The System: How I Get Anything At All Done
I was never actually diagnosed with ADHD, because getting a diagnosis would have involved some paperwork.
Suffice it to say, I have a lot of problems getting things done, especially now that I'm self employed and don't have a lot of external structure to keep me on task. But over the years, I've developed an interlocking set of habits, mechanisms, and processes that I call The System, which allows me to function much like a real person would. It takes inspiration from various organisational and accountability systems, but I'm not aware of anything quite like it.
I'm going to lay out how it works in this post, and hopefully people interested in Getting Their Shit Together will find some inspiration here.
The backbone of the system is a tree of nested OODA loops. The OODA Loop is a concept from the military, which stands for "Observe, Orient, Decide, Act". The idea is that you do these things at regular intervals, in a loop.
So when I'm working, once an hour I do the following:
Observe: What have I been doing for the last hour? How's it going? How does it compare with what I intended to do?
Orient: What goals/plan did I set myself for today? Am I on track? Should I change anything?
Decide: Given all that, what do I want to do for the next hour?
I have a template in Roam so I don't have to remember these questions.
Principle: Never remember things with your brain if you can possibly avoid it
I also usually do my hourly OODA using an excellent website called FocusMate. The consumer surplus I get from FocusMate is absurd, it's the only service I use where I'd happily pay ten times the price.
The way it works is, the site shows you a calendar. You select a time slot when you want to work, and click "book". It will then match you with someone else who wanted to work at that time, and when the time comes, the site puts you in a video call with that person. You quickly introduce yourselves and say what you plan to achieve that session, then mute yourselves and get to work. At the end of the session, you tell each other how you got on, and then there's a short break before the next session can start. I tend to pretty much fill my work hours with FocusMate sessions.
One unexpectedly great thing about FocusMate is actually the... networking? You can join Groups of people with shared interests, and it prefers to match people in the same group. This is nice because it's more likely that your partner will see the value in what you're working on, which is motivating. Over years of working this way, you get matched with the same person many many times, and you see them progress through their career or PhD etc, in little conversations a few minutes long. It's a lot like regularly bumping into someone at a co-working space; I’ve made good friends this way.
Anyway, the main value of FocusMate is in making sure I actually show up and stay on task. If you're late for a session, it hurts your score/rating, but more than that, having someone not show up for a session is kind of annoying, and I don't want to do that to people. This means if I book a FocusMate session, I pretty reliably actually do it. It's hard to just start working at 9am sharp, but it's easy to be on time for a 9am meeting with a colleague. Someone’s waiting on you.
Principle: Use soft social expectations and obligations to make things happen
FocusMate helps me to actually consistently do the hourly OODA loop, and the loop itself is very powerful, because it means that I rarely lose more than an hour at a time to distraction. I do often get off track, but on average it's only 30 minutes until I stop and Summon Sapience, and have a chance to fix the problem.
There's a real skill to accurately diagnosing what went wrong in the last hour and figuring out how to fix it, but I get to practice that skill multiple times a day, with clear feedback and record-keeping, so I keep getting better at it. We'll talk about some of the things involved in that later.
Now at this point you may have one or two questions, like: "What happens if something goes wrong that makes these hourly loops not happen at all?", or "Where do these daily plans/goals you talk about in the Orient step come from?".
The answer to both of these questions is the same: The Daily OODA Loop. Every day at a scheduled time, I have a call with an accountability partner, where the structure is very similar to the hourly loop:
Observe: What have I been doing for the last 24 hours? How does it compare with what I intended to do?
Orient: What goals/plan did I set myself for this week? Am I on track? Should I change anything?
Decide: Given all that, what do I want to do tomorrow?
Again, I have a template for this to make the process easy and avoid me needing to remember the steps.
The other benefit of that is, if I have any small quick habits I want to do every day, like logging how much sleep I got, or writing down one thing I'm grateful for, or booking tomorrow's FocusMate sessions, I can add those tasks to the Daily Check-in template, and they'll reliably get done every day.
Now I know what you're thinking, something like "Where do those weekly goals in the Orient step come from?" or "What if your accountability partner flakes out on you?". And yes, the answer is Weekly Check-ins, with a different accountability partner! The structure should be familiar:
Observe: What have I been doing for the last week? How does it compare with what I intended to do?
Orient: What goals/plan did I set myself for this month? Am I on track? Should I change anything?
Decide: Given all that, what do I want to do this coming week?
"And the monthly goals?", you ask? You can't catch me out, dear reader, it's OODA loops all the way up. Ideally with a different partner for each level. Monthly, Quarterly, Yearly. I don't do five or ten year plans, but I could. At each level, if I want to make sure some other quick habit or routine reliably happens at that cadence, I can tack it onto the appropriate check-in template. And when things fall apart (and they do), the higher levels catch it and give me a chance to fix things.
Principle: It would be great to design a system that can never fail. Realistically it's better to design one that quickly recovers from failures
I plan to work for an hour, but I know I'll often get distracted and fail. The hourly OODA loop catches that and puts me back on track. But sometimes I'll just... wake up on the wrong side of bed, and fail to do any hourly loops at all, and waste a whole day. But my accountability partner will make sure I do my daily OODA, and we'll diagnose what went wrong and how to stop it happening tomorrow. If my daily partner misses the call, I can hopefully do it on my own at the scheduled time. But if not, or if this happens a lot, I'll note it during the next weekly check-in, and make plans to improve the situation. And so on and so forth.
You must expect the system to fail sometimes, at every level. This is critically important because it prevents Failing With Abandon, that brittle failure mode where you say "Agh, I've missed this habit three days in a row, my streak is ruined, I guess this doesn't work for me, I give up". Knowing to expect failures, you can replace that with more productive metacognition, like "Hmm, I missed that habit a lot this week, why did that happen? Is there an obvious fix to try? Is this habit still serving its intended purpose? Should I decide to stop doing it, or change it, or replace it with something else?". The failure of any given part of the system doesn't break the whole thing, it gets caught by the other parts and becomes another routine step in the normal ongoing process of updating and adapting The System.
Principle: Nil desperandum. Updating your plan is all part of the plan
That’s all there is to it
The core of The System isn’t complicated - regularly scheduled planning and goal setting, with space to review and update things to fix problems, and redundancies to catch when things break.
"Isn't that a lot of overhead?", I hear you ask. Yeah, it kind of is. If you can reliably stay on track over all timescales with a lighter system, you should do that. But I found that having some accountability and goal setting helped me a bit, so I added a bit more, and that helped a bit more, and I recognised the trend, and added a lot more, and that helped a lot.
"If a bit helps a bit, maybe a lot helps a lot" -- Zvi Mowshowitz, approximately
In later posts I hope to talk more about some of the problems that happen during the Act phase of my loops, and some techniques and strategies I employ in the Decide phase for fixing them.
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