Many people make “New Year’s Resolutions” that are more like vague wishes but they don’t call them that. I’m going to lose 10 lbs, I’m going to drink less/exercise more/be more positive etc

Nothing wrong with a wish, but just saying you’re going to do something in the new year with out a strategy or plan to do it will usually lead to nothing other than disappointment.

People forget that a wish or an idea is the first important step, but it’s a beginning, not a complete solution. Not much power behind a resolution if you have no strategy or plan. Putting that strategy or plan to paper or computer makes it more real, especially if you schedule follow up to go along with it.

For those of you who have trouble with New Year’s resolutions, you might check out this post I did in 2006 called A New Year’s Theme. An Alternative to New Year’s Resolutions

Here’s just one part of it

1. You cannot officially commit to the theme until after January 1st or it doesn’t count. This is a way of removing the guilt and built up negative emotional and psychological baggage of previously unfulfilled New Year’s resolutions, allowing you to make a decision from a clearer, more realistic position.

I did well on my previous New Year’s Theme initially but then tapered off. To help reduce that this year, I’ve already programmed a New Year’s Theme Mid month evaluation reminder and and end of month reminder in ical to help keep me on track. Scheduling follow up is something adults with ADHD often forget to do.

My theme this year is getting stronger which can be interpreted in many ways, not just physical.

So did you make a New Year’s wish or a New Year’s Resolution?

I Want Sandy is a free web application that gives you email reminders for the things you often forget.

It was recently an Webware 100 Award Winner

I Want Sandy is an automated e-mail assistant. You simply add “her” as an e-mail contact to get started. Sending Sandy an e-mail with a small message will have the system scan what you wrote and convert into an e-mail reminder or calendar appointment that will be sent back to you at whatever time you note. It also has been designed to work with the popular microblogging service Twitter, letting users remotely set reminders while away from their regular e-mail.

You can also create RSS feed reminders and twitter reminders to your mobile phone as well.

Here’s some of the tags you can use to categorize reminders.
o To-Dos
o Goals
o Replies
o Reminders
o Recurring Events
o Other Special Tags

Adults with ADHD are not exactly known for their great memories of the smaller yet often important details in life and work. So if you are known to have time management problems and spend enough time in front of the computer to make it worthwhile you also might want to check it out.

If you want to see some other popular web applications, check out the Webware top 100 awards

Lifehacker has a great post on Top Ten Telephone Tricks

I especially like #1 Trick automated phone bots into thinking your line’s dead. and #4. Skip the greeting and get right to the beep with one keypress. ADHD adults are known for many things but patience in the face of inefficient, irritating voicemail loops from hell isn’t one of them.

There’s a special place in hell waiting for the person(s) who invented voicemail menus that often leave you trapped in voicemail hell. One of the worst I remember was Hewlett Packard where you spent several minutes going from one voicemail option to another for what seemed to be like an eternity only to have them hang up on you at the end.

“We appreciate your call” translated into real language often means we have such contempt for our customers, and have such excessive greed that we can’t be bothered to hire live humans to talk to you.

Phone bots, spam bots, what’s the common denominator?

Here are the links to websites and blogs relating to Time Management for Adults and Children with ADHD for my CHADD Vancouver ADHD Time Management presentation tonight.

Time Management websites Articles, Books and Websites

ADHD Treatment – Technology
Online, computer based and external clocks timers and reminders

Internet Addiction Wake Up Devices

21 blog posts on Time Management

Top Ten Most Annoying Alarm Clocks. ADD Strategic Management?

20 Ways to Say No for the overburdened people pleasers

Time Management for Anarchists: The Movie
You don’t need to be an anarchist to find it useful and funny.

Reminder Tools: Beeping watches etc from ADD Consults

Sharper Image “Now You Can Find It!” Electronic Locator ie keys etc

For Children Specifically

How routines help children with ADHD achieve structure and happiness

Tips for getting ADHD Kids up and out the door

Helping Your ADHD Adolescent Get Homework Done

Tools and techniques to help ADHD students use classroom time more efficiently

Organization and Time Management Strategies for kids

Organization Tips for Your ADHD Student

And since it’s back to school here’s

Teaching Students with ADD, Links to 34 Articles & Ebooks

Great ideas are conceived and subsequently lost in the hands of creative geniuses, everyday. Frustration, rationalization, and despondence loom as creative people jump from idea, to idea, to idea… and fall short of actually making ideas happen. It is a shame that most creative breakthroughs never materialize.

via Kineda

Now this sounds like it was written for adults with Attention Deficit Disorder doesn’t it? While lost creative ideas aren’t solely the domain of adults with Attention Deficit Disorder, they probably occur more frequently with us, and cause us more grief than non ADDers

The Action method is a method of productive creativity by a company called Behance.

They say the key to their Action Method is to leave every occasion of creativity, a meeting, article read or a dream with 3 things

1. Action Steps
2. Back Burner Items
3. Reference Items

and to have them clearly defined and divided, not squashed all together.

Action-Step-is-to-Reference-Item as Oil-is-to-Water
Per the Action Method, actions steps should always be kept separate from reference items. When you’re in a meeting, keep your action steps distinct from your notes on a separate part of the page, or use a different page altogether! When actions become interspersed in your reference items (notes, clippings, articles, etc…), they are unlikely to get your attention. And, without your attention, actions steps are seldom completed.

Which is so true. Like any great truth it’s obvious in hindsight, and not always easy to practice. I think this is so crucial to adults with Attention Deficit Disorder, because we’re often in the caught up in the dopamine frenzy of intellectual stimulation that we forget to do it. Or we don’t remember to take breaks and downtime and go go go until we drop and have no energy left at the end to separate and write down the action steps and say “I’ll do it later/tomorrow”, and often never set a reminder to do so and when later comes we’re on to the next distraction.

Fortunately they have a possibly solution to our frequent dilemma

Here is a modest proposal: When you are tempted to take copious notes in a meeting or cut out an article, make a separate action step to file the notes as a reference item in a particular place. Commit to filing the reference item in a predetermined spot, tagged or filed under an appropriate keyword. Otherwise, a reference item will just float around and never add value (or, even worst, serve as a distraction).

they’re got the site divided into 3 sections

Philosophy The why and the how of the action method

Articles tips and real life examples

Products and Services or Outfitter, where they have action pads, books, stickers etc

How do you separate out your action items from general ideas/notes?

The very useful Make Use Of blog has a pretty extensive list of 38 different To Do List Services. They also have links to each service and briefly describe some of the additional features of each service

apart from ‘Create/Delete/Edit Lists and Tasks’

For those of you who haven’t checked out online to do list services, there’s a lot more features nowadays then there was a few years ago.

Here’s some of the features of the different services listed:

Create tasks by dialing provided number and leaving a message

Retrieve and add lists via SMS receive alerts via E-mail, SMS or instant messenger

RSS support

Auto tagging

Sharing and collaboration

Categorize lists, prioritize tasks

Browser addons(firerfox, IE) that let you add notes from any webpage

Schedule lists to autodelete. A handy feature for ADDers who add too many items to their to do lists.

I’ve reviewed a few of these before, i.e., Remember the Milk, Ta-Da List, Joe’s Goals

Sometimes, even if you’re really techie, a paper based solution may be the best fit for you, but it’s probably worth checking some of them out. For those interested in more info on this very common adult add problem, time management I have a list of some time management articles books and websites on my website, and you can also check out the time management category on this blog

This may be relevant to some of the bloggers at the Northern Voice Blog Conference in Vancouver this Friday and Saturday. Where there probably will be more adults with attention surplus condition than the average 5% in the population. See Top 10 Advantages of ADD in a High Tech Career.

Here’s an example of how a Web Designer, Douglas Bowman of Stopdesign, who’s

been organized most of my life

stays organized in the different areas of his web design business. He’s redesigned sites like Blogger, Wired News, and Adaptive Path.

In my mind, once I have familiarity with a place (apartment, office, hotel, etc.) everything I have with me usually has a logical place it belongs, and I’m pretty diligent about putting it there.

I think the key in the above sentence is a logical place, as in logical for YOU. Not necessarily logical for other people. That’s where many adults with Attention Deficit Disorder get tripped up, they’ve read/been told doing X is the “logical” or “right way” to do it, which is of course bullshit.

The right way to do it is the way that works for you. The person who wrote the book/article/ did the seminar/workshop found a way that worked for them and SOME of those methods MAY work for you but usually not without modification or customization.

That customization is what I do for a living, coaching adults with Attention Deficit Disorder and even if 2 ADDers have the same problem, the solution is usually different. Sometimes my ADHD coaching clients ask me what’s the best way to do X for someone with ADHD? The answer is there is no “one best way”.

What works for one ADD coaching client doesn’t necessarily work for the other one. Logically if you think about this, it’s obvious. We’re not all carbon copy clones of each other with the same genes, environment, beliefs and experience. But we don’t always do the obvious.

So often we get frustrated by trying a recommended solution from a book etc and find it doesn’t work for us and we blame ourselves. It may be the wrong solution for us, and even if it’s the right one, it usually won’t work unless we adapt it to our personality, attitudes, behaviour and preferred ways of doing things. Even then it may need some modification via trial and error, feedback and coaching.

Douglas makes some very good points in his post and there are also more good ones in the extensive comment section.

I repeat this system over and over again, to the point that I don’t even think about it anymore.

That’s a very important point that many of us miss. You can’t just set up a system once and expect to maintain itself automatically, you need to practice doing it again and again until it gets burned in deep into your neural network. Repetition precedes effortlessness.

This cartoon is by Dave Walker
Dave does open source cartoons at We Blog Cartoons. One of my clients sent me this.

I know that for many adults with Attention Deficit Disorder (both from theoretical and personal experience) a “little look” at the internet can be broadly defined as sometime between 5 minutes and 5 hours:) You may want to use an Internet Addiction Wake Up Device to shorten that time a bit.
Often the monolith isn’t as really big as it seems. So what do you do when faced with the seemingly overwhelming monolith to carve it down to an un-overwhelming, doable size instead of running away from the task and distracting out via the internet, video games, food, TV etc?

I did this post last year and given the time of season, I thought it’d be useful to repost it. My theme for this year will be sustainable growth. Sustainable being the challenging part for an ADDer. Enjoy.

How many of you actually carry out your New Year’s resolutions? Honestly. In full.

I’m no paragon of virtue here myself.

I believe that after too many failed attempts at New Year’s resolutions, most people start to attach strong unconscious negative feelings towards New Year’s resolutions, but continue to create a new one or a batch of them each year in part out of guilt, or perceived social pressure.

If you are one of the few that do carry out your New Year’s resolutions in full, good on ya, and keep doing what you’re doing. If you’re one of those that do not, you might consider my proposed alternative.

A New Year’s Theme.

I came up with this idea while coaching a client around what goals he wanted to accomplish in 2006.

I had an intuition that a theme for the year might be more useful for him than several specific goals and I asked him what he thought about having a specific theme for the year (based on his situation and desires) and he was quite responsive to that, adjusting the wording a bit. It worked well on another client and I decided to try it myself. My chosen New Year’s theme is deliberate creation, (as opposed to impulsive action).

A theme is much bigger than a specific goal i.e. lose weight, stop smoking. It can include many related goals under its umbrella. For example live healthier, become a kinder person, judge others less, market more effectively, live a more balanced life, develop a deeper spiritual practice, etc.

It allows you to look at the whole year from a specific perspective. When you decide what you’ll do for the week, you examine those decisions in part through the lens of your theme. What can you do this week that will bring your closer in line with your theme?

It’s not an absolute; I still will do impulsive things. However I will move toward more deliberate creation in my life. It’s an orientation, a holistic point of view, something that can encompass many areas of your life.

10 Tips on creating and implementing your New Year’s Theme

1. You cannot officially commit to the theme until after January 1st or it doesn’t count. This is a way of removing the guilt and built up negative emotional and psychological baggage of previously unfulfilled New Year’s resolutions, allowing you to make a decision from a clearer, more realistic position.

2. The theme should ideally consist of a single concept, or at most 2 related or complementary concepts. A single ADDer can come up with a bigger to do list than 4 other people combined. A smaller number = a greater clarity and focus. Also an increased chance of sustained action. Will your really remember 10 different themes in your 4th month of the year?

3. The fewer words the better. Two is ideal, and much easier to remember than 15, and easier to use as a mantra.

4. It is process oriented. You are moving towards something. You can set specific individual goals during the year under the overall framework of your theme, but you don’t attach a numeric target to your theme. This reduces your disappointment, and subsequent de-motivation if you don’t do well on your theme for a particular week. There’s always next week. However, this doesn’t mean you start slacking and take a month off.

5. It’s something big enough to really stir your soul. No small dreams here. Dream big. You need something big enough to motivate you into continual action. For most people, losing 10 pounds or cleaning out the garage doesn’t cut it.

6. Work on the wording until each word really resonates with you. You choose your theme; don’t let someone else tell you what it should be.

7. Regularly examine your life from the viewpoint of moving towards your yearly theme. You need to set related goals on a regular weekly and monthly basis that move you closer to your theme, and reward yourself when you reach those goals. I suggest scheduling in the reward first.

8. Don’t plan too far in advance. Be willing to readjust and realign your goals as life circumstances change. It’s a process, not a fixed in stone timeline you set once and slavishly follow.

9. Use your theme as a decision making tool. When making an important decision (when appropriate and related), add your New Year’s theme as one of the factors in making the decision. Does this decision move me closer to my yearly theme?

10. Use your ADD creativity in creating meaningful limited goals towards your theme. If you feel like it set a new goal every week or couple of weeks. Mix it up for increased dopamine stimulation. Be creative about chosing your goal and limit it to increase the odds of completion. Don’t bite off more than you can chew.

If you have one, work with your ADD coach on developing your theme, and choosing and implementing your theme related goals as well as weekly regular strategic realignments.

I could write why most New Year’s resolutions fail but that’s another story. Ideally setting and regularly working towards personal meaningful goals year round is the best way to go. A yearly theme can turbo charge that process, it’s not for everyone, but it may be right for you.

If you decide to choose a theme for the New Year, let me know which one you choose by adding a comment below, it may inspire others.

Dave Cheong has some great tips to stay focused at work. via 52 reviews

While this wasn’t designed for people with ADD I think many of them do apply to us.

He talks about choosing the right time to do boring tasks. That’s important, but another thing to consider, is to make a list of what you consider to be ingredients of an enjoyable task, and combine using these strategies as well as applying some boredom/transformation strategies to the task.

You might also want to look at this post I did ADD and Getting Motivated Some Questions and Strategies

Different tips will work with different people, why not pick one or 2 that you haven’t tried and appeal to you and try them out for a week to see if they can be helpful?

Here’s a summary of his 18 tips, check his blog for the detailed version.

1. Write out a daily task list and plan your day.

2. Allocate time slots colleagues can interrupt you. I

3. Apply time boxing.

4. Setup filters in your email.

5. Do not check personal email in the morning. There’s even a book on this Never Check E-Mail In the Morning: And Other Unexpected Strategies for Making Your Work Life Work
:

6. Set your IM status.

7. Listen to the right types of music.

8. Use the headphones but leave the music off.

9. Fill up a water bottle.

10. Find the best time to do repetitive and boring tasks. One of the MOST important things an ADDer can learn to do.

11. Bring your lunch and have it at your desk. (Occasionally)

12. Don’t make long personal calls.

13. Clean up your desk.

14. Get a good chair.

15. Use shortcuts on your computer.

16. Close programs you’re not using.

17. Limit time on Digg, Delicious, news sites and blogs.

18. Change your mindset and make work fun.