no subject

[firecat]

I haven't been diagnosed with attention deficit anything, but I can really relate to a bunch of things Captain Awkward says in this twitter thread. Starting with "Putting a task on the [to do] list can 'solve' its urgency & I forget," moving on to "I...internalized a fallacy that I was not 'allowed' to do rewarding ambitious enjoyable things until all my 'chores' were done" to "hi to the people who really need an assistant but have no idea how to delegate things to an assistant and/or find the whole assistant thing terrifying."

https://twitter.com/CAwkward/status/1077726114376806400

PS: Also if I try to look at any of the suggested task management systems, I will get sucked into a task of "looking at, but never actually using, task management systems." Or I will decide I need to use ten of them.

Comments

[snippy]

I used to have ALL THE EXECUTIVE FUNCTION necessary for myself and several others; not having as much of it to even satisfy my own needs, let alone my wants, has been quite a loss.

[firecat]

Yeah, losing access to useful abilities that you were proud of and that were important to your identity is no fun at all.

[zeborah]

I tend to look at task management systems, get annoyed at how complicated yet insufficient they are, and decide to code one for myself because how hard can it be?

[firecat]

Have you?

[zeborah]

Three times that I can think of off-hand. One at work in Excel (teaching myself Visual Basic along the way for all the macros it accumulated to move things from the "to do" sheet to the "waiting for ITS to get off their thumbs" sheet to occasionally the "done" sheet). One at home in PHP, which is in fact a pretty simple 'to do' list with a drop-down menu on each item to mark it in progress, done, or not done - but then I started wanting to track how much water I was drinking, and my bed-times, and so it started accumulating modules. And then another one at work, which technically was for another department to use as all the commercial ones were way too complex and expensive; but once that department head left no-one else had any interest in it, so I started using it in my own department. That's more like an internal issues tracking system, and includes categories and notes fields and a basic reporting module, and ties into our authentication system. It's actually surprisingly functional considering.

[firecat]

I feel like you ought to be making all the big bucks that the inspirational "getting-things-done" speakers/authors are getting.

[zeborah]

Hard to make big bucks when every time you have things you should be doing, you instead start thinking "How can I make my to do list better?" :-)

[bibliofile]

I bet if you made it shareware, it would still pay better than reading books or petting cats.

I remember using macros in Word! Gosh they were useful. (I was a tech writer at the time.)

[zeborah]

Hmm, the two work ones don't legally belong to me and the other one I'd feel obliged to tidy somewhat since it's super basic and also hardcodes in specifically the Christchurch weather forecast, but I could put that on the "to do" list...

[bibliofile]

but I could put that on the "to do" list...

Where else would you put them?!???

[firecat]

OMG yes, macros in Word! (says another former tech writer)

[bibliofile]

I...internalized a fallacy that I was not 'allowed' to do rewarding ambitious enjoyable things until all my 'chores' were done"

This was me! So much. Somehow I decided to let myself get other things done while I was avoiding one specific thing. I could still beat myself up mentally over the thing I was avoiding, but at least I kept up with laundry and other things.

(That whole Twitter thread is great, BTW.)

[firecat]

Yes, the whole "my bathtub is sparkling because I have a project I'm avoiding" angle.

Captain Awkward has collected a bunch of very smart followers.

[silveradept]

That is certainly a thread. How much of it I'm relating toI might be keeping under wraps because of many of the fear things mentioned in that thread, but thank you for linking to it all the same.

[firecat]

Glad you are finding it interesting...no pressure to relate to it publicly.