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.