Adult ADD | How To Streamline An ADD Day

Last time, we talked about attention deficit and boredom, and how much doing boring things affects people with ADD. Part of the path toward correcting that problem is deciding what you did in a day, and categorizing those things, so that you can eliminate boredom effectively. But you may wonder, What are those categories?

Everyone should look at two general categories: Personal and Business. If you feel an ADD need to argue with yourself over certain things you do and how exact your categories can be, don't do that right away. Put what you do into four general categories, and mold and shape them as it makes sense to you.

The first general category is household/personal. This would be anything that you’re doing, like feeding the dog, cleaning the toilets, doing the laundry, taking care of the kids, riding back and forth to school—or whatever it is that you have to do that’s outside of work.

The second general category is business, but there are three sub-categories that you need to look at.

Number one is ”Administrative.” The administrative category would include answering the telephones, writing letters, managing people, meeting with contractors. It might be all those kinds of things that basically keep the business running. You could include accounting or bill paying, things that people with ADD are prone to hate, and that kind of thing, too.

The second category in business is a category called “Production.” The raw definition of production is anything that you do in your business that relates to the creation or delivery of your product or service.

This category is generally very exciting and things that people with attention deficit like to do. It's a delivery of a service that we promise to provide. It’s a production task. It would include bringing a product to fruition, that brings out our ADD creativity. But for boring things like getting the phone lines for a teleseminar, and recordings, and all those things set up. Stuff ADD people usually hate. Those are all production tasks.

The last category in business is “Sales and Marketing.” Even though sales and marketing are tactically two different areas, they both have to do with customers. Marketing in its raw form is the act of bringing customers to you and getting them interested. Sales is the act of building the relationship and making the sale. It's like the game part of business that people with attention deficit generally enjoy.

Write everything you do down for a full week. Then, once you understand and analyze the basic categories, look at your list of tasks, and ask yourself, “Where am I spending my time? Am I spending all my time doing boring things?” If you are and have ADD, you’re probably feeling stuck. People with attention deficit just don't like to be bored, period. You’re probably feeling frustrated and unmotivated.

What can you do when you know that you have boring tasks?

You need to start outsourcing and delegating them, one at a time, to other people.

However, when you absolutely have to do the boring tasks—when you’ve got to do the dishes, take out the garbage, or some kind of accounting, what can you do?

One thing is to never allow your ADD procrastination tendencies talk yourself out of outsourcing something. Talk to at least five people about how much it’s actually going to cost you, and you'll probably find that it's much more affordable than you expected.

Many people with ADD resist what we’re talking about, saying, “I can’t afford to do this.” We’ve said this before and we’ll continue to say it. That is, it costs you twice as much in time, money and frustration to try to do it yourself. It’s not worth it. Have you actually figured how much your time is worth?

Use your ADD to focus here. How much do you need? Decide an actual figure. Write it down. How much do you need each month? How much each week? Each day? Each hour? Then, come up with a plan to make that much money.

The other thing is when you start to write these categories down, and start to think about what you might outsource, it’s not an all-or-nothing thing. It’s not like you’re going to bring on someone full time and carry the cost burden of that. It might be a one-hour job.

You need to figure out what mundane boring things you're doing every day that make you fall into ADD procrastination and frustration. Then, you need to hire people without attention deficit to do them. Decide what's more important... your money or your time, and remember, you can always replace the money.