Something that I've noticed that I do, concerning school

The last time that I had hardly any problems with classes was when I was only taking classes. When I had hardly anything else competing with my time, it was much easier to apply myself to the subjects. Actually, I should say, the subjects that that weren’t very difficult. Wound up dropping history, economics and other classes like that. I passed accounting and the computer classes.

Ever since then, I have too many things going on to apply myself well to the classes that I have taken. Even with only one or two classes a semester. At DeVry, I did somewhat well for the first couple of years. And, it had just come to me that was also the time period that Jim was also in class. He, and some of the others in class, kept me interested. And there was at least one person there that I was in competition with. After a couple of years, Jim had dropped out, at least a third of the class had dropped out. And, the classes became harder, such as stats and economics. Eventually, I dropped out. And then later didn’t have the money to try and go back.

I will never be in that position again, being able to devote entire day to only studying. I also will not always have others there to keep me focused on the subject at hand. So, how do I keep focused on classes enough to get through them?

Here's a conumdrum: Do I change this habit or not?

Though the years, I have learned to sometimes plow ahead on things, for various reasons. In this instance, I am only talking about certain circumstances, such as when I am getting instructions from someone on something that I am not familiar with. When left with the option of sitting and waiting to be told the next thing, I would rather do the former. , I would rather do the former. Now it seems to me that a linear would rather you make a guess (and not wait for each and every instruction), however it seems to me that making the wrong guess does not sit well either.

I don’t like making guesses when I have absolutely no idea what is being done. However, I also know that when I just wait to be told the next step, people tend to lose patience, because I am waiting to be told what to do. I feel screwed no matter which direction I take.

Like right now, I’m installing stuff that I know almost nothing about. I don’t want to just sit here and wait for the person to come back to my desk, because I am then not helping myself and I feel like I come off looking like a bit of an idiot. If I didn’t follow the instructions the first time, usually because I didn’t understand them well enough, then I’d rather not have to ask for them again. People have a way of getting a look of consternation when things have to be repeated. Its mild annoyance when directed at children and the look becomes even less pretty when directed at adults that ‘should know better’.

It’s very exasperating when I am struggling to figure out something and I completely miss the easy method to complete it, and someone else has to point it out to me. I don’t know if they are thinking that I’m an idiot or not, however I do and I’m sure that the person is probably very unsure of me at times. Sometimes, it’s like I’m that pet that you are trying to steer to the dropped piece of meat on the floor and all they do is keep looking at you.

Here's a conumdrum: Do I change this habit or not?

Though the years, I have learned to sometimes plow ahead on things, for various reasons. In this instance, I am only talking about certain circumstances, such as when I am getting instructions from someone on something that I am not familiar with. When left with the option of sitting and waiting to be told the next thing, I would rather do the former. , I would rather do the former. Now it seems to me that a linear would rather you make a guess (and not wait for each and every instruction), however it seems to me that making the wrong guess does not sit well either.

I don’t like making guesses when I have absolutely no idea what is being done. However, I also know that when I just wait to be told the next step, people tend to lose patience, because I am waiting to be told what to do. I feel screwed no matter which direction I take.

Like right now, I’m installing stuff that I know almost nothing about. I don’t want to just sit here and wait for the person to come back to my desk, because I am then not helping myself and I feel like I come off looking like a bit of an idiot. If I didn’t follow the instructions the first time, usually because I didn’t understand them well enough, then I’d rather not have to ask for them again. People have a way of getting a look of consternation when things have to be repeated. Its mild annoyance when directed at children and the look becomes even less pretty when directed at adults that ‘should know better’.

It’s very exasperating when I am struggling to figure out something and I completely miss the easy method to complete it, and someone else has to point it out to me. I don’t know if they are thinking that I’m an idiot or not, however I do and I’m sure that the person is probably very unsure of me at times. Sometimes, it’s like I’m that pet that you are trying to steer to the dropped piece of meat on the floor and all they do is keep looking at you.

My Treo

I’m finally getting back up to speed with using my Treo to store/access information again. Before last summer, I had actually started to rely on it to store needed info, such as reminders and IDs and such. Once I lost that, I noticed really quick that trying to rely on just writing things down or having you remind me here and there just wasn’t cutting it. I got out of the habit of relying on it, since I couldn’t store much in it nor could I get much out of it.

I must make sure to keep very accurate backups from now on, which is what really did me it. Once I first restored my old phone in
August and then got my replacement phone last December, I should have been able to just load it with the backed up data and picked up where I left off. Not having that was my downfall. I will say that most of that was not really my fault. I did have backup software set up, called BackupBuddy, which I used for a number of years. Last year, I had mistakenly thought that Palm had upgraded their software to backup everything on a device, not just key files, so I stopped using BackupBuddy. However, when I needed to restore from my backups, I found that I didn’t have anything current to work with because of my mistaken assumption. Oh, and there was some two months lost due to not being able to get hotsyncs to work due to Windows Service Pack 3 update that killed Palms nearly everywhere. I had to search for that solution on the web and it took me quite some time to do it.

All in all, when I find a solution that is actually working, I need to put work into making sure that it stays in place. Just because I think that I have found a ‘better’ solution, I should not abandon my old one until I am absolutely and positively sure that the new one is working 110%.

Clarity

I’m thinking that the main reason that I don’t like filling out my Clarity – and have never liked filling out my other time systems – is because I know that I am not getting much done within a certain time period. On days when I’m working on only one thing, it’s easy enough to determine where to apply the time; even on those days, I just don’t want to interrupt myself to enter in time, because I don’t get back to what I was doing very easily. On other days, I can go from thing to thing so much, trying to determine just how much of that time went to actual work is very pitiful.

New Meds

Spent a bit of time on eBay this AM, paying on outstanding bills. Spent a few more minutes after that shopping at a couple of other sites.

Between me helping with the Bring Your Kids To Work tour of the Enterprise, the usual payday trip to the credit union, paying the outstanding eBay bills and a phone call to Apple, I have accomplished very little in the way of work today.

TimeLeft

RE: [ADHD-Coders-Unite] TimeLeft

I forgot to say that with the stickies and reminders, I can also execute most everything that I can with Planner.  I can play a sound, open a web page, set if for different time check functions, or (the best part) I can really get the point across and have it turn off the monitor or PC.  I’ve been looking for software that will do that (and still be useful and not kill other stuff) for a few weeks now.  I’m so happy, I’m doing the cabbage patch dance thing here in my seat in the semi-privacy of my office.  Woo-hoo.

From: ADHD-Coders-Unite@yahoogroups.com [mailto:ADHD-Coders-Unite@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Collins, Monica P.
Sent: Friday, February 27, 2009 12:02 PM
To: ADHD-Coders-Unite@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [ADHD-Coders-Unite] TimeLeft

I’ve been sitting on a goldmine and didn’t even know it.  I’ve had this piece of freeware software for awhile now.  I was using it for the clocks.  It turns out that it might be able to replace two other pieces of software that I currently have installed, Post-Its Digital Note Pads and ADD Planner.  And I was just getting ready to purchase Post-Its, so I’ll just purchase this instead.  One nice thing that Post-Its had was the ability to have a push pin board to put them all on, which was why I was about the purchase the deluxe version and no longer use the free one.  However, the TimeLeft stickies have the ability to be joined together and moved around as one entity.  Eh, that’ll work.

Hello, bright world.

Some thoughts to share with whoever’s out there …

I’m fairly sure that one of my main problems is that I don’t (mentally) keep up with the list of stuff that I have to do within a given day.  I have a system in place that has the potential  to be adequate.  However, I don’t ‘interrupt’ myself to give periodic checks to the day’s list.  Things were much easier when I got to work on one thing at a time.  The boss (or even my ex) helped to keep me on track by pointing out with item had the highest priority.  I recall there were times when faced with two very hot items, I would have Tommy choose which was ‘hottest’.  Even that many years back, before I knew the exact reason behind why I’m as I am, I knew that it was much easier to do one assignment, and get the others later.  In the last few years, I have to keep that mental list of things myself, both at work and at home.  Home is better now that Robert is keeping that list.  Of course, I still don’t do well with the small list that I may get now, because I don’t interrupt myself to do those things.  I even have set times, with alarms letting me know to stop and do the next thing.  Still not working.  I either don’t want to stop what I’m doing (hyperfocus) or I need to continue that particular item so that thing gets shoved down to later, except that later never happens.

If I don’t follow any pattern or habit that I have for a couple of days, I won’t pick up the pattern again very easily.  The only habit that I have hardly ever broken is brushing my teeth after I get out of bed.  If it wasn’t for the fact that I can’t stand that gross, yucky taste after I get up, I probably wouldn’t be keeping that habit very well, either.  Too bad I still can’t form a consistent habit of taking my pills, even after all of these years.  I know why I don’t on the weekends, that’s easy: not having the same morning routine during the week of immediately getting dressed and out the door.  When I had classes of any kind on Saturday, or appointments, I came closer to keeping the morning routines.  Unless, of course, I overslept and only had time to get dressed, which is what often happens in that situation.  I may have to eventually go ahead and try to keep the same schedule weekday and weekend, however I really don’t want to get up that damned early on the weekends.  This is one of those times that having had kids would have been a benefit.  I’m sure that a Saturday or Sunday would not have gone by that they wouldn’t have had me out doing something.  And I ‘know’ that I don’t have to do the same stuff on the weekends, so mentally I can’t talk myself into doing the same routines.  I ‘know’ that I can turn on the TV and let it catch my attention, so I do.  And once that happens, I’m in front of the TV for awhile.  And anything that I had wanted to do that Saturday or Sunday will probably be forgotten.  (big sigh)  Oh well.

Hopefully, this new sunrise alarm clock I’m getting will help me with getting up.  I had thought that this latest go-round with sleeping too long had to do with needing more sleep.  But that’s not quite it.  This week, I went to bed pretty early at least a couple of times, before 9pm.  And with me not getting a ride from Kevin anymore, I set the alarm at 6am now.  So, that’s 8-9 hours of sleep.  Even then, I wanted to sleep more, staying in bed until 6:30, the absolute latest I can get up and still have time to do everything.  But, only an hour is not enough to shower, get dressed and feed the cats and myself.  If I weren’t taking my morning meds at work now, I’d really be in trouble.  I find it interesting that I did it when I was catching the bus for a year, but then again, I wasn’t feeding cats in the morning, so that probably gave me just enough time.  I know there were days that I put my meds in my pocket, took a coke out of the fridge and downed them all on the bus or on the train.  The last couple of days, I tried out my other theory, setting a 2^nd (and quieter) alarm clock a half hour earlier and hitting the snooze on it, so that I can awaken slowly instead of by my very loud alarm with the dismantled snooze (from another theory that I tried some years ago, but still rely on).  The last two days I’ve been better.  I’m trying to get up at 6:00 but have set the alarm forward again after I wake up, but only up to 6:15 instead of 6:30.  Anyhoo, I think that my problem is tied to the thing I’ve read about every now and again, about humans functioning better during daylight hours instead of evening ones.  When left to my own devices, sans an alarm clock, I wake up right about  sunrise.  The sun doesn’t even have to be completely out.  It can even be very dark and cloudy.  Shortly after the sun starts to rise, I start to wake up.  (except for the last 3-4 months, when I’ve needed a couple of hours more sleep, awakening between 8:00-9:00am.  Go figure.  Probably has to do with the different meds I’m now taking.).  I’ve looked at getting this sun alarm clock on and off for a few years.  I need to go ahead and get it.

There is no point in me sending home stuff to read.  I never get around to reading it at home.  I didn't have time to read it at work.  I wind up with stuff in my mailbox or moved over to a folder to read later, never to be read. I send stuff home to send out to others - so that I no longer spend time at work doing it - and it never gets sent out at home.

If I am going to learn to get stuff done, I have got to learn to break them up in logical pieces that fall in an order.  I think that a major problem is that I (who knows, maybe all abstract thinkers have this problem) I only see the one thing, not the pieces that make up the thing.  I take forever to get started, I take forever to finish.  All I seem to see if the middle and want to go straight to the middle.  It's the same with working a project at work, whether it's a reoccurring assignment or one that I know nothing about.  It's the same with writing a routine or making a new costume.  It's the same with just rearranging my workroom.  It's hard for me to concentrate on parts that I either don't want to do, or unsure of how to start.  All I'm thinking about is the creamy middle.

Surely, it’s not just me.

Does this time-waster happen to anyone else?

Ok, this one happens a lot.  I was filling out the form that we have set up in our group to add items to our timesheet.  It occurred to me that I was currently filling out an item that is a repeating task, so I would probably want to use the same time periods that I came up with for any other service requests like it, so I created a screen print and saved it to a PDF.  While in the process of doing that, I noticed that my saved folders were mislabeled, so I spent some minutes relabeling and reorganizing the PDF folders.  Then I went back to what I was originally doing, saving a copy of my Clarity settings for EPOL SRs, so that I don’t have to spent time figuring out how much time I think these projects should take.  Then I saved that off to my Manuals & Info folder, and set up a shortcut to it from the EPOL jobs folder.  Oh yeah, and somewhere right after that, I think, I had to spend some minutes in my Planner software, updating messages and links.

 

While all of this in itself wasn’t very long, I often lose many minutes doing stuff like this.  I can easily lose a chuck of an hour doing these small tasks.  There’s no place to catalog these under in the Timesheet, but the time must be tracked somehow.  This time, the lost time was actually directly related to the work at hand.  Sometimes, it’s not: sometimes I spend a few moments looking up a word or person, sometimes I Google for software, usually to use at work but not always, or sometimes I spend many moments looking up music.  Whether work related or no, there are not categories for this, so I can’t really accurately show what was done in my day.

Does this time-waster happen to anyone else?

Ok, this one happens a lot.  I was filling out the form that we have set up in our group to add items to our timesheet.  It occurred to me that I was currently filling out an item that is a repeating task, so I would probably want to use the same time periods that I came up with for any other service requests like it, so I created a screen print and saved it to a PDF.  While in the process of doing that, I noticed that my saved folders were mislabeled, so I spent some minutes relabeling and reorganizing the PDF folders.  Then I went back to what I was originally doing, saving a copy of my Clarity settings for EPOL SRs, so that I don’t have to spent time figuring out how much time I think these projects should take.  Then I saved that off to my Manuals & Info folder, and set up a shortcut to it from the EPOL jobs folder.  Oh yeah, and somewhere right after that, I think, I had to spend some minutes in my Planner software, updating messages and links.

While all of this in itself wasn’t very long, I often lose many minutes doing stuff like this.  I can easily lose a chuck of an hour doing these small tasks.  There’s no place to catalog these under in the Timesheet, but the time must be tracked somehow.  This time, the lost time was actually directly related to the work at hand.  Sometimes, it’s not: sometimes I spend a few moments looking up a word or person, sometimes I Google for software, usually to use at work but not always, or sometimes I spend many moments looking up music.  Whether work related or no, there are not categories for this, so I can’t really accurately show what was done in my day.