Chaotic Neutral Week

Sometimes I go through weeks that are just chaotic and nothing gets completed.  I’m not even sure why half of the time.  This week though I can look back and say work was hectic, I procrastinated A LOT, in the evenings I was tired and I am always less creative when tired but also my ADHD brain just couldn’t sort and focus.  There are 5 books I have read in the last fortnight and want to write quick reviews on but can’t seem to pick one and start writing, I have a second website stream that is completely different to this content but is not ready to go live yet, I am half way through building a mausoleum and a gypsy caravan for the D&D table, finally we had session 0 for a new D&D group which looks like it is going to be really fun but challenging in a DM sense, so I want to make sure the story for session one is ready.

When I am like this (some periods of every day, but this week all day every day) I employ various strategies to get stuff done or bring me into focus, it doesn’t always work but I find the key is not giving up.  

Generally at work, the next patient or nurse is coming in and asking for something from me so that moves me on automatically.  This week there has been a lot of incidents where the nurse has started on about patient A, half way through has moved on to patient B then part way in on to C, then back to A, introducing D then on to B, I have to redirect and force focus for both myself and the nurse or mistakes will inevitably happen and  I find it exhausting managing someone else’s behaviour as well as my own so I come home from work really tired which doesn’t set me up for an evening of non work activity.  

At work I don’t have many strategies to sort this kind of behaviour and the distraction can be very dangerous for the patient, I can prescribe the wrong medication for the wrong person as I have got confused or give the wrong treatment.  Because of the the potential for a severe outcome I am usually quite direct and just state that I cannot do more than one thing at once, ask the nurse to pick a patient and we work this one out before I let them move on to another, each time they try to talk to me whilst I am prescribing I stop and ask them to please not talk to me until I am finished or I might get the wrong dose or something worse.  It is time consuming and tiring, it does help me focus in some respects though because I know I have limited time before the nurse will start talking again as they will have lost focus on letting me concentrate and people who communicate for a living often feel uncomfortable with silence.

At home I have a few strategies because generally speaking the outcome doesn’t matter (I won’t kill someone, well….unlikely).  If I have the opportunity to have time on my own this can be really freeing for the mind and I just switch and change what I am doing until I find what I want to do, this is rare though because the person I live with works from home and when I get back from work I may well be the only person they talk to all day.

I will often avoid the place that I am feeling most of a ‘failure’ in, which the last two weeks has been the hobby table.  I am at the uninspiring stage of the caravan so last weekend I forced myself to go back to the table and I started a second project as a distraction from the first.  Now I am at the uninspiring stage of the mausoleum (the second project), I tried the ‘force myself back to the table’ last night and ended up tidying my desk and cupboard which led me to go and find some storage containers from another room. These were full and the stuff in them had to be Marie Kondo’d before I could bring the containers back to my hobby space and finish clearing the stuff up, which inevitably involved me stopping by my bedroom and clearing up the shelving in the walk-in wardrobe before I landed back in the final destination.  This was at least productive, most of my procrastination isn’t, but I haven’t actually completed any of the tasks I had set myself.  

Ways in which I try to solve creative disorganisation (assuming there is no deadline)

1. Just try something.  This is the ‘force myself back to the area’ I feel I am not achieving in and try anything.  This last week it was back to the hobby table and start a different project.
2. Give up for an evening and watch TV in the hope that tomorrow I will feel more alert.  This is a one day only option otherwise I will spend the week watching TV and feel deflated that nothing got done
3. Allow myself a distraction project.  Last week it was cleaning the carpets !?! 🤨
4. Rearrange the priority list for the evening.  Dinner, hobby, shower becomes shower, dinner, hobby.  Can work!
5. If I am really unfocussed I do everything in 15 minute bursts.  In my mind I have only 15 minutes to do this, maybe prep vegetables for dinner.  Then 15 minutes at the hobby desk so I think of something I can do quickly and a base coat goes on.  The 15 minutes is strict for at least an hour and often involves multitasking (those veges will be on the stove whilst I am at the hobby desk).  Enforced short time stamps makes my brain focus but the goal is not to stop this the minute I am interested in something or the rest of the jobs fall by the wayside.
   

Writing this today was in the ‘just do something’ for the website camp, so I thought I would share why I feel so unfocused on content at the moment and how wrangling the brain to do what is necessary when all the ideas are already there is not necessarily the easiest thing to do.

I am sure some of you will identify with this as often as I do and a lot of you will identify some of the time.

What coping strategies do you employ? I am definitely open to ideas 😁