Head in the Clouds

Out of the (Cluttered) Closet

Part of me didn’t want to tell my parents about my ADD. I was afraid they’d dismiss it as some kind of flaky psychobabble or tell me that ADD was just an excuse for all the ways I’ve never had my act together.

But, even into my thirties and forties, my parents kept saying things like “Why don’t you just get up and start work at 8 a.m. and work for eight hours” or “Why don’t you just add up how long it takes you to get ready to go out.” I was longing for them to understand why, even though their ideas made sense, it wasn’t quite so easy to implement them. 

And, even more importantly, every once in a while my mom would say, with a sigh, something like “I guess we never taught you to manage your finances.” I wanted to let my parents know that my challenges are due in large part to my genes, plus who-knows-what environmental factors. That my brain actually works differently from the average brain. Mostly, I wanted them to know that my flakiness is not their fault.

Since my mom and dad were both approaching eighty, I figured I'd better not procrastinate for too long. So, after sitting on the couch with the phone in my lap for many minutes one day, I finally dialed. My dad answered. I probably talked fast. I told him all I knew at the time about ADD in adults, ADD in women, ADD in girls.

When I finally stopped, he thought a little. Then he said the perfect thing.

“That explains a lot.”

In what ways have people validated or invalidated your experience with ADD, or a loved one’s experience? Join in the conversation!

Manage Your Time, or Manage Your Energy?

Managing my time is, for me, sort of like herding a flock of squirrels, Cape buffalo, and banana slugs. Maybe that’s why I immediately liked an idea my ex started talking about a few years ago: Manage your energy, not your time. That thought came to him one day as he meditated. Not coincidentally, it was soon after he stopped drinking coffee. He’d been wondering how he’d get through his days without caffeine.

Apparently, my ex is not the only person to suggest managing your energy instead of your time. A friend recently sent me a link to an interview with Tony Schwartz, co-author of a whole book on the topic.

I’ve only read the interview and whatever I could peruse of the book on Amazon, but here’s what I’ve taken away: Schwartz suggests examining what gives you energy and what depletes your energy in four areas: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. He also suggests working in “sprints,” interspersed with recovery time. And he talks about the “power of positive rituals.”

Managing energy seems like a particularly helpful idea for those of us with ADD, since we often have such difficulty getting a grasp on time. In my case, time doesn’t feel like it moves at a constant speed, I have the hardest time figuring out what to do when, and the same tasks can take me wildly differing amounts of time. I can more easily visualize how to alternate work and rest, how to nourish my body and spirit, and how to build comforting routines (but not too rigid a structure) into my life.

I realize I’ve done bits and pieces of energy management intuitively over the years, and I’ve let the concept slip into my consciousness a bit more lately. Here are a few things that help me: 

• I don’t tie the belt of my bathrobe to the chair in my home office for X number of hours. Instead, whenever my brain disengages, I go off and scrub a sink or do some knee exercises or something. When I come back to the office, my brain is usually good to go again. 
• I listen to the Doors or the Gipsy Kings or Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me (the NPR news quiz) to keep my energy up when I do housekeeping.
• I go on frequent short hikes, eat plenty of protein and produce, and try really hard to go to bed at a reasonable time. (Um, it’s approaching 1 a.m. as I draft this. Apparently I have a ways to go on this last one. )
• I do one- to ten-minute guided meditations on the computer (more on that in a future blog post).
• I fit in fun stuff—camping, miniature golf, folk-dancing, wading in the creek, box games with my daughter.
• I go to support groups and call people and get together for walks and tea. 
• I keep honing my routines around housekeeping, work, exercise, and all the rest. 
• I’m trying to stick with work I’m passionate about. 
• I practice gratefulness.

Most of those things take time. But they do give me energy.

Still, sometimes I’m afraid that if I engage in enough energy-building activities to really help (am I high maintenance in this way?), I won’t have enough time left to do much actual work. Maybe it’s time to read Schwartz’s book and implement the concept more deliberately. My ex found the book a year or so after his own revelation, and he recommends it.

Are there ways you manage your energy, as opposed to your time? Feel free to chime in by commenting!   
 

Here’s the short interview with Tony Schwartz that my friend sent me.

Tony Schwartz and co-author Jim Loehr’s book is The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal.

Here’s a strategy for doing homework that fits into Loehr and Schwartz’s model.

Here are the Gipsy Kings performing "Bamboleo" live. The song is good for almost five minutes of energetic housework: