together. I got to make, you know, the solution that I want to use on the cabinets. I've got to be wiping down. I got to need my stepladder out because my cabinets are tall. I probably should dust them before I wipe them down. I start to talk myself out of all of these things.

If I were to say, this is what I'm going to slow down and do. I'm going to see how far I get in 20 minutes. If I'm in a rhythm, I'm going to do them for a second 20 minutes. If I definitely have to stop at the end of the 20 minutes, at least on a post-it note, I can write to myself, you stopped here wiping down cabinets, and I can stick it on the inside of the cabinet door where I stopped.

And then if I start on the left side, or I started in one corner, and I'm trying to work my way around, I know right where I left off, I'm going to ignore the fact that the ones I already have cleaned might look dirty again, because I want them all to be hit once. And then maybe one time I start back over.

I don't know. But I just, I don't have the patience to start something that in my brain is going to take forever or that I don't know how to get started or I don't know how to stop effectively. This is to help weed out all of those excuses and get it done. All right.

I'm going to stop there. If you ever want to reach out, I'll remind you, joy at joylovinghome.com. I have a free group that is bit.ly slash joylovinghomecommunity. And then I have my membership, which is $10 a month where we work together with some accountability. Every Tuesday, we call it Tackle It Tuesday. And intermittently on the other days, you're more than welcome to ask questions

and get feedback from the very lovely members. But you find out about that at joylovinghome.com slash membership. I hope that you continue to choose joy.