Hi, I’m Dr. Tracey Marks a psychiatrist, and I make mental health education videos. Today, I’m talking about the things you can do to help your ADHD. And this is a followup to a video I did on executive function. In that video, I talk about, the different ways ADHD affects your decision making, your planning abilities, time management, and other tasks.
When it comes to non-medication ways to manage your ADHD symptoms, we can break it down into these three domains: time management, organization and planning. This video is dedicated to time management. People with ADHD typically have trouble estimating how long things will take and adjusting their schedules accordingly. As a result, you may be frequently late to things, or it can even affect your ability to finish things because you don’t take into account how long things should take. Also with ADHD, the loss of time has a cumulative effect.

You can just lose time to things that you can’t even track. So step one, to master this time management skill is to have constant access to time pieces. Do you wear a watch? You may say, “I don’t need a watch “because I’ve got my phone.” But you can’t always pull your phone out to look at the time.

You want your awareness of the time to be a seamless flow, because it’s always there in your face. If it takes too much effort to know the time, you’ll just act without knowing probably assuming that you’re fine with the time. So you want to have a watch on your wrist and clocks on the walls in the rooms where you spend the most time, like the kitchen, bedroom, home office and bathroom. The watch gives you access when you’re in places where there’s no clock in easy view. And the clock is for easy view, when you don’t have your watch on, you’re not wearing it for some reason, or you just don’t want to lift up your wrist.

Have you been late for an appointment because you took a 30-minute shower that you thought was going to be a quick five minutes? That’s where a bathroom clock is a must.

The next step is to estimate the time that it takes for your usual tasks. Knowing how long things take, can help you plan your day, leave your home in time for things, and know how much of something that you can complete. Leaving things undone can happen because you get distracted or bored, but it can also be a factor of starting something that will take you more time than you have.

And repetitively leaving things undone chips away at your motivation and self-esteem. It’s very satisfying to be able to complete something, even if it’s a small task. So you want to make a list of your usual tasks and over the course of a few days, time how long it takes you. Your list may look something like this, getting ready for school or work. And if task takes you more than an hour, by the way, you should break it down into sub tasks to see what takes you the longest, then keep that separate.

So, it may take you 40 minutes to shower and groom yourself, brush your teeth, comb your hair, et cetera. Then have a separate task of eating, preparing your lunch and getting out of the door. Then include things like doing laundry, dishes, other house chores, walking your dog, sorting your mail. Let’s say you have a task that you do that you can never seem to do in one sitting. And because of that, you always get behind on it because the unfinished tasks pile up on you.

Use this exercise to time the activity and break it down into phases of the tasks. So you can see where the time goes. Here’s an example. Judy gets anxious thinking about her piles of laundry that she can’t get under control.

She first estimated that it takes her about two hours for the wash and the dry cycle.

Then maybe another 30 minutes to fold. But at any given time, she has piles of clean clothes in baskets and on a bed in the guest room. And the family goes into the room and gets clothes from the bed, clothes fall on the floor, get stepped on. And then you can’t tell what’s clean and what’s not. You might say, “Why can’t other people fold those clothes?” That’s not the point. The point is in her head, Judy thinks that laundry is this basic task of putting clothes into machines, and it only takes about two and a half hours, but she can never find a two-and-a-half-hour block of time to do it.

So to really see this task through to completion, it was important to break out the different aspects of doing laundry and knowing how long it took to do each of those things. So when she did that, she realized it took 15 minutes to gather all of the clothes from everyone’s room and then take them downstairs and put them into the washing machine. It took an hour and a half for the wash and the dryer cycle together.

It took anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes to fold the clothes and another 10 minutes to put them away. So it takes Judy the initial 15 minutes to gather the laundry. And then after an hour and a half break, it’s another 30 minutes to process each load. With her family there was easily four to five loads of laundry each week. So folding and putting away could easily take a couple of hours.

Knowing this helped Judy plan how she did the laundry, because one of her problems was that she set an unrealistic task for herself to have a day where she does the laundry.

That was overwhelming because it was too many steps and she couldn’t sustain her attention to the final steps. And this is especially hard, when you have to an hour and a half to do the next step. So the natural inclination would be to save it for later, knowing that the second part of the laundry would take a couple of hours, allowed her to schedule that as its own thing, and then break it into steps. So, after she completes the mountain of laundry that sits on the bed, she would then schedule separate times to sort fold and put away.

Now, this may seem like common sense. And if it does, it’s probably because you don’t have this problem, but ADHD causes problems with executive functioning, which includes planning, time estimation and organization. And when you face a task that has multiple steps to it, it’s very easy to lose track of the steps and just have them drop off or be left unfinished or poorly finished in a way that causes problems like not knowing where your clothes are because they’re underneath a pile.

Or your favorite tops slipped under the bed after someone stepped on it. And this means it took you an extra 20 minutes in the morning, finding your clothes to wear.

So, this problem with time has a trickledown effect. And this highlights a point when you are timing your morning activities, you may have to break out how much time you spend finding clothes to wear. So the time awareness exercise involves two parts. The first part is estimating the time for your usual tasks. And you don’t winna guess on this.

You winna look at your watch and write down the start time and finish time on a time log. Then the second part is to look at the tasks that take you a long time to do and are problematic for you, causing you to be late, break those down into smaller tasks, and then time them. You can use this time log later for planning your day, as well as troubleshooting things that are eating up too much of your time.

Like the example of spending 15 minutes each morning, figuring out what you winna wear or finding clothes. So, you can use this list later to reduce some time inefficiencies.

The third and final step that I’ll talk about in this video is to keep a planner. I suggest two different kinds of planners, a daily planner, to keep up with your daily activities and a week at a glance calendar so that you can keep a bird’s eye view of what’s currently going on in your life, and what’s coming up in the future. This is something you wanna carry with you all the time.

It doesn’t have to be paper, it can be digital, if you’re more comfortable using something on your phone. With ADHD out of sight is out of mind.

So if it’s not on your planner, it doesn’t exist. You don’t wanna crowd your head with all of the things that you need to remember to do. If you happen to remember great, but you don’t want the burden of needing to remember, because with ADHD, mental clutter gets purged without your knowledge, your brain just lets go of it for you. And the information is gone until someone reminds you of what you missed. You want your planner to include appointments and tasks.

Now that how long things will take, you can avoid having things overlap each other. You wanna look at your planner at the beginning of the day and the end of the day. You look at it at the beginning of the day to get an overview of what you’ve got to do for the day. And then you wanna look at it at the end of the day, to see what things were left unfinished and what you’ve got going on the next day.

If there are things that you didn’t complete, you wanna move that task to another time slot.

And that could be the next day, or it could be several days down the road. If you notice a pattern of certain things that you never seem to finish, in the time that you thought you should, that can be a task that you break down into sub tasks and assign those as separate things for your to do list. So this may seem like a lot of work to get all of this going. When tasks seem too overwhelming to start, it means that the task is too big. So you break it down into parts.

So, I’ll break down what I’ve talked about in this video into parts.

Start with getting a watch and having an adequate number of clocks, visible to you in areas where you spend time. Then create your time log using your watch and your clocks. This may take you several days to do and start with the big things that you do, like getting ready for work, chores, eating dinner, getting ready for bed. And this list can also include things that you do at work, so you can have a better understanding of how you use your time at work.

And this is to help you appreciate time. Lastly, you get a daily planner and either a weekly or monthly planner. You’re gonna use the daily planner to track your appointments, obligations, and your to do list. And you’re going to consult the planner twice a day. In the morning to appreciate the scope of your day and in the evening to reflect on how your day transpired and review what you’ve got going on tomorrow.

It also gives you a chance to reschedule things that you didn’t complete. Okay, thanks for watching. I hope this is helpful for you. Go improve your time awareness and then come back later to hear about how to follow through with difficult tasks. Stay tuned, see you next time.

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