ADD ADHD Addessories

ADDessories, accessories for ADD ADHD

ADHD Rabbit Holes

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Being distracted easily is the number one symptom of ADHD. The, “Squirrel!” ADHD meme takes the easy distraction concept to its absurd end. However, it turns out that not just us ADD-ers get distracted online and fall into a never ending series of clicks, and opens, and reading.

My wife has started using the expression, “down that rabbit hole,” as a way to say, getting sidetracked by something that and taking a long amount of time to get all the way to the end of the path your original distraction sent you on. One of the keys to managing ADHD is seeing ADD rabbit holes before you venture too far down the path.

ADD Rabbit Holes

Examples are often better than descriptions. This particular article is actually one of my ADD rabbit holes (I’m supposed to be writing about IOT security). I figured I would minimize this particular distraction by trying to quickly document the rabbit holes my ADHD mind tries to send me on as I work.

  • Writing an article about ADHD rabbit holes
    • I prefer ADD to ADHD, but ADHD is the official acronym and ADD can be confused with add — like in math– so I should really just embrace the whole ADHD thing
    • Do I really not have an ADD vs ADHD article on this website to link to? — You know what I should write?
    • (OK, I’m back. I started a draft, wrote 383 words, and picked stock photography before I was able to pull myself back to THIS article, which is already a rabbit hole!)
  • I bet I could make better stock photography for rabbit holes…
  • Figuring out if my SSL WordPress plugin is really doing what it is supposed to
  • Figuring out why my AMP plugin throws off so many errors
    • Is it the Genesis WordPress theme?
    • If so, should I find a new WordPress theme
    • What about that webhost that does WordPress specifically…
  • Did I remember to hit publish on my Stash vs Acorns review article.
  • Are my free SSL certificates still working
    • Does it matter
  • I like this song. Maybe I would like this band… the Banners… or is it just this song? “Someone To You” — I should Sticky Note the name and listen to them later… or I could add them to a playlist…
  • Why does my PC STILL have Runtime Broker using up so much memory all the time… does it actually matter now that I’ve upgrade to SSD and my computer is plenty fast enough…
  • How to save an email to OneNote — just copy and paste it. You already know how to do that, and you can keep going…
  • I should add an ADHD Life category to this website…
  • I wonder if my opening a 529 article needs updated for the new year…
    • Geez. Nerdwallet really crushes the search rankings for finance terms… I should check out their site and see what they are doing…
  • WAIT! Where is that list of rabbit holes I was logging?

ADHD Distraction Rabbit Holes Continue!

How about this tweet from 3 days later?

When your ‘What Is Bitcoin’ article was written in 2015, and sorely needs updated, but that isn’t what you are doing today. NO DISTRACTIONS! (Wait, capital or not… let’s check the AP Stylebook…) -> What Is Bitcoin Is It Worth It? https://financegourmet.com/blog/personal-finance/bitcoin-worth/

twitter.com/ArcticLlama

Or how about Microsoft Edge asking for an update. A quick click and its done, except…

There are new themes you can use for Microsoft Edge. It won’t hurt to look at them… I wonder how they get put together… could I make make my own Microsoft Edge theme?…

microsoft edge themes

Yeah, it’s been 25 minutes. That’s not even a bad rabbit hole for me.

You can bet that I’ll come back and add more to this list of rabbit holes… probably when I’m on an important deadline and am supposed to be working on paying projects for a freelance client.

What are your rabbit holes? Do you have a better term for those distractions where the bottom seems to fall away from you?

(This article really needs a how to snap out of ADHD rabbit holes section, but I just snapped out of this rabbit hole after seeing the clock and panicking… I’ll be back…)

Interesting update for me: I recently got a Fitbit. It has this slightly irritating feature where 10 minutes before the hour it reminds you of how many steps you still need during that particular hour in order to reach 250 steps. It turns out this helps when you are down a rabbit hole. The buzzing on your wrist reminds you that there are only 10 minutes left in the hour, and you realize, you aren’t using the hour for the productive task you meant to be using the hour for.

I wonder if setting additional buzzers would work. The danger, as always, is that the ADHD mind will begin to ignore “usual” stimulus in favor of new stimulus…. BTW, learning how to set new buzzers and setting them up would be another rabbit hole, but fortunately, I saw that one coming.

Quick ADD Distraction Rabbit Holes Can Be the Most Dangerous

Back to work.

Except, I’m supposed to be writing an article about claiming the Education Credit on your taxes, but I noticed my WordPress theme needs updated.

  • I’ve been hacking the theme function with one change on every update.
  • I could do that again in minutes, but…
  • I’m really supposed to be doing a child theme…
  • I could do that in 30 minutes, but…
  • I could just redo what I have if I learned Elementor better…
  • Or I could wait for Gutenberg updates that are supposed to allow for similar functionality…
  • Wasn’t I going to try and join in the open source by chasing down some bugs in order to build skills, reputation, and maybe connect better with the WordPress community
  • Ahhhhhggggghhhhhhggghhh! (How do other people type the sound of falling for a long time… Ack! Another rabbit hole….)
  • Choosing a playlist for Spotify to block out the side of spouse’s zoom calls.
  • Switching to whitenoise generator… picking exact white noise I want….

More Rabbit Holes!

Oh, yes. With my ADD I fall into plenty of rabbit holes. The extra trouble I get in as an adult with ADHD is that sometimes the rabbit holes happen when I’m in “hyperfocus mode”. When you fall into a rabbit hole during hyper-focus with ADHD, it is tough to climb back up, mostly because you don’t even realize you’ve fallen. You are just focusing on the rabbit hole now.

  • Microsoft Clarity – it’s a new webmaster tool from Microsoft. It does some intriguing things like heatmaps and recordings of user sessions. I set it up for one website a few weeks ago and an email prompted me to check it out. I not only rabbit-holed looking at all the new data, I continued to rabbit hole by traipsing off to set it up on my other websites. — I’m SUPPOSED to be answering emails during this “brief break” in my online training. Gah! — Oh, and by the way, guess what would make a great article for my computing/business/marketing website? Microsoft Clarity! Into the notebook it goes.

A new one! Aggh!

Build Brian Had Cancer instead of writing a review for Best Hubris, which bumped a review I was supposed to write for this very ADHD blog. Oh the irony!

ADD Planner 2X

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For many people with ADD / ADHD a planner, organizer, calendar, or day timer is the first recommendation they receive.  Ironically, it is probably also one of the things they have already tried a million times before.

You see, people with ADD are not dumb.  Far from it.  Most ADDers are actually quite intelligent, and even more are very self-aware.  It doesn’t take long after you notice that you are different from everyone else before you start trying to figure out how you are different, and eventually why you are different.

For students to professionals with ADD one of the first things they’ll notice is that they are disorganized.  ADHD can be manifested in many different ways, but one of the most common traits is a lack of organization, whether it is losing important papers, or just your car keys, or whether its forgetting important meetings, or forgetting to eat lunch.  It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to come up with the notion that if you could just get organized and keep track of all those important things better, that might change how things go down for you.

The irony is that for most ADD / ADHD adults, just remembering to actually pull out the planner and look at it is half the challenge.  That is if you’ve already mastered the part about actually remembering to do the mundane easily forgotten task of writing down those important things in your planner in the first place.

Twice the Planners or Planner 2X

The frustration of having, starting, and using so many calendars or planners only to fall into the same old pattern of forgetting not just the meeting, but also to write the meeting down in the planner in the first place is one that drives some ADD / ADHD people to periodically throw their hand up in the air and just give up on the whole planner thing.  Interestingly, the answer might be to take the opposite course.

Of course, everyone is different, but for ADD businesspeople who spend a majority of their workday at a desk, the solution to the organization dilemma may lie in a simple ADD trick for organization.

The first part is the same one that every ADD coach, every ADD book, and every ADD group suggests: Get a good planner that you like and is small enough that you will actually carry it around with you.

The second part is where the magic happens.

ADHD Calendar

Get a big monthly calendar to put on top of your desk.   This is your 2X calendar.

The desk blotter style works great if you can handle it covering that much of your desk, but if not, a smaller calendar works just as well.  The key is that it must sit on your desk in the main work area, whether that is under / in front of your keyboard, or under your mouse, or where you fill in forms.  Something like this work just fine.

desktop-calendar-2XDo not use a calendar on the wall, a calendar across the room, or put a calendar on a table or section of desk that you don’t always use every day.  This is supposed to be in your face on your main workspace.

The best calendars are plain without any pictures to take up extra room.  You want a calendar that is as big as you can stand having on your desk all day every day.  For me, I threw away my mouse pad and use my 2X calendar for my mouse.

The point is that you now have a paper calendar that is virtually begging to be written on, front and center on your primary work area.  This will distract you.

That is right, the calendar will distract you.  You have just turned your ADD traits into a strength to help you.

Using Your ADD Calendar

Imagine, you are talking on the phone.  It is a long boring conversation.  You look down at your blank calendar.  You might as well write something on it.  How about the Tuesday Morning staff meeting.  It doesn’t really need to be written down since you have it every week (and are late to 1/3 of the time anyway because your forget what day of the week it is), but you will write it down because you have been distracted by the calendar.

Later, you might get distracted by the fact that you don’t have any blue on the calendar and you’ll write something else down.

When your boss calls in the middle of a detailed project and tells you about the client meeting on the 13th, you would normally go back to your task after hanging up the phone because you were in the middle of something and didn’t want to lose your thoughts by finding your new day timer (is it still in your bag that your brought from home?).

Of course, by the time you get to a stopping place, you have forgotten to write it down, and your organizer sits unused in the bottom of your drawer.  But, with your 2X calendar sitting right there on top of your desk, you can just grab your pen and scribble something down really fast without having to find and pull out your planner while you are still on the phone.  Then, when you finish what you were doing your wandering eyes will scan across the date, see what you scribbled and that is when you will grab your little Filofax calendar that you bought especially to get more organized and jot it down.

The 2X calendar won’t help you remember to check your little Franklin Covey planner each morning, but since it is sitting on top of your desk, IT might be what reminds you of all those important little events instead.  And, if in doing so, it gets you used to checking and adding things to your real day planner more often, then so much the better.

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