Keep Your Eye on the Prize
Are you the type who has this inner conflict: You have the ability to hyperfocus, but due to your distractibility that focus is often misplaced?
I don’t know about you, but I find it real easy to throw myself into a task with great abandon. The only problem is that the task I choose may not be the one that will be the most beneficial to me at the time. I could be sitting down at my desk with full intent to resolve or complete an important task: let’s say its the next post for this blog. Out of the corner of my eye, I’ll see my bookshelves and decide it’s the perfect time to reorganize several hundred books.
Busy as heck, but rather ineffective. The key to your success lies in being able to take that energy, that need to keep busy, and consciously point it in the right direction. If you need to get somewhere, you don’t run on a treadmill.
Sitting down with very clear intent and direction will help to keep you on the right task. Make a point of planning and prioritizing. Decide what is going to help move you toward your most critical goals. Pick the steps that are most important to focus on next and work on those. Monitor your time – keep a written record of it – to keep yourself honest.
Baby steps in the right direction are more important than marathons in the wrong direction.
Chris – Thanks for this post. This is one of my most common hurtles in both my professional and personal life. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat down to do a project, clean a room, do a budget and instead totally rearranged my music library, read thirty pages of blog posts or played five hours of a video game online. So many times as an ADHD’er when you stand in front of the mountain with no map, instead of climbing, you just end up finding another path.
The technique I’ve found most effective professionally is a two list system, a daily to-do and a Master Plan, that I make myself reconcile everyday for 15 minutes. I’m interested in what other Hunter’s do to keep themselves on track.
Thanks for sharing with us Mike. My situation is unique in that I am juggling my professional calendar and responsibilities, as well as those related to my work as the ADHD Hunter. I am using a combination of two different Outlook files, Google Docs & Google Calendar, all of which feed to my Blackberry, with eight e-mail accounts. For longer-term planning, I use a series of spreadsheet and word-processing documents, as well as Mindmeister mind-mapping. I know it sounds overly complicated, but it’s necessary so that I can compartmentalize the different aspects of my life.
What are the rest of you doing? Please comment below with what works for you or with what difficulties you are challenged by.
– Chris
Chris,
Even I needed this one today! Got so much to do am finding myself easily sidetracked. So this is a short comment! Gotta start with a list.
A.
Thanks for taking the time to stop by Amy! Hope all is well.