Order from Chaos

The Everyday Grind of Staying Organized with Adult ADHD

Jaclyn Paul

• Publisher: Summit to Sea, LLC
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781736470206
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Attention-Deficit Disorder (ADD-ADHD)

Stop paying the high cost of disorganization.

Late fees on forgotten bills. A home full of clutter and unfinished projects. Eroding respect with your friends, family, and colleagues. Health worries from doctor’s appointments you keep meaning to schedule. Nonstop anxiety as you wait for the other shoe to drop.

You deserve better.

Order from Chaos will teach your how your brain works and how to stop getting in your own way. Mixing stories from the trenches of her own experience as a mom and wife with ADHD with wise, well-researched advice from her years as a blogger at The ADHD Homestead, Jaclyn Paul shows you how to design your own system for restoring order.

Past failures don’t have to define you. Order from Chaos offers a helping hand to get you on the path to a more peaceful and rewarding life.

RULE #1:
YOU MUST MAKE PEACE WITH REALITY

DON’T SHOULD ALL OVER YOUR LIFE

How many things have you done because you think you should?

As newlyweds, my husband and I split time over Christmas and New Year’s with our respective families. We spent a long time away from home, but we were young, and we still felt our parents’ expectations to participate in long-held traditions. Then my parents’ divorce added another stop to our holiday travels. For our son’s first Christmas, when he was nine months old, we spent 12 days out of town: four days at my mom’s house, four at my dad’s, and four with my in-laws.

Because we should be fair, right? Our son’s grandparents should be able to see their first grandson for his first Christmas. We shouldn’t leave anyone out. We should, we should, we should.

But think about this from an organizing and ADHD perspective. Out-of-town travel, especially with a baby, requires significant coordination. I had to organize itineraries, packing checklists, and gifts. I maintained communications to plan three consecutive overnight stays. We had to prioritize well enough to fit everything — including a portable crib — into our car and leave room for gifts we’d receive along the way. It would’ve been an impressive feat for someone with no cognitive deficits, let alone two adults with ADHD.

After that Christmas, I announced the end of multiple overnights and extended time away over the holidays. Everyone would take turns. People would visit us for a change. And you know what? No one stopped speaking to us. No one even called to complain. And I started to look forward to Christmas for the first time in years.

When you try to get organized, remember it isn’t all about skill and habit development. We must also get real about what’s advisable, or even possible. Even the most organized person can take on too much. For someone with ADHD, that threshold may be lower than you think.

Doing things because we think we should, rather than because we must or because they serve our Why, leaves little time and energy for our true priorities. Be especially ruthless with activities that require a lot of your ADHD. Most people with ADHD struggle with tedious tasks like filing, paying bills, and reading and answering emails. Even membership in a social book club requires a host of skills that may not come easily: keeping track of dates on your calendar, remembering to get and read the book, checking in on the group’s preferred communication channel, securing a babysitter if you’ll need one, and organizing a contribution to any potluck food and drink the group might share when it meets. Add up enough of these just-for-fun commitments and you may find yourself in complete gridlock.

This gridlock creates stress for you and your family, and it makes you feel like you’ve failed — again. And not just at filing your tax return, which everyone hates and puts off until the last minute, but at something others seem to do with no effort at all. The no effort part is likely a façade, of course, but the hit to your self-esteem is quite real.

Don’t be afraid to challenge assumptions and habits that “should” all over your self-confidence.

WRITING EXERCISE: WE ALL HAVE OUR SHOULD

Your should can be the enemy of your Why. Sit down in a quiet place. Make your own list of shoulds, using the examples that follow as inspiration. Where are you feeling pressure from others, or from your own expectations, to stretch yourself thin?

Should		Reality
We should upgrade to a house with more space and bigger closets.	vs.	Our current home should be adequate for our family, but we’re struggling to keep it clean and organized. Excess storage and living space will only increase these responsibilities and set us up for more stress.
Our homeowners’ association needs a secretary. I have the skillset — I should volunteer.	vs.	I’m already barely keeping my head above water with my own email and record-keeping. Adding more will subtract from time I can spend on our family.
We should see my mom more. She’s always talking about how her friends’ grandkids visit every month.	vs.	Traveling with ADHD can be stressful, before even adding the kids to the equation. The time we spend preparing and packing everyone up, not to mention the weekend away, eats into our family time and leaves no chance to catch up on anything around the house. Mom is retired and in good health. We need to talk to her about visiting us more often and make sure she feels welcome.
We should have credit cards with our favorite stores because they offer great deals and rewards.	vs.	People with ADHD generally dislike paperwork. Each new credit card brings its own set of upkeep responsibilities: paying and filing the bill each month, keeping an eye out for fraudulent transactions, handling the junk mail and email from these merchants, etc. Not only that, it’s easy to justify extra spending when we get special coupons and discounts. These cards may not be worth the cost to our time or our bank account.
I should sign up for this e-newsletter. It’s full of information about free online courses I’d love to take.	vs.	I have over 4,000 unread emails in my inbox right now. Half of them are various e-newsletters that will either distract me from something more important, or I’ll never read them. The course information is available online. I’ll look it up if I need it.

THE MANY SHOULDS OF MODERN PARENTING

Another biggie for my generation is balancing work and family. Women in previous generations fought for mothers to have a place in the workforce. We now enjoy extensive benefits and legal protections to ensure that having a family and having a career needn’t be mutually exclusive.

Consequently, many women feel they should continue to work after having a baby. And the research shows that some of them are right. Children seem to thrive more not in one situation or another — in daycare versus at home with Mom — but when their parents are happy. In other words, a child of a mother who wants to work is probably better off if she does, rather than if she stays home out of a feeling of obligation.

But be careful. Some parents with ADHD may flounder as full-time caregivers, while others will suffer when asked to balance work and family. Liz, a mother with ADHD and the writer behind the blog A Dose of Healthy Distraction, writes, “I dreamed of having a baby and staying home.”¹² And yet Liz “never quite settled into” life as a stay-at-home parent. Expectations became overwhelming, and she ended up feeling “like a rat in a maze.”

I, too, planned to stay home with my son. Before he was born, I had a job managing human resources and IT support for a small non-profit. Quitting made financial sense. If I’d kept working, we barely would’ve broken even after taxes and childcare. Emotionally and cognitively, I couldn’t imagine dealing with others’ problems (professionally, of course) all day, fighting traffic to get to daycare, and squeezing everything I could out of the few hours at home before I went to bed. Before having a child, my husband and I had struggled to balance work with household responsibilities. After? I didn’t want to find out.

In fact, I wanted to write a novel. I wanted to turn The ADHD Homestead into a helpful resource for managing home and family with ADHD. I knew, deep down, that I could not do these things while raising a child and working full-time. My life as a stay-at-home parent hasn’t been easy, but I wouldn’t have done it any other way.

Liz and I are both mothers with ADHD. I’m certain ADHD played a big role in each of our decisions, even though we ended up in opposite situations. Remember: ADHD symptoms exist on a spectrum, and people with ADHD are still individuals. As Liz writes, “Everyone has to make decisions based on what works for their family and personal situation.” Don’t get caught up in societal pressures or mommy wars. Get to know yourself and do what’s right for you and your family — not what anyone else says you should.

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12(Lewis, 2017)

KNOW THYSELF

As we challenge ourselves on all those little shoulds, as we ask ourselves “why?”, we come upon another reality: who we are informs how we ought to solve problems and organize our lives. Don’t overlook the many small decisions you make every day — decisions that should be informed by your unique brain and your specific situation. The tools you use to organize your life can make or break your success.

For example, do you care if an app on your phone is ugly? My husband’s job, where he has spent up to 20 consecutive hours working on his team’s web app, is to create attractive user interfaces. A bad user experience feels to him like a poorly-written book feels to me: grating and intolerable.

As the resident IT expert at a previous job, my boss called me into her office to see a great new calendar and task app she’d discovered. When I looked at it, I was horrified. The app was so hideous, its color scheme so jarring, I couldn’t focus on its features or content at all. But it was perfect for her. She didn’t care about the aesthetics. She’d found an app with the feature set she needed.

Knowing which of these user types you align with most closely will help you narrow — or broaden — your search for the perfect organizing tool. If you’re helping someone else get organized, it will be critical to learn about their brain and recommend solutions that align with their needs. What feels perfect for you may be unusable for them.

In the following pages, I’ll introduce several ways of thinking about your behavior and tendencies. While it’s a good idea not to get too caught up on types and generalizations, they can help you get to know yourself. I’ve found it both helpful and liberating to be able to classify my behavior traits and adapt my organizing strategies to suit my brain.

Some of these classifications have their roots in scientific research and have been adopted widely. Others have not. All will provide some insight and help you get to know yourself and your brain.

RUBIN’S ‘4 TENDENCIES’

When we talk about getting organized, we must look at who we are. Not just as people with ADHD, but as individuals with our own sources of intrinsic motivation. The first step is, of course, finding our Why. But beyond our Why lies a complex web of character traits that tell us a lot about which approaches are likely to succeed — and which will not.

“If we know ourselves,” writes Gretchen Rubin in her book Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives, “we’re able to manage ourselves better, and if we’re trying to work with others, it helps to understand them.” Otherwise, we’re stuck trying to swim upstream: a feeling familiar to many people with ADHD, not to mention those who live with us.

At no point has this been clearer to me than when I had a conversation with my husband about lists. Since I was a teenager, I’ve used them to calm down. Overwhelmed? Make a list! Anxious about forgetting something? Put it on a list!

As a human resources manager, I instituted several checklists in my office: a coversheet for our employee files. A new hire intake checklist. A first-day-at-the-office checklist. I dreaded leaving a key document out of our HR files, forgetting to set up someone’s desk with the proper gear on their first day, or neglecting to collect all the necessary information to add someone to our payroll. A list was the only way to prevent that dread. Lists also helped when my boss asked me about my progress on these tasks; I knew immediately what I’d done and what I had left to do.

My husband, on the other hand, is repelled by...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Your Guide to This Book
• Who We Are vs. Who the World Sees
• Before We Proceed: A Quick Note About ADHD
• Why Should I Get Organized?
• Rule #1: You Must Make Peace With Reality
• Rule #2: You Need a Container (and It Cannot Be Inside Your Brain)
• Rule #3: You Need a System That Works
• Rule #4: Strive for Less (Stuff, Distraction, and Overwhelm)
• The Daily Grind: Staying Organized for the Long Haul
• Suggested Reading
• References
• Table of Figures