Julie and Jel discuss time management – the ups, the downs, and the realities of living with this very common ADHD challenge.
They highlight the difficulty in balancing impulsivity, distractions, and hyperfocus, which often leads to underestimating time or losing track of tasks. Both discuss strategies like setting reminders, creating structured routines, and choosing self-paced work environments that accommodate their need for flexibility. However, even with these strategies, they note that burnout can be a risk due to the tendency to take on too much. Julie and Jel find that working in harmony with natural rhythms, like rural routines, helps them maintain a healthier balance. They emphasize the importance of recognizing limitations and scheduling recovery time after periods of intense focus.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- Challenges and Habits: ADHD can complicate time management due to distraction, impulsivity, and hyperfocus. This often leads to underestimating time requirements or losing track of tasks when new interests arise.
- Hyperfocus vs. Procrastination: Those with ADHD may procrastinate on necessary tasks, only to make up for lost time in short, intense bursts of productivity, sometimes right before deadlines. This cycle is taxing and often leads to exhaustion.
- External Routines and Self-Structure: External routines, like school schedules or job expectations, can aid time management by providing structure. Conversely, self-imposed routines, like creating daily to-do lists and reminders, help manage distractions but are less effective without accountability.
- Avoiding Burnout: Attempting to balance multiple responsibilities (work, parenting, personal interests) can result in burnout for those with ADHD. To combat this, Julie and Jel suggest recognizing limits and setting aside recovery time after intensive periods.
- Impact of Nature and Routine: They find that rural life and natural schedules provide a grounding structure that helps alleviate some ADHD-related time management stress.
LINKS
Julie is the author of THE MISSING PIECE: A Woman’s Guide to Understanding, Diagnosing and Living with ADHD (Harper Collins, 2024).
TRANSCRIPT
JULIE: I’m Julie Legg, author of The Missing Piece and diagnosed with ADHD at 52.
JEL: And I’m Jel Legg, diagnosed at 55.
JULIE: Welcome to ADHDifference. Today we’re going to be talking about time management, a challenging area for many of us with ADHD.
JEL: Absolutely. So, we’ve had a pre- chat about this and we have a pre-chat and chat chat chat chat all the time about everything, but this one, wow. Looking back on our lives and current lives, managing time it’s a biggie. Managing appointments, managing schedules, managing time… deadlines, all sorts. So, we’re going to share some sort of our experiences and some of the tools we may be able to bring in, or we’ve brought in to help us, which may or may not work for you.
JULIE: Yeah, everybody’s very different.
JEL: Exactly.
JULIE: I was thinking back to when I was growing up, for a few years I lived on a remote island. It was at the time, it’s now a bit more populated, Kawau Island in the Hauraki Gulf just off Auckland in New Zealand – and there was no electricity in the home that we were living in. And so there was a strict routine in the morning of Correspondence School, and we’d do that, and then by lunchtime it was all ‘over Rover’ and we could go off and have free time. So, there was no time management. When the sun went down it was time to come in for dinner. Under the kerosene lamp, a few, you know, board games and then it was bed. So, we didn’t have clocks. We didn’t need them. We had a routine and that really worked for us but … life’s not always that easy.
JEL: No, that’s a pretty alternative free-range kind of way of living. I mean structured in so far as your parents were teachers, professional teachers, so it was an externally assessed proper education you’re receiving. Other than that, though it very much was outside the norms of how many of us grew up in houses, in streets with school timetables and so forth.
JULIE: Tell me about a few of your experiences with time.
JEL: When I was young or now or? [Both.] Both, oh yeah oh look as kids we … so I’m a child of the 70s, born in the 60s but I like to think of myself as a child of the 70s. So, my sort of real experience of going out independently and playing and exploring from about seven or eight or so is early 70s. And clocks? No. The clocks … we could read the time, that was a big achievement and tying our shoelaces, but you know clocks weren’t part of our world. We had no mobile phones. We didn’t have watches and so we were also driven by the sun and also structured around lunchtime and tea time. And, yeah, it was out exploring and going all over the place and just being very physically interactive with the world. But you got a sense of when tea time was either because the sun started to go down or you’d hear one of your friend’s mum calling from in the street. “Mark it’s tea time!” Well, if it’s Mark’s tea time it must be mine soon and then you get dragged in by a call and then sometimes back out again in the holidays. And television had very few programs for children, very few, so we didn’t even work around the timetable of a TV, which was great.
JULIE: It was. So, when did time management become a challenge for you because we can both agree growing up … and of course we had limited responsibilities, that’s you know that was our parents to suffer time management of us, probably … but when did it become an issue for you?
JEL: I think there’s a thin line between time management and how you want to spend your time. So as a child for me, this isn’t really time management, but I would be obsessed with my certain toys. Whether it was Lego, particularly Lego, to a certain age, or then building model railways that sort of thing. I just want to do it all day every day and I didn’t want to stop for tea, and I didn’t want to stop for bath time, or bed or any of that, and so that’s not time management, that’s a relationship with time where you aren’t really working to timetables.
JULIE: But also too, you know, you could add in there the hyperfocus and when you’re really hyperfocused on something you’re very passionate about it’s very difficult to tear yourself away from that. Yeah. Or others too and you know, poor parents probably got a … the ‘evil eye’ from us, daring to rip us away from our best-est hobby at the time.
JEL: I honestly, I think … I think where time management starts to really kick in at a certain age where you’re starting to get homework. The dreaded homework. And I think for me, I’m guessing probably around the age of 9 or 10 and suddenly … it wasn’t a lot, it might be an hour or so a week so it was … There were two options: leave that homework and concentrate on playing on your hobbies and whatever you were doing, leave it to the last minute and risk forgetting it and getting a detention, and that was the last thing I wanted, or do it straight away. And so, from the beginning for me, it set this time management of critical tasks that were expected to be done that have now gone all through my life, this arrangement and relationship with it. Do it straight away. As soon as I got home, straight into my room. Do the homework, nail it, and then the free time belonged to me.
JULIE: And I think too it’s interesting talking about childhood time management because the consequences of not having time management increases with age. Forgetting your homework because you would … you ran out of time is one thing, but in a job where you’re constantly late for work, for example, could end in disciplinary action or being fired over time. So, you know it can become an issue. I first realised that time was important to me in one of my many jobs. We’ll talk about careers and employment in another episode. But I had gone through about five jobs in two years when I left school at 16, and it wasn’t through to time management, but then I realised that my CV was looking pretty horrible. So, I decided to go contracting which is great because you could dip in and out, and you know, get ahead … you know, run in and do your job and then leave again. But what they required was accountability for my time. And so, every hour I really needed to, you know, write down what I did in that hour because at the end of the week I needed to put a report together or…
JEL: Someone has to be billed for the …
JULIE: Absolutely and in some of those, you know, in the legal professions you had to account for every six minutes of your time. It’s like, crikey! So, I was very fastidious of arranging my time during the workday to make sure that no one could look at me saying “ahhh, what have you been doing the last half hour?” I’d have a list and then I’d have a prompt that would come up on my screen saying you’ve got a meeting in 15 minutes. This is your time to prep so literally I spent the first half an hour of my day scheduling all these prompts on my, I think it was Microsoft Outlook schedule or something or other, and that really did help me. But I was very very scared of being pulled up and asked how I may have wasted some of that time.
JEL: So, what we’re talking about with time management, we often we’ll go sort of off track almost, but we haven’t gone off track but pull it back to how time management can relate to ADHD. So, I think what we have from early stages of our lives, that’s very structured. That’s a method to deal with it, otherwise you’d be all over the shop. [Yes, I would.] You wouldn’t get things done and you don’t want to fail any more than I want to fail at things. And so, from my perspective, if the teacher would say “this homework should only take about half an hour,” I wasn’t interested whether it’s going to take 30 minutes. There was one thing I needed to do. Get it done. Do it well. Get a good mark. Complete it and then free up my time. So as a child I wasn’t really thinking in their structure. It was my structure because ADHD for me was all about my time, my freedom. Yeah, and then when I got into a work environment I could … oh time sheets, no no no no. See for me, time sheets are irrelevant because I’d be given a task and if I did that task well in a reasonable period of time, or at least on time … There’s the key thing. It’s not about how long it takes for me, it’s … was it done well and was it done on time? So that’s the sort of framework I have to work in, and all my adult life is … I might charge you an hour to do something okay, but if it takes me 3 hours to do that that’s not your problem. You’re still only getting charged an hour. It’s my problem to deal with.
JULIE: So tell me, why does a job that takes 1 hour … why does it take 3 hours, Jel?
JEL: Time management.
JULIE: And what are you doing in the other two hours?
JEL: Yeah well, it’s the … any subject we talk about in any of these individual wee vlogs or podcasts, they always relate to something else and in that case it’s distraction, lacking of focus. What particularly doesn’t work for … I think we both work on computers and have done for as long as we can remember now, and of course once the internet kicks in you’ve got access to this huge resource of entertaining and interesting things to read and watch. Well, that’s the distraction. So as a web developer you know I’ve got an excuse to be researching all the time. How to do something. How to make something work. How to write a code for something and of course it’s just a big smorgasbord of distractions. And, yeah it just doesn’t work for me if someone phones up in a panic and says “we have to have this done in the next hour.” That’s the worst thing. If they said “we have to have it done tomorrow,” no problem. I guarantee it will be done tomorrow. It’s always done the next day. For my entire business as a web developer was based on no more than 24-hour turnaround. There was no booking it in next Thursday for you. You give me the job today often it would be back today or first thing in the morning. But in a day I might have four billable hours but spent nine hours in front of the screen. Yes. That distraction kicks in. Yes. Time management you see, rubbish time management.
JULIE: I was just going to relay a bit of a story too. I’ve been contracting for decades but also working from home running my own business. And I used to find simple things like writing a report … I know it should take an hour and that’ll be fine, but I just had to double check because yeah that I hadn’t missed out words and double check my numbers. Just in case I was careless or not focused at the time. So it took me longer as well, and writing emails and all sorts, and so I also would undercharge my hours. Isn’t it crazy.
JEL: And then there’s another aspect that kicks in when you … excuse me … when you have spent four hours doing something should take an hour, suddenly you can find this hyperfocus part of you can kick in and make up for that time, and do something really well and efficiently really quickly.
JULIE: For me it’s 4:00pm. I often get a bit lost during the day, in so far as time management goes, and I Iook up at the clock and … yes we do have a clock in the kitchen, and I go “Oh my goodness it’s 4:00pm,” and I’ll find that from 4 to 5 I’m the most productive whatever I’m doing. I nail it because I’m almost making up for lost time.
JEL: So, what we’re really saying is, I think both of our careers have been for, well for a latter long long part of our careers, since computers have come in, we’ve really been goal and goal orientated rather than procedure orientated. It’s all about what do you want, when do you want it and we will always deliver. We hate to be late or miss a deadline, but we suffer a fair bit for the process because yeah, we can lose a lot of our free time because our time management is absolutely rubbish.
JULIE: Talk to me about appointments.
JEL: Appointments oh, now you see appointments … I always … If I have a choice like going to the doctor or dentist, that sort of thing, I’ll always pick 11:00 in the morning because build … Even from the day before, building up to that 11:00 appointment I can’t do anything else. I can’t relax. Can’t concentrate, anything. Everything has to be … It’s a process of getting … Well, I’m going to have to leave at this time. Before that I’ll grab a shower. I need to have had breakfast. It’s just … It’s really quite stressy and so if I have a 2:00 in the afternoon appointment it writes off the whole day. I have this thing about hating to be late because with ADHD it’s a bit of a trait that our time management is so rubbish we’re bound to be late. So, everything I do in life is compensated by overthinking what can I do to avoid that situation.
JULIE: So, you would never be known as the guy who’s always late for things? No. You’re always early, very very on time.
JEL: And then I sit there early and I think “oh so early” and then you know what it’s like when you go to the doctors or dentist. You never go in exactly on time and 20 minutes after my time’s gone, and I do see a clock and I’m looking at the clock, and I get more and more stressed and my legs start doing the, you know, the air drumming. [Yes.] There’s St Vitus Dance I think it used to be called, which I’ve done all my life. The legs just, you know, off they go and that’s it, I’m really starting to go.
JULIE: And no wonder your blood pressure is up when they test it. It’s not going to the doctors. It’s waiting for that half an hour.
JEL: Waiting, waiting. Ah, that’s it. It’s someone else’s timetable. It’s all the time it’s someone else’s timetable, well that’s patience that’s another conversation altogether, but yeah, I’m losing control of my own timetable. So, going there and then back to the thing where I waste three hours to then do one hour’s work, well that’s my choice. I can’t blame anyone for that you know, but when someone else is making me wait that ADHD thing really kicks in.
JULIE: Yes. I’m a little bit more haphazard when it comes to simple things like going to an appointment. I go “Yeah it’s going to take me 30 minutes. It’s taken me 30 minutes to drive there.” We live rurally so it takes 30 minutes to drive anywhere but it’s, you know, “half an hour’s fine” and so I’ll be busy doing something, and being distracted, and useless time management, and then I think “oh I’m still on my dressing gown.” I didn’t factor in the fact that I’d have to get changed and, you know, maybe brush my hair before I left. And I jump in the car stressed, knowing that I’ve got to make this in 25 minutes, only to find that I’ve got no petrol in the car and then I need to do a big deviation off to the station to fill up. And so even though I’m trying to come in very calm and relaxed it always ends up for me, I’m not always on time.
JEL: When I went for my assessment, excuse me, one of the things with the psychologist, my psychologist, was eliminating or discounting a whole bunch of things that it could have been rather than ADHD. So various analysis tests and so forth looking for a personality disorder but one of them that I raised that I was concerned or thought maybe I had was a degree of OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder I believe, because I do have an obsession with where things are on my desk, where objects belong. The keys go there, or that something goes there, but no, that was completely ruled out. So, in relation back to … Jules is not quite the same as me on that regard eh. The keys will come in and they’ll go somewhere random. And my fear in life, there’s lots of fears in life but one of them, is losing the keys to the car. Stupid little things that can have such a big stressful impact.
JULIE: Which is all about wasting time funnily enough, isn’t it? [It’s inefficient.] And that’s why you put your pen in the same place because otherwise you’d be running around looking for a pen and that takes time when you need one.
JEL: Yeah, so as a result then, you know, even when Jules is going to the doctor, part of my … it isn’t OCD but what I call OCD kicks in, but it’s actually a tool to manage the ADHD. So, I start “so okay darling, is there petrol in the car? You’ve got petrol for tomorrow?” I make sure the keys are where I know Jules expects to find them. Never leaves them in that place but knows where to find them, magically.
JULIE: Magically a little elf comes and finds my keys and puts it back in the same place.
JEL: And as you’re leaving the door “see you later darling, have you got your phone?”
JULIE: That’s right, my phone yeah yeah yeah.
JEL: Now perhaps in many marriages this is seen as overbearing or nagging but it’s not. These are the little tiny things we do to look out for each other. Just because we know each other’s shortfalls. I know there’s a high chance Jules will get a kilometre up the road and the phone’s still here. Won’t get a kilometre without the keys of course, but you’d try.
JULIE: A similar thing too is I find, I do all the cooking by choice, but also we’ve worked out that’s the most efficient use of time.
JEL: And you’ve tasted my food.
JULIE: Yes, I have. But even for me that takes a certain bit of time management to do. And after months and years of not eating ’til 10:00 at night because I had forgotten to defrost something, or I hadn’t had all the ingredients, or we were too busy talking until the wee small hours that we’ve forgotten we hadn’t eaten, I now try to make a concerted effort for that. So, dinners for me, it’s in my basket, and what I find to save those moments is I will cook up a big meal, more than we need, and freeze it down for those moments when my time management fails me. And I can just simply go and get a pre-prepared meal that I’ve made, you know, out of ingredients from our garden and have that. So, you haven’t been starving yet, have you.
JEL: But that’s also driven from … We have four grown boys, are men now, between us, all left home, so yeah. When you’ve got three hungry boys coming home with us at one stage, well quite a number of years of course, we’re a blended family, you have to be … You’ve got no choice.
JULIE: There were times where my time management was out of necessity and not necessarily by choice at all, in so far as I’d be getting up very early to drop one of the boys off at swimming lessons and then I’d be up making school lunches and the rest, and getting them off to school, and me going off to work – and in reverse homework, and then meals, and the rest. I hit every deadline at work too. It was a necessity for me to do that because that was what was required of me and my family but I was absolutely exhausted. And it wasn’t because “clever me, I was really good at my time.” I forced myself to do it and it wasn’t necessarily a pleasant experience I must say.
JEL: Now some of you may wonder how does someone with ADHD who’s not medicated be so structured and so successful at balancing and organizing all of that? Well, there’s a downside isn’t there. Because then when it becomes your time, perhaps from about 9 or 10:00 at night you stay up till 2:00 working on some side hustle. You’re developing a website at one stage. And then, but in bed at 2am up at 6am. You have to have that down[time] personal time. Whatever we do we have to have that personal time at the end of the day and half an hour, an hour, is not really enough. [No, that’s right.] And so, what’s the side … What’s the trade-off there is then your health starts to fail. [I agree.] You can’t go on like that. That’s the burnout. [Absolutely.] And so, you know, sometimes with ADHD perhaps without medication, but even with medication, you still have to do all of that. You know, you have to. You’re juggling all these plates. Eventually the plates might land nice and tidily but you’ll break. You can’t go on like that.
JULIE: And you’ve touched on something there too and that’s almost ‘recovery time’. I know we’ll be chatting more about it in another episode but it’s after such a hectic hectic routine day forced upon you, or self-imposed, you do need that downtime to recharge your batteries and it isn’t necessarily sleeping you know. It’s just that time to collect your thoughts.
JEL: Now I’ve got a thought on that, just thinking about it, we’re talking about time management. Now you do all of that, which is a job in itself. Solo mum, three young men, lots of activities and so on, then you suddenly say “well I want to build a website. I’m really passionate about it.” It was a big website with lots of content so then you stay up for that, those 4 hours a night every night, ’til 2:00. That’s actually a really good example of bad time management because you’d have been better off going to sleep. [I know.]
JEL: And trying to find some time on Sunday when they had all done this, or Saturday when they had done their sports and they were just chilling, to concentrate then but this is the ADHD thing, for us, is we just want it all. We want to do everything. We’ll run around at 100 km an hour, and we want to build that website, and we want to be responsible good parents. And commit to all of that. And this is perhaps why burnout so often happens with us is we don’t know when to stop.
JULIE: Yes, which brings regulation into it or moderation and I think with ADHD brains we struggle with moderating anything and so if we want to do it, I want it now. If I can do it now, I want to do it now. I don’t want to wait for another week and again that’s the impulsivity coming out. Yeah, and I was going to say and then throw everything in there – the dopamine hit of achieving great things. Yes. You know your interests sparking and feeling as if you’ve achieved greatness for the day.
JEL: Everything’s interrelated as you’ll see, as you work through different episodes, focusing around one or two words, in this case time management. So, while Jules was a solo mum, I was …
JULIE: I think they call it a single parent.
JEL: Single parent okay, single parent these days. And I was working separately, I had my … building … you know, at the height of my web development business and I literally could be doing 80 or 90-hour week sometimes. I know that that seems pretty impossible, and I can’t believe I’m saying it, but you can do 14-hour days. Especially working from home, you don’t waste 2 hours going into work and especially not having meetings. You just, you know meetings … if you work remotely, it can be quite efficient in some ways, but actually then that leads to some all sorts of health problems and burnout. The work comes in, the work comes in. You don’t say no and you just do more and more and more and the time management goes completely out the window. There’s no time management to say I need to go for a walk, I need to sit and relax, watch a movie. I’ll watch a movie, put the movie on but I’m still coding. Yeah. So, I can do two things at once. So, is that good time management? No, it’s bad time management.
JULIE: And it is really frustrating, isn’t it because we know. We know we should take time out of our day to exercise, some time for ourselves, a balanced work-life style. You can tell us ’til we’re blue in the face but our gut instinct is to squeeze as much as we possibly can into a day or being a walking contradiction and lose ourself and do nothing in a day. So, it’s … time management is always going to be a challenge.
JEL: I don’t know that we’ve really ever been any good at time management. We’ both always run two or three, sometimes careers and sometimes interests. So, while you’re working in marketing and paying the bills with marketing, you’re also a professional actress and doing voice over work as a professional, which is all extra on top of that and being … what’d they call it these days? Single parent.
JULIE: Single parent … what? Yes.
JEL: Okay and for me personally, yeah often working as an engineer and running a recording studio and … Do you know what it was with the web development you were doing, and me learning how to be a music producer and an audio engineer, and then the web development, no one taught me. I taught that whilst being an electronics engineer … overlapping careers, sometimes for two or three years, where you want to move from one career to another, you do two things at once. So, we’re talking about time management but for a lot of our lives there hasn’t been any.
JULIE: No. There really hasn’t. No, just crammed as much as possible …
JEL: Just running on the hyper all the time. Yeah. So where are we now? Well, we’ve retired to some degree. That’s a big word for people our age, but stepped back from the pressure of those careers.
JULIE: Yeah, it’s interesting. We use the word ‘retired’ because it makes us feel good but actually, we never stop doing anything and there’s so many projects on the go all the time. I don’t think we’ll ever stop, if you know what I mean.
JEL: I still have web development clients. I still love doing the work but not 90 hours a week. Still a music producer. We have a studio and run but not commercially so much now. It’s a bit less than it used to be.
JULIE: Well, we use that for … our own commercial projects. Yeah, so we have a … We’re a studio band ourselves so we do a lot of work there too. I’m still contemplating writing my next book and I have waves of busyness.
JEL: I know what’s changed. [What’s changed?] A lot of energy goes to looking into, looking after, rural property. It’s not a huge one. It’s only a hectare and only half of it really accessible, so it’s not huge. You grow lots of food. [I do.] You preserve lots of food. [I do.] You do amazing stuff with what comes out of the garden. [Thank you very much.] There’s lots of it. There’s a fair amount to look after in an old house and so forth, so a lot of time now gets spent doing those things. Time management with those is easier because you can’t cut the grass at 2:00 in the morning. [Correct.] Yes, so nature starts giving you a timetable. You can’t cut the hedges in the middle of summer so don’t worry about it. Yes. Do you see what I mean? It’s like … and then suddenly nature says “oh there’s loads of weeds everywhere you need to get rid of them.” Okay, fair enough.
JULIE: Yes, interesting. That … I love that, I really like that, which means that again getting … going back full circle, being closer to nature so to speak, we work to sort of natural and seasonal timetables which does suit us well.
JEL: Yes, really the ADHD just calms down a bit it’s …
JULIE: Okay so we’ll bring that in so maybe the stresses that we have with time management is because of other people and external things. Not for us. We’re more than happy. We do what we need to do in a day, really because no there’s no external pressures.
JEL: We have to be honest; we achieve less. A lot less than we used to.
JULIE: I know but we’re still smiling I think, which is just important – balance.
JEL: But when we have those bursts of energy where something has to be done very quickly, we know how to do it quickly.
JULIE: Yes, we do, oh for example we can clean the house in an hour, if someone says that they’re going to come around. [It’s like a military operation.] But we won’t necessarily … [Bother if they’re not coming around.] Yeah, so once a month we go “oh my goodness, how the heck has it got this bad?” and then we’ll have to spend a day doing it but any which way, when the urgency is there maybe our time management becomes better.
JEL: Time management. Now bearing in mind, of course, people watching or listen to this don’t live in exactly the same situation we do and please please please understand that the situation we’re in now is not the story of our lives. We have lived in town, working in offices and factories, and laboratories and places like … all different places like that. Driving in traffic every day both here and the UK, we both lived in the UK at times though separately, so we know what that real world is like out there for most people. Time management. You said something earlier I think I can relate to is when it’s external pressures. For me one of the external pressures of time management is being in an environment where I feel I’m being watched. Am I working or not working? [Yeah, true.] Well, the thing is though I developed incredible abilities to make it look like I’m working when I was actually reading about something that interested me. [No way!] Oh yeah, because I don’t work in that environment. [I’m shocked.] Get back to what we said at the beginning, it’s not about what do I produce per hour. It’s about what do you want and when do you want it, and is it reasonable? If you want that by the end of the day or the week, and that would be sufficient to say I deserve a week’s salary for doing that for you, I will deliver it. Even if I have to take it home and work on it, I’ll do it.
JULIE: I agree actually which prompted me just to think in a sort of a corporate office environment and you’re expected to be sitting there in your chair, being busy, but when things are really quiet and there’s not a lot to do, it drives me nuts because you’ve got to look busy because you can’t just go home, because that’s not the done thing. You’ve achieved all you can possibly do in that day … very very frustrating.
JEL: I was very lucky that I worked for a number of years in one electronics company and we were big exporters and earned a lot of money for the country, which I was quite proud of. And sometimes it would be so intense and so busy and there’d be other times when it might be three or four months where we’re in between big projects and there was nothing happening. But I think for the time, it was the 90s, we had very progressive people that owned that company and say to us engineers “well we’re very quiet at the moment so just jump on the internet and research and up-skill yourself or learn something about the new technologies and just manage your own time doing that” and that suited me so well because you know yeah … that’s where I learned I could just learn, teach myself and learn things. And then suddenly a project would come in and it’s like “got to get this done.” Done under a high-pressure environment and then, with ADHD of course, that’s a challenge. Just loved it. Loved that intensity. 36-hour shifts sometimes to get something out the door. I … again, none of it’s good for your health but, you know, I think perhaps being unmedicated is how in some ways we managed that but none of it’s good for your health. I will say this a lot through these … through these chats and so on. There’s no big prize at the end of this. It’s no “well done, yay.” No, no. There are downsides, always.
JULIE: So, like many things, time management like many other ADHD traits, and all challenges, I think it really depends on the person and their environment whether it’s a problem, or not. If you’re fully retired and all you have to do is work out, you know, when bowling practice is, or you know when the bridge club starts, you can manage your time better that way, but when You’ve got demands on you it can be quite tricky.
JEL: Well, it’s interesting you raise that actually. When you’re fully retired and you have a lot less to do, if you perhaps … and ADHD of course is across the entire age range, there are people in their 70s that you’ve come across that are being diagnosed, so it’s well into retirement, you’ve always got this other thing kicking away with the side of ADHD is you can’t just sit there and do nothing. Your brain won’t … your brain just won’t stop firing with thoughts and ideas so you do have to do something. And there is an old adage that some people say, a lot of people say, “look I’ve never been so busy since I retired.” Now when we use the word retired, we are not … we don’t have the state pension or anything, we know we’re not at that age at all, it just means we’ve stepped away from the primary careers that we’ve had but actually we are just as busy now. We are. But it’s just our time management is probably better because we’re forced by nature to have time management.
JEL: I can’t emphasize that enough. It’s I think nature will pop up a lot in these chats how even if it’s you can find your lunchtime instead of sitting in the office going through your phone and watching the news, if you have a wee park around the corner or some green space … you used to have in Ponsonby didn’t you? Go and sit in that park and sit there and don’t take your phone. Eat lunch and just listen to the birds. That’s a massive thing to calm the brain, isn’t it? Just listen to nature. [Absolutely.] Sound like a couple of old hippies but it is pretty amazing. We have birds that get into big fights and squabbles out the back where we have a table. [They do.] Sometimes you have to tell them off like children they get so carried away.
JULIE: Some … some little strategies that may or may not be useful, or not, but anecdotally people have put like a kitchen timer on knowing that … or their phone, 30 minutes, give yourself 30 minutes to do what you need to do and then attempt to do the dishes which are piling up from last night. Or, you know, just give yourself little things … or if you’re struggling with studying and, for example, or writing a report do it in short bursts and go “that’s right, after 30 minutes … 10 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, stop” and have a break. Walk around the house. Have a glass of water and then get back into it. And I think do whatever it takes to challenge yourself, to put little wee little stepping stones in place, if that’s a challenge for you.
JEL: That certainly is a method. A method I’ve used, if I have a bunch of things to do and once they’re done, I get to have play time, then I just go gung-ho at them. There’s the washing up, done. There are the clothes, put away. There’s that done. You know and I just go gung. I use my ADHD just to go hyperfocus boom boom boom boom boom boom and then I go, right now I can do the thing I’ve looked … all I’ve wanted to do for ages, do you know. Go record a bit of music, or write some music, and then I completely fail. I don’t do that I just start losing myself on the internet.
JULIE: But you’ve given yourself a chance at least.
JEL: It’s good time management followed by hopeless time management. There is no magic bullet really, is there?
JULIE: No there isn’t but it did sort of remind me though of, I like the hard work and then reward so knowing that … It’s a dopamine hit. [Self-driven.] Yeah, so you reward yourself by achieving something that you’re not so excited about and then rewarding yourself …
JEL: But you do actually have to reward yourself. If you say at the end of this process “I’m going to go and play …” well I don’t play computer games, but if that’s your thing and I’m going to go have an hour or so playing a computer game a couple of hours before bed, you do actually have to do that. Or you don’t get the dopamine hit from doing it. You know it’s like you do get a bit of a hit from getting on top of those tasks and getting them done but you still need that big reward of that. It’s a reward thing, I’ve done that now I deserve something.
JULIE: Now dopamine, again, is going to be another subject that we’ll be talking about but you’re right. If you think about a project, a really long project that’s going to take months and months and months and months or years, oh gosh we’ve had a few of those, it’s a really hard slog, if you’re just all day long, all day long doing the same thing. You almost need … you know we talk about complicated things to chunk it into sections. [Simple parts.] And so to do a burst and then to again allow a chunk to rest, recover and reward yourself is the approach really because we’ve got to wake up in the morning, and hopefully with a smile on our dial, and get stuck into the day. So we have to be kind to ourselves.
JEL: Or not get stuck into the day sometimes, be honest. Sometimes you just wake up and you achieve nothing and do nothing. It’s another day.
JULIE: Yes, but if you need to be in the office.
JEL: Yeah that’s back to that all the time isn’t it and that’s an interesting thing ‘if you need to be in the office.’ Actually think about ‘I need to be in the office on Monday.’ Okay well what does that sentence mean? If that sentence is: on Monday I need to complete that project or do that thing or achieve that part of the project, isn’t it so much nicer if you don’t have to go to the office. You just have to get that done on Monday. I know but that’s another conversation … Time management is so related to your environment where you know … and there is this big modern conversation about how efficient or inefficient it is for people to work at home. For me personally and I think for you, I’ve been an advocate for working at home for … I haven’t been in an office since 2000. That’s 24 years.
JULIE: Yeah it is tricky when you when you don’t have the choice however.
I know. It is tricky and we talk about time management and that kind of ties in with procrastination and maybe struggling with prioritization. And I think if you can get some assistance, if that’s a problem at work, it’s a matter of asking someone to help you prioritize the day’s tasks I think and that would help with time management too. If it all turns to custard at least you’ve got some major things done. Yeah, it’s a little bit of a work in progress isn’t it.
JEL: Wow, tricky. That’s time management.