to-do lists

[dragonlady7]

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lazaefair replied to your post “Now that I’ve set myself up over on Dreamwidth I’m posting there more,…”

Your post is giving me sympathy panic. the only way I can get through that shit is by writing the entire to-do list down and breaking it down to the teeny-tiniest increments, AND continually reminding myself that it’s okay for me not to finish it. So when I find myself wondering what to do I can go back to the list to remind myself. And I can cross things off the list for that little dopamine rush.

oh my god I have SUCH a love-hate with to-do lists

i love making the lists, see, but the problem is that I have absolutely no idea how long a thing takes to do. I just don’t. So a to-do list for a single weekend might consist of three hundred hours’ worth of work, if you could actually do the math out. And the other thing I’m bad at is, on a large scale, understanding the dependencies of tasks? So I’ll tell myself that I need to Do Some Big Thing but then I have no idea where to start, and I’ll try to come up with smaller detailed things but I’ll get to that item and then it needs me to have done fifteen other little things first? 

I love lists. I write basically fanfic about what my life would be like if I could fucking do anything ever.

I have not been able to have friends over for about a decade because my house is too messy for anyone to get in the door. How do you fix that? 

Well, I know how you don’t. You write “CLEAN KITCHEN” on your to-do list, and then you think, well, ok, I need more detail, that’s just silly, and you write “MOP KITCHEN FLOOR” and you’re like oh I’ll have to sweep first, and you write “SWEEP AND MOP KITCHEN FLOOR” instead, and you’re all pleased, and you spend your afternoon at work daydreaming about how clean that floor is going to be when you get home. 

And then you get home and well, you can’t actually… mostly… see the floor in that room, and so you need to take out the recycling, and then you need to gather up all the film plastic recycling too, and you get that out the door and that’s great, and then you do the dishes, and that’s as much as I’ve gotten done this weekend, I’ve done the dishes like fifteen times because every time I go to do another bit of the big “CLEAN KITCHEN” to-do item on my beautiful list, there are more dirty dishes and I can’t do anything until I get those out of the way. And I’m also trying to do Christmas shopping and I really wanted to sit and write for a moment, well I’ll get to that later, maybe tomorrow, oh it’s Sunday already, well ok I won’t do any writing this weekend, fine, but I still have to– 

Oop, weekend’s over, maybe next time?

That’s how you go four years without sweeping your kitchen floor. 

So… no, to-do lists don’t really help me much. Lists are crucial– the Christmas gifts have lists to go along with them, and I’ve written down dimensions and things, and it’s possible some of them will get done now that they’re written down. Because things that aren’t written down don’t exist, to me, so they don’t happen.

But task lists don’t really help me much overall. I’m thirty-nine years old and I’ve never actually learned how to write a list of things that are actually possible in this world.

On Monday I’ll go back to work and look sadly at my list of what I was going to do this weekend (CLEAN KITCHEN was one two items of about twelve, and another one was PUT AWAY CLOTHES which is going to involve three rooms of the house and is a huge undertaking I’ve started working on about twenty times in the last two years, to give some idea), and then I’ll sit and start a new list and daydream about what it would be like if I were the sort of bitch who could actually write a reasonable to-do list and follow it.

At this very moment in my house if I had a kind of magical summoning ability so I could pull them out of the acres of shit in here, I could probably produce a stack for you of hundreds of to-do lists I’ve written myself, and not a single one of them has more than two items crossed off on it, no matter how many items there are. And I can’t throw them out until I finish them, or the tasks I’ve conjured will cease to exist.
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Comments

[unicornduke]

I think one of the issues with to do lists, is that you have to start with a baseline of somewhat clean. It doesn't work if there's stuff sitting around.

I get that same thing sometimes and I'm dealing with it right now in my bedroom. I can't vacuum the large amount of seeds off my floor because there's other shit on the floor, but I can't move those until I have space to put them, which would be on the table, which is covered in seed stuff still, etc, etc, etc.

I also didn't vacuum the kitchen/living room for a full month in September because there was too much shit on the floor and the only thing that kicked me out of it was the hair blobs got enormous.

One thing that I do is I'll just move Jade's shit. I usually just do a pile and then ask her to clean it up and she does eventually. Sometimes I'll put it in her room as is.

There's no real answer to this except that this shit is hard.

[light_of_summer]

I am wondering if you are familiar with diagrams that show how tasks depend on each other, and if something along those lines might prove helpful for you, especially if it is editable.

My first exposure to this kind of thing was probably flowcharts, in school, and my second was project management software, at work. Those both have their strengths and drawbacks, notably sticker price and time involved to use.

However, if you would be interested in trying a visual approach to tracking task dependencies, I can recommend free mind map software, which is not really intended for this purpose, but can be adapted to work. I have the SharpMindMap app on my Android phone. In the past, I have also used FreeMind software on Windows.

It's also possible to hand-draw an editable mindmap in any program that lets you select and move objects (as distinguished from whole sections of bitmap screens). The advantage of using mind map software is that the arrows automatically adjust and stay connected when you move stuff around.

Here is a quick example for some things I hope to do today:



The three places I plan to shop are in a specific order because I want to get Persian cucumbers instead of regular, if TJs still has them, and I need to get the frozen stuff last.

[dragonlady7]

oh man. i don't... know if I could figure out how to do this? I mean, I get that it's a flow chart kind of, but I worry that I'd get to preoccupied with making the pretty diagrams, and not actually... make a functional list. I sort of do this sometimes with my to-do lists, though? I'm not sure!

I sometimes get really annoyed that all my lifelong attempts to get diagnosed have been stymied, because all I really want is coping strategies, because yeah I should be able to figure stuff out on my own but the way you do that is by using the scientific method and trial and error, and trial and error doesn't work if you can't actually remember what happened last time you tried to do a thing, so you just wind up trying the same thing three or four dozen times until you've had so many bad outcomes that you're burnt-out on the entire idea of doing anything at all.

At this point I see new things that might help and then my eyes glaze over halfway through the explanatory paragraph and I'm like well that seems great I can't wait to never do it. I've gotten so that with things like sewing, if I can't master the thing by just picking it up and muddling through, then I won't do it. It's very annoying.

I like the idea of this, but I just don't know if I understand it. I mean, I get what you're saying. But I don't have a lot of faith that I'm going to manage to incorporate anything like this into my Attempts To Do Stuff routine.

I do know that I am capable of spending an entire day doing Literally Nothing because I figured out that a task had dependencies, so I can't do B until I've done A first, and I don't want to do / can't do / just am not doing A yet, so I Will Never Do Anything Ever, and that was most of my 20s.

[dragonlady7]

I'm quite good at cleaning at my sisters' houses. Farmsister keeps her house pretty tidy, so it's easy to clean up; I absent-mindedly clean her kitchen probably thrice a week, and sometimes I clean the bathroom mid-week too, but she's got a rigorous weekly schedule for all of it, so it's always really easy to just-- hop in and do it. And because it's a farmhouse full of people at all times, there's always just plain old dirt to clean up.
Middle-Little's house is a disaster of disorganization but I'm uninvested so it's easy for me to clean that, too, because I can see it all pretty clearly, understand what's trash and what's important, and I can efficiently move through, triage things, set aside important stuff, and get down to the dirt to remove it.

My place, I'm beset constantly by What Each Object Means, or conversely by a strange sort of blindness so I don't even see the objects as anything but Immovable Fixtures That Have Always Been Thus. It's exhausting and I can't figure out how to get around any of that. This box has been on the floor for literally years, I don't even understand that i could put it somewhere else and not have to step over it a thousand times a day.

[unicornduke]

Oh yeah. I've become more ruthless on the subject of "What Each Object Means" because I was extremely messy when I was younger. Just. Piles of shit everywhere and I stopped that when I discovered mice love it. I hated mice more than I hated cleaning, especially because they'd be moving around at night and I could hear them. Drove me nuts, almost literally because anxiety + extremely active imagination + rustling noises = very very bad. Dad didn't like cats so there was no cats in a 100 year old farmhouse. Of course there were mice.

I'm gearing up for a marathon day of cleaning. I can keep a baseline of clean in the living room and kitchen but given the state of my room, I need to take a day off work and just. Work On It. I can't do it on the weekends because there's too much else to do. I might do it over winter break. I blast music and just bounce around like the junebugging that one tumblr post talked about. I'll probably focus on cleaning the floor because that will cascade everything else. I have kept it mostly open because Mara needs a place to sleep.

I need to find a way to store the flax and corn so it's out of the way but still accessible. The corn needs to stick around so I can grind it but the flax could theoretically go to the farm if I had a good storage spot. idek.

Fuck cleaning, why is this shit so hard

[light_of_summer]

I get it re lack of faith about usefully incorporating various kinds of suggestions. (I struggle with a certain amount of executive dysfunction, myself.) I figured it was worth mentioning the idea, but I'm not invested in you trying it.

I do wish your parents/sibling/dude would step up and support you in getting your brain troubles diagnosed AND treated. I mean, I want them to support you with at least the same level of care and commitment they'd rally round with if you suffered a really serious injury like a stroke or loss of a limb. Seems to me this is just as important!

If you ever feel like putting this paragraph in front of any of them, as part of requesting their help in tracking down appropriate providers, and calling for appointments, and being WITH you during appointments, to help you get your concerns really addressed and your questions asked and the answers noted, please do! Those kinds of support are things that many people with health troubles need! Whether they realize it or not!

[dragonlady7]

Ha, I had mice as a kid, didn't stop me. One time I had one fall into a cup I had in my room, and die there, and I didn't know, and it wasn't until I wasn't around for a while that my mom discovered it, and she was like, didn't you notice the smell, and I was like, well it wasn't that bad.
I know the noises they make, though, for sure.

I need a few days off from work where I'm not trying to be anywhere else or do anything else not including the weekend so that I can just focus on the house and not be so paralyzed by "i only have one day let's run around in circles panicking about how i can't get it done in one day!" but every time I have time off I feel obligated to go to the farm, and that's so much time that I can't take any other time off, and it's just. Argh. I need to live in my own house for a little bit to figure out what to do about it, and I never do. Frustrating.

[dragonlady7]

I really wish I had some support. I've been trying to get to a doctor for literally years, and I'm just-- on my own, and that's not going to happen until/unless I have some sort of health crisis. More severe, mind, than not being able to spend more than 15 minutes at a stretch in direct sunlight, which is how I lived for about two years, a year or two ago, and it kind of went away this spring and I think it's gone? I'll never know what it was all about.

My sister did offer to call a doctor for me once, but I don't even know how to take her up on it. I don't know. Argh.
I've asked my dude for help in the past and he's just like "I don't like phones either" and clearly doesn't think I mean it, so.

Support

[light_of_summer]

Well, with your sister, one possibility would be to say something like, "Hey, I don't know if you remember this, but one time you offered to call a doctor for me, to help out because my concentration is so bad when I'm on the phone. Would it still work for you to do that for me?"

But, also, I'm thinking that you could really use the help of someone who didn't have to be nudged through each step--someone who would actually help you navigate the process of getting diagnosed, not just act as a sort of secretary.

With some googling, I found one organization that probably isn't an exact fit, but they might be a resource for recommendations about where to go for help. Check this out:

https://www.patientadvocate.org/connect-with-services/case-management-services-and-medcarelines/

TL;DR: Among other things, they offer free services to help people who are trying to get screened for suspected chronic conditions, and they have an online intake form that can be used instead of a phone number.

Caveats: I don't know if ADHD/similar qualifies as a "disease", and also, they want to give their services to people who are in active treatment or scheduled for it, so you might not qualify for their services, but I think it'd be worth filling out their intake form to find out, and to ask for any recommendations they might have about other sources of help.

I don't know how you do with forms. If needed, maybe Dude would help with that?

...I hope it's OK that I've poked my nose into your business this much. If you want me to back off, just let me know, and I will. I don't want to be an additional stressor in your life!

On the other hand, if it's OK that I'm doing this, and if you'd like me to do a little more searching for possible sources of support, I'm willing to do at least a bit more. I have a couple more ideas about places to look...

Re: Support

[dragonlady7]

Oh, this is lovely of you. it's good to know there are resources available, I've always sort of wondered.
I'll try my sister first. Actually my middle sister might really be helpful, she's got complicated medical conditions of her own but is quite good at making phone calls and such. I'll try her first, I think. But if I can't get her to help me, I will come back and look at these resources more!

Re: Support

[light_of_summer]

Yay! \😃/

While I'm thinking about it, here's one more link--it has specific suggestions for finding someone who is trained in diagnosing ADD/ADHD!:

https://www.additudemag.com/adhd-testing-diagnosis-guide/