I either have an exciting plan,
or when that fails, no plan (I resign).
Since the exciting plans usually fail, I end up living on autopilot.
I really struggle making things in life move. There’s too many simultaneous Big Tasks* whose logistics I need to keep track of that I can’t hold them all in my head at once (I can only focus on one Big Task at once). Especially when most tasks are timelines where you need to wait for responses, compose emails, search for things (there might be none – what then?) etc. and where you need to think about the order of the tasks in the timeline so that you save time. Not to forget remembering to notice if people haven’t replied to your e-mail and having to either remind them or come up with a Plan B (this usually leaves you stumped because you now can’t get the thing you started the whole journey for). There’s so many steps to keep track of and you can’t even write them down because the amount of steps keeps changing.
*Finding the next place to rent, booking a dentist for my hurting tooth, planning journeys (what is the Plan B if the journey is too expensive?)
The cluelessness and dread of having to come up with a Plan B is why I hate searching for things. Having to come up with a Plan B is so disorienting. And it’s the opposite of stimulating: you’ve put in a ton of effort and gotten nowhere. How do you all deal with it?
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My “solution” personally is probably terrible -
Have so many plans on the go, you don’t ever get to the point of completing or failing!
Also this random tweet from years ago. I am totally on the “improvise everything” side
What if you’re both?
I’m really good at making the plans. I just suck at following through on them.
Improvisers unite ✊
I have accepted I can plan about 20% and the rest will have to be solved on the fly. The world is confusing. There are too many things happening at once for anyone (definitely at least for myself!) to keep track of everything. My goal when planning is not to set out exactly what I’m going to do, but rather to reduce uncertainty and gather information to improvise effectively if needed.
My goal when planning is not to set out exactly what I’m going to do, but rather to reduce uncertainty and gather information to improvise effectively if needed.
Missed this bit. This is good
How do you deal with unexpected Plan Bs? Like say, your traveling and looking for a place to stay but there are none, or you need some extra money but you can’t find any suitable jobs? It might not be an ADHD problem but these things always really stump me.
!Is the answer to constantly lower my expectations/requirements?!<
I’m reluctant to say lower your expectations, but if you’re trying to find a job, maybe it isn’t the right time to go on vacation.
In another comment, someone mentioned planners and improvisors, and you said you were the second one. I disagree. I think you’re a planner, but you’re so afraid that you’ll spend all this time planning and something won’t go exactly right, so you’re not planning anything at all.
What if you tried making more general plans? Book a flight and a hotel nearby. Look at various places that you could visit while you’re there, and just leave it at that. If you want to check something out, go do it. If you see something cool on the way, check it out. Nobody’s best memories are about how closely they followed a schedule. It’s definitely good to have a plan, but getting distracted on a side quest doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy the rest of the day.
For some reason I’ve got this really bad habit of thinking up the experience I’d like to live and trying to make it reality, instead of seeing what’s actually out there and going with that…
Do you have any thoughts about what I should do about this? I’ve noticed this is a pattern in my behaviour and I thnk it really trips me up…
Well, it’s really easy to say “Just change the way you think!”, which would probably fix everything, but in reality, we all know it’s not that simple. I may be good at going with the flow, but I have a whole mess of other issues that I wish I could just “change the way I think”.
Maybe try thinking of examples from your life when things didn’t go exactly to plan, but everything still worked out in the end, or maybe even turned out better than planned.
Surprises happen. Some are good. Some are bad. Some you can directly influence, others are out of your control.
If you can’t make the best situation, make the best of the situation!
Try using external tools. Tracking can be done with a physical Kanban board.
Bruh. Nothing called a “board” can contain all the steps to even one of my plans.
And I’ve got a lot of plans. Hundreds of “I just need x to get to the next step of y plan” pass through my mind daily.
I have no money, so I have no reasonable way to obtain x, so y is at a standstill… For now. Rinse and repeat with everything, and you’ll have a good idea of the chaos I live with.
Yeah I have this problem too. There’s so many
“I just need x to get to the next step of y plan”
weighing my head down but writing them all out and updating them would be such an arduous and impractical task. Let alone dragging around (ie. losing) a physical planner. I don’t knw what to do. I wonder how people without ADHD deal with this. I’ve been thinking that it would really help me to be able to study how a youtuber like Tom Scott (who travels to a new place for each of his videos) keeps track of all his planning. Because the logistics of filming his videos are essentially the same tasks that we struggle with but a much bigger volume.
The answer is likely “other people”.
I know that Tom, doesn’t really have much of a team, if any, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t get help with stuff like organising and booking flights and stuff. I don’t believe for a second it’s just Tom, jumping a flight to somewhere and setting up his camera, talking to it for a while, then editing it and posting it, all by himself.
I’m sure that was the case once upon a time… Currently, not so much.
Don’t get me wrong, his content, the scripts, the research… I’m sure Tom is either directly involved, or doing that stuff entirely on his own. I believe the words he says are his own and that he has taken the time to learn the subject matter himself. Whether anyone helped with writing may be in question, I haven’t really dug into his process, so I don’t really know, but in the end, Tom is saying things that he believes to be true based on his own understanding of the matter. I believe that 100%.
How he got here? Idk.
Agreed. But in any case, the process of contacting a place, waiting for a response, reminding them, finding a date, booking a hotel and arranging transport is exactly the sort of process that us ADHD people struggle with, and I’d be curious to see what techniques he’s developed to keep track of them all. Not because he has ADHD (I don’t think he does), but because the shear scale of the process would put him or whoever he’s employing into the same position as us.
