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Wild Card / Re: Organizization Codependency
« on: November 03, 2009, 05:55:57 pm »
jay-ell,
Have you and/or your spouse been evaluated by a shrink for anxiety, ADHD, AS or the like? What your above two posts describe seems like it could be either anxiety and/or a failure to see the forest for the trees phenomenon. But maybe I just recognize that because it's what I'm personally familiar with from my own experience. Myself, I am extremely capable of structured thought, but not of strategic thought. I do better in a structured environment, such as the workplace, where the overall strategy of what we are doing has been determined by someone else. I can solve the puzzles of how to get a particular task done with given resources. Where I suck is being able to integrate disparate concepts together into a coherent strategy... I can work with apples, and I can work with oranges, but I can't work with both at the same time. The job I failed the hardest at was delivery driver for a busy mom 'n pop operation. Nothing was computerized, but it didn't have to be. It was in a small town that was easy to navigate... But it required balancing numerous disparate and conflicting objectives... keeping delivery times short, but accepting as many deliveries as possible. No fixed set of rules, no decision making flow chart, could respond to every possible combination of demands and objectives that would arise every day. I could be successful on a given day, but I could never tell you why. I don't learn strategy, I learn detail. I wake up each morning with amnesia, having forgotten any sort of strategic ideas I may have formulated the night before. Every day is a totally new day of reinventing the 'organizational' wheel all over again.
Making lists of items to do, and organizing these lists into categories, it tends to work for me only for a short short period of time, until such time as the number of items on the lists grows, and I become overwhelmed with it all. A list of things to do or even a list of categories of things to do is not the same thing as a strategy. Making lists works for me initially when only a few things are on the list because it forces me into a defacto strategy of focusing on only those things which I happen to remember initially and put on the list. But it fails in the end because over time I tend to remember more and more things that I want to do or that need to be done, so it all melts down, I set the list aside and loose it in all the clutter, and eventually the cycle repeats it's self where I will start a new list after a few weeks or months of dysfunction and depression.
I have recently found a mechanism that seems to work better for me - I consciously force myself to not think on a low level... low level thought being thought about individual specific items. my mind loves to go for low-level items. It's very good at exhaustive low-level thought... I'm almost like some sort of rain-man in how I can deconstruct things on a low level.. I can take apart anything mechanical and figure it out better than most people can... I can fix just about anything... instead, I force myself to think about things that are higher-level... that are strategic in nature... with the idea being that the low level tasks of the day, what to do next and in what order, this low-level arrangement of tasks can spontaneously arise from the direction provided by having a high-level strategy, a higher-level purpose in life.
Of course, we all have higher-level purpose in our lives... we have hopes and dreams, we have goals... but how much time do we actually spend thinking about things from a higher-level perspective, and how much time do we spend worrying about things that are lower-level... anxieties such as changing the oil in the car before the engine blows up, getting bills paid on time, and so on... The more time you spend thinking about something, the more your brain develops capability for thinking about it, and the better your brain gets at it... if overall you neglect to spend time visualizing the higher-level perspective, the bigger picture, then your capability to do so will become weaker over time, and pretty soon the big picture of your life, your higher-level hopes and dreams, become abstract notions wholly disconnected from your daily life.
So that's what I've been finding recently seems to be working for me, is to force my activities to flow from the higher level concepts, from the bigger picture of my life, to force myself to develop that bigger picture, and to hopefully over time gain a more functional understanding of how to make that happen as I gain more experience doing that... to force myself to stop doing things because they are causing me anxiety, and instead to do things because they stem from some positive purpose in my life. I've spent most of my life doing things in response to some anxiety, either immediate or projected, and I've found that there's no end to the amount of anxiety I can generate for myself. I've found that after years and years of trying, a coherent high-level strategy has yet to emerge from my low-level focus on lists of items, and so my life hasn't really gone anywhere I've intended or wanted it to. I've had fun along the way, I've had lots of crazy and wacky adventures, but I want to shape my life into something different, and I want to do so more deliberately.
Have you and/or your spouse been evaluated by a shrink for anxiety, ADHD, AS or the like? What your above two posts describe seems like it could be either anxiety and/or a failure to see the forest for the trees phenomenon. But maybe I just recognize that because it's what I'm personally familiar with from my own experience. Myself, I am extremely capable of structured thought, but not of strategic thought. I do better in a structured environment, such as the workplace, where the overall strategy of what we are doing has been determined by someone else. I can solve the puzzles of how to get a particular task done with given resources. Where I suck is being able to integrate disparate concepts together into a coherent strategy... I can work with apples, and I can work with oranges, but I can't work with both at the same time. The job I failed the hardest at was delivery driver for a busy mom 'n pop operation. Nothing was computerized, but it didn't have to be. It was in a small town that was easy to navigate... But it required balancing numerous disparate and conflicting objectives... keeping delivery times short, but accepting as many deliveries as possible. No fixed set of rules, no decision making flow chart, could respond to every possible combination of demands and objectives that would arise every day. I could be successful on a given day, but I could never tell you why. I don't learn strategy, I learn detail. I wake up each morning with amnesia, having forgotten any sort of strategic ideas I may have formulated the night before. Every day is a totally new day of reinventing the 'organizational' wheel all over again.
Making lists of items to do, and organizing these lists into categories, it tends to work for me only for a short short period of time, until such time as the number of items on the lists grows, and I become overwhelmed with it all. A list of things to do or even a list of categories of things to do is not the same thing as a strategy. Making lists works for me initially when only a few things are on the list because it forces me into a defacto strategy of focusing on only those things which I happen to remember initially and put on the list. But it fails in the end because over time I tend to remember more and more things that I want to do or that need to be done, so it all melts down, I set the list aside and loose it in all the clutter, and eventually the cycle repeats it's self where I will start a new list after a few weeks or months of dysfunction and depression.
I have recently found a mechanism that seems to work better for me - I consciously force myself to not think on a low level... low level thought being thought about individual specific items. my mind loves to go for low-level items. It's very good at exhaustive low-level thought... I'm almost like some sort of rain-man in how I can deconstruct things on a low level.. I can take apart anything mechanical and figure it out better than most people can... I can fix just about anything... instead, I force myself to think about things that are higher-level... that are strategic in nature... with the idea being that the low level tasks of the day, what to do next and in what order, this low-level arrangement of tasks can spontaneously arise from the direction provided by having a high-level strategy, a higher-level purpose in life.
Of course, we all have higher-level purpose in our lives... we have hopes and dreams, we have goals... but how much time do we actually spend thinking about things from a higher-level perspective, and how much time do we spend worrying about things that are lower-level... anxieties such as changing the oil in the car before the engine blows up, getting bills paid on time, and so on... The more time you spend thinking about something, the more your brain develops capability for thinking about it, and the better your brain gets at it... if overall you neglect to spend time visualizing the higher-level perspective, the bigger picture, then your capability to do so will become weaker over time, and pretty soon the big picture of your life, your higher-level hopes and dreams, become abstract notions wholly disconnected from your daily life.
So that's what I've been finding recently seems to be working for me, is to force my activities to flow from the higher level concepts, from the bigger picture of my life, to force myself to develop that bigger picture, and to hopefully over time gain a more functional understanding of how to make that happen as I gain more experience doing that... to force myself to stop doing things because they are causing me anxiety, and instead to do things because they stem from some positive purpose in my life. I've spent most of my life doing things in response to some anxiety, either immediate or projected, and I've found that there's no end to the amount of anxiety I can generate for myself. I've found that after years and years of trying, a coherent high-level strategy has yet to emerge from my low-level focus on lists of items, and so my life hasn't really gone anywhere I've intended or wanted it to. I've had fun along the way, I've had lots of crazy and wacky adventures, but I want to shape my life into something different, and I want to do so more deliberately.