Posts Tagged: Time Management

ADHD Traits — No Comments
26
Apr 12

Overcorrecting ADD Behavior

My office is a nightmare. The shelves are crammed with what was originally placed on the shelf, plus all of the things that were stuffed on to of those things. There are file folders on top of books, there are books on top of files, the lesser used printer has stuff that can’t be chanced with getting lost on one of those full shelves. Behind me, the floor is piled high with papers, file boxes, laptop bags (I seem to collect them), and plenty more stuff. The irony is that while I have never been a neat person, my office never used to get this bad. It is truly terrible now, thanks to me being diagnosed with ADD, but not for the reason you think.

Correcting ADHD Behavior

Many have noted that being diagnosed with ADHD can actually be liberating at first. There is a great sense of relief at knowing the name for what has been going on for all these years. Frankly, Attention Deficit Disorder isn’t really all that scary sounding. To me, that sounds way better than something like depression or even Seasonal Affected Disorder, with its unfortunate acronym telling you exactly how to feel about that one.

However, after a while, ADD becomes like any other chronic condition. You start to try and fix it, or manage it in some ways. There are often two components of ADD treatment. One is often ADHD medication, the other is behavior modification or therapy, usually in conjunction with a health professional or ADD coach. Either way, the self-aware ADDer will eventually become aware of at least some of the things that his or her ADD seems to propagate within their personality.

For me, the biggest problem I have in the entire world is procrastination. I have no doubt that I could have had success a hundred-fold above and beyond everything I have ever achieved in any arena in life if I could just stop procrastinating and get things done at even a semi-reasonable pace. Many ADDers report being unable to adequately focus and get going until a deadline looms. For me, the deadline must often pass, and the consequence be severe before I can get going. It is the one thing that I would gladly change about myself.

Knowing this, shortly after being told I have ADD I noticed myself organizing my office ahead of a huge, important project, with a very looming deadline. Like many ADDers, I had a reasonable excuse for this ADD trait kicking in. After all, I would be much more productive if everything were organized neatly and I could find what I was looking for right away.

The catch, of course, is that a full office organization of this kind can take hours, precious hours that should be spent on the task at hand. Organizing would have been helpful last week. Doing some of the 20 hours of work that are left before the deadline 12 hours away, would be much, much, more helpful. And so, I stopped.

Unfortunately, that was years ago and I haven’t really organized since. Every time I even think about organizing a list of important things to do floods my mind and I feel guilty for moving around even one scrap of paper, believing that what I am doing is procrastinating. Frankly, that is what I’m doing sometimes, but doing that occasionally would likely be better than getting to where the current state of my office is.

This is a sneaky ADD issue to avoid successfully. Often, in our attempts to better ourselves and “make up” for the various character trait of ADHD that cause us distress, we overreact. Shifting too far is often no better than staying where you were on the behavior spectrum. It can be difficult to see when you have overreacted, but there are some signs to look for.

Signs You Have Overcorrected for ADD

  1. You set a hard and fast rule – Life isn’t static. Things change. Organizing isn’t always procrastinating. Sometimes it is good, even necessary. If you have a “never” or “always” lurking in your mind, you may have overcompensated.
  2. The new situation is just as bad – Never cleaning leads to a state just as bad or worse than cleaning too often, or at the wrong times.
  3. You feel bad about doing something – Adjusting to ADD is about understanding how your mind works and making tweaks to the things that you want to in order to achieve your own goals, which should be primarily about happiness. If you’ve set up a structure that makes you feel bad about doing something, then chances are you’ve overcorrected. Stop and think about what you actually feel bad about. Should you really feel bad about that? Feeling bad about cleaning or organizing is not what I wanted. I wanted to be sure that I was doing it for the right reason at the right time, but it progressed to just feeling wrong about doing it at all. If you feel bad about overeating or not exercising or yelling at a spouse, that makes sense. I’m fine with feeling bad about those things. But if it doesn’t seem right that you feel negatively about something, then it probably isn’t.

Have you overcorrected  any of your ADD traits? What kinds of ADHD symptoms have you gone too far with?

ADHD Traits — 1 Comment
19
Jan 11

Progressive Procrastination and ADD

ADD and procrastination go hand in hand. It isn’t hard to see why. Procrastination is the art of putting something off, often because there are more interesting things to do, or because the required task seems boring, long, or unwieldy. All of this plays right into the sweet spot of ADHD. How easy is it find something better to be doing when virtually everything is a stimulus to an alternate train of thought? And, before a long, boring, task even begins, the ADD mind is looking for something that will provide more promising stimulus.

procrastinationEveryone gets distracted, but what makes ADD different than normal distraction is both the level and the frequency of the distraction. A person without ADD may clean out the basement without ever even noticing what is on the boxes he is using for organizing a pile of clutter. A person with ADD might not only notice, but be reminded not only of whence the box came, and perhaps, other “important” tasks or thoughts that are related, however tangentially, to what is on that box. If you’ve ever picked up an empty storage box, seen the old writing from your time in the college dorms on the side, remembered that the alumni association was having some sort of event that you were meaning to go to because an old classmate said they would be there the last time you talked on the phone, and then left before filling a single box because you remembered that your cell phone needed charging, and never came back because while you were upstairs, you noticed that crack in the wall you’d been meaning to fix, you know what I’m talking about.

Procrastination Getting Worse

The catch to procrastination is that it often grows upon itself. I call this progressive procrastination, although there may already be a scientific term for it that I am unaware of.

Progressive procrastination happens in two ways. First, with each task that is procrastinated, the list of projects that require attention grows. Life never stops and just because you didn’t finish cleaning out the basement doesn’t mean that your small business taxes won’t come due until you are done. Rather, your taxes and basement are now both on the list and procrastinating on either one simply moves it further down (or up, depending on how you think about things) an ever growing list.

At a certain point, the list becomes unmanageable. Shortly thereafter, it becomes a fantasy. A list with thirty long-term, do them now, tasks is simply not reasonable. At this point, the average ADDer takes one of three roads:

  1. Keep adding to the list. — All of the tasks are real and need to be done, so there is no need to remove them from the list.
  2. Start over — If a list isn’t realistic, then it makes sense to make one that is.
  3. Try to “do better” — The list is a personal failure that can be fixed by self-improvement or improving how things are done. At this point, yours truly invents a new organizational system, or better yet, spends hours online researching all possible organizational methods including trying to find special ADD calendars, ADHD organizers, or other ADD management systems.

The problem with all three of these methods is that they set up the ADDer for more failure in the future.

Method one ensures that the list will never be done and that one will never feel the satisfaction of completing the list. Without the reward feedback of the feeling of accomplishment on a job well done, the mind not only fails to construct motivational pathways that may lead to success in the future, it lets those that sit unused wither away.

Method two may lead to the completion of the list, but it might be nothing more than a hollow victory. Most people with ADD are introspective from years of asking questions about why things seem to work differently in themselves than in others. They are not easily fooled into taking pride in accomplishing a “dumbed down” list of tasks. Furthermore, the tasks that were dropped from the list are further embedded in the psyche as “unimportant” or “delay-able”. After all, if they were dropped from the list in the first place, how important can they really be?

Method three is, of course, simply more procrastination. No organizational system in the world makes a list of necessary functions smaller. In fact, the time spent creating, developing, or finding the perfect ADD organizer may add to the growing list of procrastinated tasks because that time is not being used to complete other items before they fall onto the “to-do list”. In other words, if your list is long because you forgot you needed to do those things, then by all means, find a better organizational system to suit your ADD. On the other hand, if you can recite that list backwards and forwards because certain things have been on it for so long, you don’t need a new system, you need to do some of the things on the list.

I wish I had a great solution, but I suffer from progressive procrastination myself.

I’ll offer two tidbits in hopes that they may bring enough boost that we can make progress.

  • You always overestimate your willingness to do something later. — This is that “I don’t really feel up to it, so I’ll do it when I feel better about it,” excuse. It is a lie. If you have a killer headache and don’t want to do something noisy, that makes sense. To see if you are fooling yourself however, go do one of the quiet things on your list. If you won’t do that either, then the problem isn’t your headache. What can be helpful here is knowing, in advance, that you are lying to yourself. That way when you hear it in your head, you know it is a lie. Don’t let that pass. Be offended, just like you would be if someone else lied to you. That indignation may be just enough to keep yourself from believing that you will feel like doing it later, because you and I and your brain know that you won’t.
  • Procrastination is a pretty girl (or boy) lying because they can get away with it. — Have you ever noticed how sweet the little voice in your head is when it wants to procrastinate? “Oh, don’t worry. You work fast. You can get it done later. You always do.” Now see that pretty little voice batting its eyes at you with its bald faced flattery. Picture that smug little smile that says, “it worked before and it will work again. You are nothing but putty in my hands.” Procrastination always gets its way by being sweet and manipulative. “I know you have that big project due, but it won’t take long to help me with this video game. Come on. You know you want to.” — Trust me. If you picture that pretty girl or pretty boy who always got away with everything just because they were pretty and always sweetly lying their way into getting what they wanted, you’ll despise that little procrastination voice in your head and do the opposite just to spite it. The trick is making yourself see it, because when you don’t want to, the voice will sound a lot more like the truth. Good flattery always does.

What are your tricks for avoiding progressive procrastination? How long do they usually work for you before you have to regroup?

ADHD-ADD Tips — 1 Comment
23
Nov 10

Living With ADD – Productive Procrastination?

The guys over at the website MakeUseOf.com usually write articles about software, websites, and other utilities. For those of us with ADD and technical skills, it’s a productivity nightmare. Not because they do anything bad, but because they offer up so many electronic goodies in the form of free software and tools that it is hard not to get distracted and end up spending hours tracking down all of the great new distraction free writing programs and testing them out when you should be working.

ADD Tips at Make Use OfWhen an article showed up in my RSS feed from the site regarding “productive procrastination” I figured it was a typo, or more likely, a targeted SEO keyword phrase that they were aiming for with the article. I do the same thing here and on other blogs and websites in order to court Google’s SERP favor. Every title I write on this blog, for example, I end up trying to shoehorn in either ADD or ADHD plus some other useful keyword in order to not torpedo my own posts.

In this case, it was neither. It turns out that the article’s premise is that there are ways in which one can procrastinate in a productive manner. The idea being that if you are going to procrastinate anyway (not a bad premise), then you may as well do it in a way that is beneficial to improve your overall time management. For example, if there is a way you can network or otherwise build your professional contacts network while you are not writing that report that is due Monday, at least the time being wasted is building up something that you need anyway, maybe sooner than you think if you don’t finish up that report!

Like many good ideas, nothing in the article is earth shattering, but the concept could be used to one’s advantage.

After thinking about it for a few minutes I considered my own list of ways to procrastinate productively:

  1. Return phone calls – Everyone procrastinates using email, so that doesn’t count. Actual phone calls, however, are usually important enough to count as productivity.
  2. Pay Bills – If you are an adult with ADD, you know that paying bills can get lost in the shuffle. If you aren’t writing that 1,000 word article due in two hours, you might as well avoid some late fees while you are not doing it.
  3. Blog – If you have a professional blog, or a website that makes money from your writing it, then write and post an update. It might not be the most productive thing you could be doing, nor the one that would earn the most money (Ahem!) but it could pay off in the long-term and it might make you feel better to get something off your distracted mind so that it can focus on what it should be doing.
  4. Read – Not fiction, not websites, real, live, knowledge building reading. If you can’t focus on what you should be focusing on, then try and get smarter.
  5. Nap – If you aren’t getting enough sleep, or you are just tired, getting distracted is too easy. Procrastinating when you are tired is just as easy. Try a 20 minute snoozer and see if it restores your productivity. If it works, that “wasted” 20 minutes will probably make the remaining hours and minutes of your day more productive enough to make up for the nap. Just don’t get sucked into laying in bed all day.

Anyone else have ideas for productive procrastination?

ADD Organization Tips / ADHD-ADD Tips — No Comments
30
Aug 10

Deals On Organization Tools for ADD ADHD

I usually don’t do a lot with deals or online coupons here on ADDessories. There are a lot of deal websites and coupon websites out there that do it better, mostly because they do it 24/7. However, this time I am making an exception, because there are Target stores everywhere, and because the planning and organizing tools that they have right now are so cheap that they are a good way to test out what kind of ADD tools and ADHD organization resources might work best for you.

I’m making a big assumption here that most Targets, or at least most Super Targets have a similar layout and structure to the ones here in Denver, Colorado. If not, you might have to look around the aisles a little bit or see if they have the same deals online or maybe if there are some Target coupon codes online that you can use to get the same kind of value.

Near the entrance of our Target stores, there is a dollar area. The items in this little section are rotated in and out fairly regularly and typically cost $1 or $2.50 depending upon the item. Either way, that is a good deal for a little white board, cork board tiles, or notebooks. Don’t get me wrong this is not high quality office supply store type stuff. These are cheapo, made in China, the cheapest way possible items. However, they will work for a little while and that gives ADDers an opportunity to try them out.

Have you ever wondered if a good ADD organization tip would be to put a white board in every room of your house, or if it would be a great way for people with ADHD to remember things to have a little corkboard tile section by the front door, backdoor, and the door to your bedroom and office? It can be an expensive experiment to see if that works for you if you are shelling out $15 per whiteboard. But, with these cheap whiteboards and dry erase calendars at Target, you could put one in every room of a 10 bedroom house for less than $30. That’s a good way to try out some ideas.

Check out your local Target or pop over to Target.com and see if you can get rock bottom priced dry erase boards, dry-erase calendars, and more to help improve your organization skills and manage your ADD better without new medications or anything chemical for a change.

- Everyone have a nice– “Hey, is that something interesting over there?”   :)

ADD Organization Tips / ADD Tools / ADHD-ADD Tips — No Comments
2
Jun 10

ADHD Time Management Tips Microsoft Outlook

outlook-time-management-snooze When it comes to managing the symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, ADHD or ADD, nothing is quite as frustrating as doing everything right and putting the effort into using all of the organizational tools, electronic organizers, and ADHD planners available to you only to have them not work for your ADD mind for some reason.

One of the most useful computer tools for ADHD available in most office environments without having to go through the trouble of getting new software or utilities installed on your work computer is Microsoft Outlook. Using Outlook can be one of the good ADHD tips.

In some way, MS Outlook is an ADDer’s worst nightmare. There are so many buttons, icons, and features, not to mention tons of functionality from other programs just a few clicks away, that one can easily get distracted and end up spending 45 minutes configuring your Google Gmail email account to synchronize with your Microsoft Outlook email client when you should be working on that presentation that is due in two hours.

On the other hand, all of those planners, calendars, task managers, and to-do lists can be wonderful for the adult with ADHD when used properly. In order to make these computerized organization tools work for ADHD you have to know how to get the most out of each of the different settings and functions. For example, tasks are great, but if you never click the tasks section, you will never see the list. Furthermore, if you don’t always input your tasks on the task list, then important tasks will slip by unnoticed.

I’ll be covering some of the great ways to use Outlook to organize your schedule and tasks more efficiently for ADD people. However, for today, I just wanted to convey one very important ADHD trick for people who use Outlook to help them stay organized.

Use Outlook Pop-Up Reminders To Improve ADHD Scheduling

The number one problem with any planner, calendar, or organizer used by adults with ADHD, or teens or kids with ADD for that matter, is remembering to actually use it and look at it. Too many of us have written everything down somewhere only to forget to ever look at what we wrote down. The reminder feature of MS Outlook helps prevent this problem.

By setting a reminder on your scheduled events, you get a right in your face, can’t ignore it, pop-up when your event is coming up. The default reminder goes off 15 minutes before the event starts. You ADDers already know where this is going. You read the reminder, and that is good. Then you click the Dismiss button and go back to what you were doing for “just a few more minutes.” Next thing you know, you are twenty minutes late for that meeting that you just got the reminder for.

To avoid this problem, don’t click dismiss. Click Snooze. That way, the reminder will come up again in five minutes. Do this even if you are planning to start the new even right away. There is no harm in a reminder window popping up and staying open on your computer screen while you are away working on your new task. You can just click Dismiss when you return. On the other hand, there can be a lot of harm if what you meant to happen when you clicked the Dismiss button didn’t actually end up happening as is so often the case.

Try it. Spend a week clicking Snooze and not clicking Dismiss until it pops back up and interrupts you working on your new task. You’ll be surprised at just how much this improves your time organization.

ADHD-ADD Tips — 1 Comment
24
May 10

ADHD Tip for Time Management

There are a lot of tips out there for time management, and even more time management advice. Most of it is aimed, of course, at the public at large. After all, time management is one of those things that plenty of people have trouble with whether they have ADHD or not. Like many other symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, the difficulties of time management with ADD are often extreme versions of the the issues non-ADD folks have with time management. However, many of the time management tricks used by the general population can be very useful ADHD tricks for ADDers as well.

adhd-tool-timer-time-management This post will be very short because, as a follow-up post will show, I have already spent way too much time "off task" today. I haven’t been screwing around, per se, nor have I been wasting my time. Most of the tasks and functions that I have tackled this morning have value and will benefit me in one way or another. However, as is often the case with focus problems, there are other very important tasks that I should be doing right now instead. In fact, when I sat down this morning there were some "must do" tasks on my plate that have not yet found their way to my fork – metaphorically speaking.

One of these many sideline tasks that have been distracting from important tasks is re-finding, downloading, and installing an old ADHD tool that I used to have on my computer that I forgot about when I did my upgrade to a newer, faster system with Windows 7 installed.

ADHD Tools Timers

One of the tough things to swallow about all of the ADHD advice and ADD tools or tricks thrown around is their mind numbing similarity. After a while of reading about attention deficit disorder and the research being done for ADD, as well as the number self-help books and other books for ADHD, you start to see a lot of the same things mentioned over and over again. Sometimes, that is for good reason. Many of the ADHD tips given by these resources are good ones that are particularly effective. Sometimes, on the other hand, it seems that the conventional wisdom is just being repeated within the mental health community echo chamber and that all innovation in the realm of helping with ADHD symptoms has ceased.

Using a timer is one of the most common suggestions for help managing ADHD time management issues. This tip occupies both of the realms mentioned above, being both a good tip, and one so rote as to be wholly unhelpful to many people. Which is why I wanted to pop up a post about one computer-based ADHD tool that has proven helpful for me to some degree.

There is a small Windows utility called Multi-Timer 1.1 which is freeware. The guy who developed it has also written a fancier, nicer looking version, but that one is not free, and as ADHD tools go, sometimes simpler is better.

What makes Multi-Timer so useful for ADHD time management is that it shows multiple timers at once. Obviously, the ADHD mind likes to do more than one thing at a time. Sometimes this stream of multitasking works well, and other times, not so much. Either way, it is very likely that while working, an adult with ADHD will encounter another task that is just as important or more important than the one being worked on. Having multiple timers allows for the original timer to keep running (or be paused) while the timer on the next task starts.

Even more useful, this timer utility allows for both count up and count down timers to be used simultaneously. This provides the ability to both time how long something takes, as well as provide a time structure for something that should take a certain amount of time. By default, Multi-timer displays 10 timers at once and each time can be selected individually via a tab. I like to set the 5 timers on the right side to my most common count down timer periods. For example, I have 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 5 minutes, and 1 hour as my count down timers. (The last timer is the one I use for variable times like 25 minutes if I need that for some reason.)  I use the timers on the left as my count up timers, starting one for each change of task or setting as appropriate.

Ironically, some of the best ADHD help comes not from the timers themselves, but from seeing the timer application on the screen counting down (or counting up) and become embarrassed, upset, or disturbed by what is showing on the timer. This can be a stunningly effective way to refocus. Imagine that you have a writing project that  should take 30 minutes. You start a timer and hammer away. Later, you get distracted by other tasks. Eventually, you close enough windows that the timer shows through and you notice that the time spent on the task so far is 55 minutes. This can make you stop looking for that Jim Croce song you just remembered you love so much and get back to finishing the writing, because you aren’t going to let it go over 1 hour!

Try downloading the timer and see if it works for you. Often the toughest part of using it is remembering to start it up in the first place and then remembering to trigger the timers themselves. Even so, it may work just often enough to make your days more productive.

ADHD — 2 Comments
25
Jul 09

ADD Planner Update

Our custom add-plannerADD planner is nearly ready.  We’ve ironed out those pesky bugs and soon you’ll be able to preview the planner that was specially designed for people with ADHD/ADD by people with ADD/ADHD.

Check back soon.  (Next week!)

ADD Organization Tips — 2 Comments
9
Jul 09

ADHD ADD Planner Take 2

It’s not uncommon for everyone, whether they have ADHD or not to start the new year with a resolution to be more organized.  At the heart of that endeavor is often a new planner or organizer.  For people with ADD-ADHD planners have a special meaning often characterized by a love / hate relationship.

By mid-year, it has probably become very clear whether or not the planner you have is the right planner for ADD-ADHD symptoms of yours.  If not, this time of year is like New Years all over again for buying organizers, planners, and calendars.

Calendar and planner makers can’t live by selling their organizers just once a year.  So, they use a variety of strategies to boost sales.  There are 18-month planners that run from July to December of the following year.  That’s July 2009 to December 2010 this year.  Then there are Academic planners, back to school planners, teacher’s planners and all other types of calendars and organizers filling the shelves at your local Target, Office Depot, Staples, Wal-mart, or other favorite store.

So, if your planner can’t handle your ADD-ADHD needs, head out and take another look at planners now.  Keep in mind what ways your current planner has not worked out for you.

Do you need more room for notes?  Do you need longer days?  Do you need a Daily ADD Planner instead of a Weekly ADD planner?  Do you need better visibility for weekend days instead of them being tucked away in a corner?

Or, stop trying to make something not made specifically for those with ADHD and ADD and keep your eyes peeled to ADDessories for our upcoming customized ADD Planners and ADHD Organizers which should be ready soon!

ADD Organization Tips / ADHD-ADD Tips — 1 Comment
2
Jul 09

ADHD ADD Organization Tip

Some tips and techniques to help adults with ADHD-ADD or kids with ADHD-ADD are complicated.  Others are little tricks that are so easy that they might seem like they couldn’t possibly help, but they do.

One trick that many people with ADHD-ADD find helpful is to add color to standard organization tools.

Customizing ADHD-ADD Planners

If you have a planner you use as your ADD planner, try adding some color to it and see how the planner’s organizational effectiveness increases.

There are some requirements.

First, the colors must be mutable, that is they must change from page to page, weekly, monthly, or whatever.  Having a colored block or area pre-printed on your planner won’t help, because your mind will eventually block it out.

Essentially, the ADHD-ADD mind begins to ignore things it perceives as common, boring, or rote.  The first time it encounters a colorful page in your planner, it will gleefully pay attention to all of the colors (perhaps at the same time). 

But, as each page goes on, the brain becomes more used to the colors and perceives them not as new and novel, but as the same old thing.  As such, the ADHD mind will not divert its attention from whatever else is occupying it to make anything other than a cursory note of those colors.

Instead of getting pre-colored pages or sheets, use highlighters or markers to add your own dynamic colors.

For example, highlight your most critical task in the to-do list in yellow.  Highlight that critical can’t miss meeting in orange.  Highlight your spouse’s birthday in blue.  Write that important website to check out in purple ink.

Be sure to not overdo the color.  Too many colors becomes just so much noise to any brain, especially the ADHD-ADD brain.  Try and have just four or five colors (not including your usual black or blue ink) and use them sparingly.

Lastly, do not highlight the same things the same way each time.  Again, the key is to make the page look new and different, not to always have a 9:00am staff meeting highlighted in orange.

Change the color used to highlight your critical to-do item with the color you used to highlight your critical meeting.  Also, experiment with thick highlighting, think highlighting, highlighting a whole line and highlighting just a few key words.

You’ll find that there are two major benefits.

One benefit is that you have to actually go through that list you only half-read anymore in order to find the items that you want to highlight which means you will get more exposure to your whole list.

The second benefit is that your mind’s eye will constantly pop to each colored item because they are constantly in different locations and different colors which means you might actually not ignore that super-critical-top-of-the-list item that somehow normally just seems to blend in with things so instead you end up focusing on something like setting the Tivo to record So You Think You Can Dance.

ADHD Traits — 2 Comments
11
May 09

What It Is Like to Have ADD/ADHD – Adventure 2

coke-can In our continuing series on what it’s like to have ADD comes this little gem, not second hand, not from reading, or talking to people with ADD but from me, this afternoon. E

For the last 2 hours I’ve been dying of thirst.  I keep saying, “Ok, get up and get some water,” but with each mouse click and keyboard stroke there appears one more thing.  Just one more little thing, and then I’ll go.

Of course, my most pressing project has been behind all of the other Windows on my computer screen since I booted up this morning.  I’ve gotten plenty of interesting (read new, and not due today) projects done since lunch time.  I’ve re-ordered the Netflix queue, ordered decorations for the baby’s room, bought a new pre-paid plan on Shutterfly, and emailed a dozen people about maybe refinancing our mortgage or second mortgage just to see if we can save some money.

Oh, and I’ve updated Facebook about 20 times.

Back to the drink.

So, I finally stood up, mostly because the urge to drink something had been joined by an overwhelming urge to also visit the bathroom.  I have no idea how long my leg has been bouncing autonomously like that.

And what should my eyes notice, just 12 inches away from my main desk surface sitting atop the “L” on the way to the door (next to my day planner by the way)?  An unopened Coke that I had retrieved the last time I was thirsty (and the phone rang).

ADD/ADHD – It’s not just distraction, it’s not noticing.  (That’s my new slogan.  I’m working on the jingle…instead of going to the restroom….)

***************  Not bad. Just 4 minutes to find clip-art instead of my ADHD distracted by clip art!

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