You Mean I'm Not Lazy, Stupid or Crazy?!: The Classic Self-Help Book for Adults With Attention Deficit Disorder (19 page)

1. What is your daily/weekly work capacity?
   
2. How much sleep and rest do you need, including “down time” when there are no demands placed on you?
   
3. What is your financial bottom line—how much income do you require to maintain an acceptable standard of living?
   
4. How much time can you devote to family and friends?
   
5. What must you do to renew yourself spiritually, not just in the sense of religion but regarding anything that gives your life meaning?
   
6. How much and what kind of recreational activities are critical for your well-being?
   
7. How long can you work efficiently without a break?
   
8. What obligations can you fulfill?
   
9. What things are cluttering your life and could be eliminated?
   
10. How much time do you spend daily on self-maintenance: grooming, dressing or health care?
    

Is Your Life in Balance?

You probably know that “all work and no play makes Johnny a dull boy.” A balanced life must include time for work, relationships,
spiritual renewal, recreation and rest. In today’s fast-track, dual-career society,
the pressures are such that even calm, well-organized people become frazzled as they attempt to find time for everything.

The juggling act is daunting for you as an ADD adult. If you just go with the flow, you’re likely to find yourself drifting in directions that aren’t particularly helpful. You can get immersed in work and forget that you have a family, or allow your socializing at work to
interfere with the quality of your performance. Since you’re distractible and have an elastic sense of time, you can’t expect to let balance take care of itself. You need to carefully design it. To work the steps in your personal balance plan most effectively, we recommend that you hire an ADD coach to assist you in the process.

Conduct Your Own One-Rat Study

To answer the questions we posed
about the balance in your life, you’ll need to conduct your own research experiment. It should include a daily log that tracks your activities for several weeks. Write down everything you do and how much time it takes. Also, keep track of the difficulty of each task or event.

Rate the difficulty on a scale of one to ten. If you have trouble deciding how to rate something, pay attention to stress
indicators. What happens when you face too many demands? Some people react to stress with muscle tension or headaches. Others become irritable or start tuning out. What is your pattern of stress indicators?

When your diary is complete, examine it for observable patterns. Did your stress indicators increase after a certain length of time on a task? If so, you have discovered how long you can work
without a break or a shift to another activity. In similar fashion, you can begin to estimate your overall daily and weekly work capacity.

By keeping track of stress symptoms and altering the number of hours you work, you can determine how long you can work efficiently. Don’t neglect the other areas of your life when you analyze your diary. Does exercise seem to lower your stress level and improve
the quality of your work? What about the time you spend with your family?

Make a Personal Schedule

It’s time to develop a tentative weekly schedule that includes an estimate of the time it takes to do each activity. As you pencil in time estimates on your schedule, be very careful. Refer to your diary to find out how long it took to complete various tasks, and factor in extra time. Doubling
your estimate for everything except sleep will give you a cushion for unexpected events and the distractions that inevitably derail ADDers. Don’t forget to include transition time from one activity to the next. Unfortunately, technology is not sufficiently advanced to allow us to “beam up” from one place to another.

We can almost guarantee that after the first week, you’ll decide that your schedule
is unworkable! You will probably find that everything you needed to do didn’t fit into your time frames. We bet that if you did manage to stay on schedule, you were frazzled by the end of the week.

Your life is out of balance because you’re trying to fit too much into it! This includes not just the quantity of activities but an accumulation of demands on your capacity for work and stress. After
you’ve recovered from the shock of recognizing the impossibility of doing it all, you’ll need to review your schedule with the goal of slicing and dicing it!

The demands on your life need to match your capacity and abilities and also fit into the time you have available. How do you get started figuring out what to cut out? In the next section, we’ll get back to the moral inventory we talked about
earlier. This will be the place for you to start.

Analyzing Personal Strengths and Weaknesses

Although we wouldn’t presume to minimize the enormous task of recovering from alcoholism, in some respects it might be easier than recovering from ADD. As an ADD adult, your flaws are less apparent than those of the alcoholic’s and may therefore be somewhat easier to deny and ignore. You have the power
to take control of your life by looking squarely at your limits.

Acknowledging your limits offers an opportunity for you to grow far beyond them. By limiting the activities that stress your fragile skills, you will free up energy and time for those you do well. It’s time for you get busy on your inventory to help you better understand your strengths and weaknesses. Use the following questions
as an outline for this important job.

What Can I Do Well?

This first question may be the hardest to answer! Members of our local adult support group were initially stumped when they tried to describe some of their strong points. Several expressed that they couldn’t think of anything positive because they were so accustomed to focusing on their mistakes. Over time, it became apparent that there
was indeed a wealth of talent among us. After several months, group members gradually became less tentative about their strengths.

If you have a similar problem, we suggest that you work first on enlarging your thinking about what constitutes an asset. For instance, as some of our group shared particular talents in their jobs, one participant (we’ll call her Sarah) was initially apologetic about
not working outside the home.

As the sharing continued in subsequent meetings, it became apparent that Sarah was a virtual genius at living a balanced life. She had conducted her own elaborate “one-rat study” to determine her work capacity. She added up all the mental and physical tasks performed in a typical week to arrive at a total number of working hours. Her calculations were very precise.
Sarah determined
that travel time to her son’s school conference constituted work, and time spent at the support group was leisure. She informed the group that she didn’t count the time it took her to get dressed in the morning, but if she had to change into her grass-cutting clothes during the day, she counted it as work!

Sarah spent several weeks tracking her signs of stress as she manipulated
the numbers of hours she worked in a given week. At the end of her study, she concluded that she could work no more than fifty hours a week without exceeding acceptable levels of stress. Since she already had two children, motherhood wasn’t an optional role, but she knew she could make decisions about her other roles.

She realized that she could manage only a part-time job outside the home, but
didn’t waste energy fretting about the lowered family income. Instead, she turned her creative talents to devising strategies for living well on less money. She grows much of the family’s food in a backyard garden, swims in a small pool dug with family labor and barters with friends for other goods and services. She carefully considers the impact of labor and money decisions on the family system,
not only as financial expenses but also as the cost and value of energy and time.

The result is a family that is truly in balance. Sarah, whose particular gifts aren’t easy to measure or define by societal standards, is extremely successful. She could be a valuable consultant to many harried, stressed families.

When you make your list of things you do well, go beyond the obvious. Many of us
with ADD measure personal worth by the yardstick of people with more orderly or ordinary lives and minds. We consider ourselves successful if we play tennis or golf well, have careers with a steady upward climb and perform tasks efficiently. Remember, our abilities are often more offbeat.

KK:
“My younger brother has ADD and has always had an intense curiosity about how things work. When he was
a kid, he
got in mega-trouble because he always took things apart and neglected to put them back together. He did, however, have a talent that was very useful. He could figure out how to open any kind of lock. We always called on him when family members had locked their keys in the car.

“He was a lifesaver when my dad, who worked for Colt firearms, accidentally locked my cousin Florence in a
pair of police handcuffs one Friday night. Unfortunately, the key was in Dad’s office, which was closed until Monday morning. Cousin Florence would have spent a very uncomfortable weekend had my brother not come to her rescue.

“My brother would have made a great burglar, but he might also have turned his unusual talent into something both income-producing and legal! I don’t know. Maybe he could have designed
security systems. Actually, he became a chef who happens to have many other untapped talents.

“When I was twenty-three years old and doing my own self-assessment, I was initially hard-pressed to figure out what
I did well. A string of failures had left me wondering if I had any abilities at all. I sidestepped the question of my abilities by taking a look at what I liked to do. Identifying my talents followed logically from this starting point.

“The first item on my list was that I liked to spend time talking with my friends. I realized that not only did I like it, I was also good at it. People often
called on me for help when they were in trouble or feeling unhappy. Bingo! I realized that I was an effective, albeit untrained, therapist.

“I added my love of reading to my list. I realized that besides books, I loved reading
people
and trying to understand them. My list grew to include attributes such as my tolerance and acceptance of others’ faults and my problem-solving skills.”

When you
begin working on your own list, try starting with the things you like to do. Since we often prefer activities that come easiest to us, you may find yourself focusing on your talents without even realizing it. Include as many things as you can. Don’t limit yourself to standard or marketable skills such as being a computer whiz or a good dancer. If you can tie a knot in a cherry stem with your tongue,
include it on your list. If your talent is playing the “Star-Spangled Banner” on your teeth, don’t hesitate to write it down. These abilities might not have any apparent value. But some creative thinking can lead to some surprising uses for seemingly useless and strange talents!

What Can I Do Adequately?

Your downhill skiing talents may not exactly qualify you for an Olympic gold medal. If you
can manage, however, to get down the hill in one piece, add this item to your inventory. What about the costumes you sewed for your daughter’s school play?
Maybe some of the seams ripped apart and had to be pinned together for the performance, but you did manage to get the twenty-five costumes sewed together.

The point is, you should include each thing you can do
reasonably
well. These activities
may not be your favorite things to do and they may not be a showcase of your talent, but at least you can get by with them. If you are a mediocre tennis player, include it as long as you don’t play so poorly that you face humiliation each time you step on the court. If your cooking is fairly routine and unexciting but edible, it belongs in this category.

What Can’t (or Shouldn’t) I Do?

This
final section of your inventory is extremely important because it will help you make decisions about the things you should simply stop doing. Do you remember Debra, who tries to hide her deficits by doing everything? Not only does she try to do everything, she tries to do everything brilliantly! She continually feels stressed and inadequate owing to her unrealistic expectations.

Even if you aren’t
trying to do it all, you are probably trying to do things you shouldn’t do. You may be a whiz in mathematics, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you should do your own income tax returns. Do you really have time to fit this into your schedule, or should you pay an accountant to do it? What about those things that really aren’t your forté? If you are experiencing failure when your efforts
don’t accomplish what you want them to, perhaps your only failure is in trying to do some of these things at all. No one can be wonderful at everything.

Many ADDers try so hard to be
normal
that they are unrealistic about their capabilities. If playing softball always results in an agonizingly embarrassing experience, don’t do it—even if your three closest friends pressure you into joining them
for this great pastime. Bland, rather tasteless meals are acceptable, but if you repeatedly burn down major sections of your kitchen, it’s time to reevaluate your cooking.