okay sorry for posting before reading this entire thread, but I feel like I have something relevant to say but I don't feel like I have time to digest all 6 pages right now.
regarding lists, it has occurred to me that "lists" can serve one or both of the following functions for a person:
*organization: by putting items together into a related group, it helps to establish and/or maintain a sense of organization. Each 'group' of items is a distinct list, on a distinct page of paper.
*memory: by writing items down, it helps to remember these items. Personally, I have a terrible memory, and so I expend a lot of mental effort and stress and anxiety trying to remember things. Writing things down helps this.
Note that it's sort of a circular thing -- part of the reason I have trouble remembering things is that I'm very disorganized; if I had an organized sense of what was going on in my life, then remembering the different things I need to do would be much easier because each of these things would be 'associated' in my mind with their individual places in the overall organizational paradigm. much of memory is associative. but I am not organized, and so consequentially my memory is terrible, which in turn doesn't help my organization... see.. it's circular.
Now, the problem with lists is that lists are inherently organized and structured. You might think -- Yes, but isn't that the point of a list? Well yes, but that
can be a problem. I'm guessing that the 'normal' person (someone without massive stress due to ADHD, etc) who makes lists does much of the organization in their mind. By the time they make out a list, they already have their life organized, and the list is merely a memory aid -- nothing more. For these people, the list is not an organizational aid. They might say that the lists help them to organize their thoughts, but, in reality, the making out of the list is at most a peripheral component of the organizational process which happens naturally and automatically in their mind's eye.
For those of us who are not naturally and automatically organized, the structure and organization that is inherent in a list can be a huge hindrance. Those of us with issues such as ADHD do not have a completely structured thought process. Ideas and worries and aspirations may occur to us in any random order, and so as we write down a 'list' of what's on our mind, what we are writing down is a not organized, is not even a rough draft, it's perhaps nothing more than a stream of consciousness. Okay this is not completely accurate; our thoughts may well be organized on some level. E.g., personally, I'm able to solve very complex problems, so long as the problem in question is in a limited context, and deals with generally homogeneous concepts. E.g. I can tear apart a car engine and rebuild it with no problem. I can fix the roof for
Gladys. I can write a love letter to my cat. But when it comes to organizing this mix of heterogeneous tasks, each one relative to the other, that's where I totally fail. I can't prioritize, I can't comprehend the complex mix of apples and oranges that life continually throws at a person.
So if it is a viscous circle of molasses where poor memory results in poor organization/structure and where poor organization/structure results in poor memory, then certainly, we can start with ameliorating either one and hope to achieve some sort of positive results.
Personally, I chose to start with memory, since memory is a relatively simple function, as compared to organization, something which is a foreign concept to me.
The problem I have with memory is that as I write down lists of items I wish to remember, as I stream my consciousness onto paper, the consciousness automatically takes on a form and a structure, as my list grows. Immediately, I find myself trying to improve the inadequate structure which is organically springing forward... I say to myself, well this item relates more to car maintenance than it does to school, so I'm going to shove it off onto another page of my notebook here, and this page will be a list of things related to car maintenance...
and I mean, this works fine for most people, but my personal experience has been that it simply does not work for people with ADHD. If I could organize my thoughts, then I wouldn't be sitting down at a loss, trying to sort through my thoughts on a micro-management sort of level, trying over 99 different permutations of arrangements of lists and never finding the one that works for me. I swear, I've tried it all... I've tried breaking my life down into thematic concepts... After the lists about things related to my car and house and school and so on fail me, then eventually I say, well, hey, maybe the list needs to be not about my 'cars' but instead about 'transportation' in general, since that's actually what I use the cars for...
so anyway, long story short, the solution is to not make lists. don't do it. Separate memory from organization. 'Normal' people are able to remember stuff, so ADHD people should be able to remember stuff also, without it being a huge hassle and without agonizing over what list the item to be remembered should be 'remembered' under. If you agonize over the organization of each item you're trying to remember, you've already lost the battle. You're diverting time and energy away from the act of remembering. You're plunging into the miasma of ADHD head-first, and you're creating and feeding stress and anxiety. Memory is normally associative, but for someone with ADHD, maybe it simply can't be associative... At least, not in the normal structured way that we normally envision conceptual associations as existing and manifesting themselves in.
So what I do now is when I want to remember something, I don't put it in a list. I put it on a note card. One note card per idea or concept or task or hope or dream or expectation that I have for myself. The wonderful thing about a pile of note cards on a desk is that there is no inherent structure. You don't have to worry about committing to a structure at the time that you create the record. A pile of notecards is essentially a big ol' random access database. I find that since I've started using note cards, I actually remember things much more easily, simply because I no longer feel anxiety about the possibility of forgetting something.
Remember, even if something is written down into a list, you can still forget it if you miscategorized it, if you picked the wrong list. And even if you put it in the right list, the item may still be just as good as forgotten, since the whole idea behind lists is that they are an organizational tool - an organizational paradigm. And one inherent aspect of organization is compromise... You prioritize your things to do, you pick your battles. And well, if you use the wrong organizational scheme, you'll find that items that shouldn't be forgotten *are* forgotten, in the sense that they're relegated to a lower priority when perhaps they shouldn't have been, they're put in the wrong list, or they're put in the right list but the list winds up being the wrong paradigm in the first place, when considered in the larger context of all the other lists... This is, I believe, a constant source of ongoing stress and anxiety for people with ADHD--This recurring experience of finding one's self failed by one's organizational paradigm in this manner leads to this persistent fear and anxiety that every time you file something away in the paradigm, it's being misfiled and it will come back to haunt you. So this is why I say -- Don't do it... don't make lists. Don't file things.
So what I do now is, only occasionally, I will go through my pile of note cards and pull them together into groups of notecards... These groups are like lists. The thing is, the process is dynamic. I can adjust each list on the fly, as my needs and circumstances change. I think that this dynamic rearrangement is constantly going on in the 'normal' person's mind, but for whatever reasons, it doesn't occur so well in the ADHD person's mind. One nice thing about using note cards in this manner is that I can do my rearranging at whatever time is best for me, when I feel like my mind is working. Many people who have ADHD have the experience of being able to cognitively organize their thoughts and ideas fairly well at least during part of the day, or at least during part of some days, and I have this same experience. So I find that being able to flip through my note cards, and pull out those that are relevant to me now, at this point in time, is useful for me.
The whole idea, I think, is to offload as much as possible the rote and repetitive and memory-type functions from the brain, and let the note cards stand in and carry out these functions. This leaves the brain free to focus more on what no organizational system can do for you, which is to actually figure out what it is you want to do with your day, and your life. This sense of what you are doing with your time is sort of the architectural keystone of your cognitive process, and for this sense to develop and maintain it's self, the subordinate cognitive functions (such as memory) upon which it relies must be working reasonably well. My guess is that the note cards, at least in my own case, successfully replicate some of the function that is shot to hell in my own brain.
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Topic: Organizization Codependency (Read 16426 times)