So my therapist and I were talking today about ADHD brains, and what “executive function” means, and we discovered a really interesting thing about how my brain works. I don’t know how much it will extend to other people, but I’m throwing it out there in case it’s useful for anyone else.
Usually it takes me about 1.5 - 2 hours each morning, to go from “booting up my computer” to “actually starting on my first task”. This is true whether I work from home or work in the office, whether it’s a coding day or a meeting day, whether I jump out of bed when the alarm goes off or if I’m very seriously giving consideration to sleeping under my desk while my computer boots. I don’t want it to take that long, but extensive experimentation has shown that it definitely does.
Today I decided to try an experiment. Instead of my normal morning routine (where I check email, IMs, to-do list, and self-care list, and compile that into an enormous to-do list for the day, then sort that list in order of “if everything goes sideways and I get to only one thing, what thing will be the most painful if it happens tomorrow instead of today”, and then set up multiple desktops on my macbook so that each task – including “brush teeth” has its own desktop, and then put the desktops in the assigned priority-order), I decided I’d just jump right into my first task, and see if I could get myself a hyper-focused hour of work before someone came into the office to bug me.
I mean, I got the task done, in record time. Then I checked Tumblr. Then I checked Facebook. Then I composed a summary of David Graeber’s argument that the European Age of Exploitation cannot be understood without knowing why the Chinese decided to abandon paper money. Then I replied to all my Facebook messages. Then I helped Jessica at work set up her code. There followed a relatively productive afternoon where I helped my boss sort out a personnel problem, set priorities for our department, contributed to one meeting, ran yet another meeting, got consensus on a project, and helped Jessica again – but I didn’t eat my midmorning snack until 1pm, I never did brush my teeth, and my knees are killing me because all through the second meeting my body was sending “This posture hurts! Change position! Get! Up!” signals, and I couldn’t summon the focus to actually move from the floor to the couch. By the time my therapist called, my phone was on 3% and I couldn’t find my bluetooth headphones. I’m still 400 calories under my target for the day, because I missed 900 calories during my workday and I couldn’t figure out how to add more than 500 calories to my dinner.
So my therapist and I talked about this strange mix of symptoms: knocking out task after task of helping people at work, but unable to feed myself; incredibly highly effective code debugging, but also getting lost in Tumblr for an hour. I wasn’t under-stimulated, but I also didn’t get to pick what I focused on. And he talked about how executive function isn’t just one thing, which I knew, but mentioned specifically that one element of executive function is taking your own initiative, deciding your actions for yourself, rather than just reacting to stimuli. And it hit me —
I thrive in hyper-focused development environments, where I react to each compiler error by debugging the error … but I break down when the compiler runs without error; I don’t know what to do if I don’t have the error-stimulus deciding my actions.
I thrive in high-multi-tasking environments like running a retail store at Christmas, where I do a task, and then look around and see which notification is the highest priority, and then do that task. But I struggle in January and February, when all the customers are gone and I don’t know what to do.
And today, I was entirely stimulus-driven. Jessica asked for help, and I helped her. Kathy commented on Facebook, and I replied to her. Ryan asked about a report, and I explained it to him. Mark brought up something that reminded me of David Graeber, and I typed up a history essay. Anything that didn’t have a notification – brushing my teeth, eating my snack, charging my phone – didn’t get done.
And that’s when it hit me. My usual morning routing isn’t a waste of 2 hours. It’s setting up my environment so that I will be stimulated to do the things I want to do.
I have barely any initiative-decide-for-myself at all. I get one (1) intitiativon each morning, and I have to spend it wisely. And what I do with it, each day, is set up the stimuli I will experience throughout the day.
- I finish a task and close that desktop: the next desktop pops up with a note that says “Meditate.”
- I finish meditating and close the desktop: the next desktop pops up with an email I need to reply to.
- I finish that email and close that desktop: the next one pops up with a note that says “Order groceries.”
I don’t have any initiative left by that point, but I don’t need to: I get the stimulus to do my work, maintain my health, connect with friends, and clean my house, and I’m too executive-dysfunction-deprived to do anything but respond to stimulus, and so I do all those things.
This explains why I need to leave such specific directions to myself: not “write chapter 5″, but “Open C:/Documents/Writing/NovelTitle/Chapter5.doc”. The first one isn’t a stimulus to action; the second one is.
It’s also why I have such a hard time with “leisure”, and why my “randomized leisure activity” deck helped me so much; because by the time I get to the end of the day, and I’m out of spoons and I have earned a fun and relaxing evening…. I cannot – by definition – decide what would be fun and relaxing.
Like I say, I have no idea whether that will be any good for anyone else, but it prompted some interesting introspection, and I wanted to share.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I still need to go brush my teeth
