#taskbreakdowns

People all over are talking about setting goals right now, because it’s the beginning of a new year. The big buzz word for goals has been to make them SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-based. I’m not a fan of SMART goals myself, but I know they’re great for some people. So if you want to give them a try, here are the steps to follow.

Specific

Decide what you want to achieve. Really drill down to what it is and why.

For example, if you want to read more books, put a number on that and decide what types of books you want to read. One book a week? That’s 52 books in a year. Do you want them to be fiction or non-fiction or does it matter? Is it that you want to read more or that you want to read more women authors, or authors of a particular race, or maybe more books about a type of person? This is helpful because it gives you the criteria you’ll need for choosing your books, which lessens decision fatigue.

It also helps you know when you’ve achieved the goal.

Measurable

It’s way easier to measure something positive than negative (depending on what you’re talking about).

For example, if I want to skin-pick less often, I would need to have a baseline of how much I actually do it in order to measure whether I’m doing it less often.

Instead, I would figure out what I want to do instead of skin-picking, and then measure how many times I do the replacement behaviour vs how many times I just keep picking.

Achievable

Make sure you choose something you’re going to be able to do. You can make it something that might be difficult, but don’t make it impossible.

For example, I see social media people talk about setting goals for how many followers you’re going to have. I dislike that because it’s dependent on other people’s behaviour, and I have zero control over that.

Instead, I would set goals around how many times per week I will post to social media. That’s my behaviour, and while ADHD makes it difficult to control sometimes, I have way more control over what I do than what someone else does.

Relevant

Your goals need to make sense for your life.

It would be ridiculous for me to set a goal to go to the gym three times a week since I live in the country and there’s a pandemic going on.

What I can do, however, is set a goal to go for a walk every day and to do at-home strength training three times a week.

Time-based

Goals need end dates to be effective, especially for those of us with crappy executive functioning. That deadline gives us the needed push to get stuff done.

So a goal to write a novel is great, but it’ll be better if you have a date by which you want to have it finished.

Examples in full (not my actual goals):

I will read 52 science fiction novels by December 31, 2022.

When I notice that I am skin-picking, I will pick up my knitting instead and finish two shawls this way by December 31, 2022.

I will post on Instagram three times a week, for a total of 156 posts by December 31, 2022.

I will prepare to walk a 5k in September 2022 by walking outside for at least 30 minutes a day, six days a week, once the weather is warm enough to do so.

I will finish the final draft of my in-progress novel by June 30, 2022.

Breaking it down

The biggest problem for us is that all of these goals need to be broken down further before we can really begin working on them.

We need to know all of the steps that will get us to that deadline, and we need to schedule them appropriately so we aren’t scrambling too much to get there.

Bonus: Triplets

Executive dysfunction tends to result in long lists of stuff we need or want to do. Sometimes they’re prioritized, sometimes they’re categorized, sometimes they’re broken down into smaller steps. The common trait is that they’re ridiculously long and overwhelming.

Here’s one way to manage that overwhelming list when your “can” has fled the premises but stuff still needs to happen. (I call these “Bad Brain Days.”)

Goals & gravy

Goals & gravy is a deceptively simple way to help yourself feel like you’ve accomplished something in spite of your brain giving up.

Goals

Choose three tasks that need to get done in the next three days.

gravy

Choose three tasks that you want to do.

Do a Goal, then do a gravy. The gravy tasks are fun rewards for getting Goals done.

Don’t forget to celebrate every task you complete—that helps with more than just habits!

If you do other tasks on your list, they are bonuses and that’s even more awesomesauce!

Bonus: Triplets

Triplets are sets of three tasks that you follow with a break. This gives you a much smaller focus to look at when you have a long list of tasks, and that keeps it from being quite so overwhelming.

Try to keep the tasks you use for triplets smaller.

A triplet consisting of two or three large jobs that will each take longer than 20 minutes to complete isn’t going to work as well.

If that’s what you’re looking at, take one of those big jobs and break it down into three segments for your triplet.

No, it isn’t cheating. The whole point is that you’re trying to trick your brain into letting you do stuff. If you have to make it think that you’re doing less than you are, so be it.

Sometimes we have to use weird analogies to get us through things. You probably aren’t really tricking your brain, you’re actually reminding it that things aren’t as hard as it thinks they are.

It’s still not cheating, though. You have executive dysfunction, and that makes it hard to do stuff. Which means that if something makes it easier for you to do the thing, it’s an accommodation and you’re fine.

Our lives aren’t a game or a test. Making lives easier is what people do every day, and doing something differently from other people isn’t wrong if the result is that it gets done.

Believe it or not, we can actually form habits that we want in our lives, not just the kind we wish we could quit! It requires effort and a refusal to give up, but it is definitely possible.

Here’s what to do:

Figure out what things you do every day.

Decide what you want to add, and choose one of the things from step 1 to go right before the new habit.

Figure out the smallest part of the new habit. For example, if you want to start brushing your teeth before bed, you might choose “get out toothbrush and toothpaste.”

Decide how you’re going to celebrate after you do that tiny step. You could smile at yourself in the mirror, jump up and down, clap your hands, or any number of other things.

Start doing your new habit and celebration.

One of the hardest parts of executive dysfunction is planning. There are a lot of different parts, and all of them require skills we do not have!

This Tumblr is here to help with breaking tasks and projects down into steps, but even once you have that, there’s figuring out how long stuff is going to take and scheduling each step so you get things done on time. And then you have to battle inertia to actually do the things!

But let’s go back to the beginning. Sure, if you need the steps for a task you can look here or send an ask. But what if that’s not an option, or the steps we have aren’t going to work for you?

Here is how you break down a task into its steps. I will use brushing your teeth as my example. Yes, you are going to find out exactly how I brush my teeth

1. Write down the task.

Brushing my teeth.

2. Write down all of the things you can think of that need to happen to do the task, including fetching materials. Don’t worry about the order yet.

Put toothpaste on toothbrush

Put toothbrush on outside of back upper molars

Scrub outside of upper teeth

Scrub outside of bottom teeth

Scrub top of bottom teeth

Scrub bottom of upper teeth

Scrub inside of upper teeth

Scrub inside of bottom teeth

Get toothbrush

Get toothpaste

Brush top of tongue

Rinse mouth with lukewarm water

Get cup

Rinse toothbrush

Put away toothbrush

Put cap on toothpaste

Put toothpaste away

Rinse rim of cup

Put cup away

Remember you should brush your teeth

Go to bathroom sink

3. Figure out what order the steps actually go in. Think about whether you can do the next step in your list after the first one, and also think about the order you usually do the steps in. If you realize you forgot something, add it now!

Remember you should brush your teeth

Go to bathroom sink

Get toothbrush

Get toothpaste

Get cup

Put toothpaste on toothbrush

Put cap on toothpaste

Put toothpaste away

Put toothbrush on outside of back upper molars

Scrub outside of upper teeth

Scrub outside of bottom teeth

Scrub top of bottom teeth

Scrub bottom of upper teeth

Scrub inside of upper teeth

Scrub inside of bottom teeth

Brush top of tongue

Rinse mouth with lukewarm water

Rinse rim of cup

Put cup away

Rinse toothbrush

Put away toothbrush

Smile big on the mirror and celebrate!

It’s 2022 now, and of course everyone around us is talking about goals and vision boards and words for the year. This post is meant to be a humorous look at how such things typically go for those of us with executive dysfunction.

(I was going to do a flowchart infographic but I ran out of time. Of course.)

Realize it’s New Year’s Eve and you haven’t made your resolutions yet.

Look for your resolutions from last January. Find, instead, a short story you wrote and your resolutions from three years ago. Set the story aside so you can read it later.

Read over your three-year-old resolutions. Note that some of them are still things you want to accomplish, and the rest are completely unrelated to anything about your life now. Recycle them.

Research goal-setting and resolutions by watching YouTube videos and reading blog posts.

Follow the steps from everything you watched and read. End up with ten different sets of resolutions.

Compare the resolutions to each other and decide to combine some, so you have just one set.

Try to break down each resolution into smaller steps. Realize that you have no idea what’s involved in some of these things.

Start researching the areas you don’t know enough about. Follow All The Rabbit Trails. Become an expert on repairing toilets, something you will probably never need to do in your life.

Start scheduling the steps for your resolutions in your new planner. Realize that it has a goal-setting section, which was one of the reasons you got it.

Re-do all of your resolutions using your planner’s goal-setting section.

Lose your planner two weeks into the new year, prompting you to purchase a new one. This one hasn’t got a goal-planning section, but you’re over that. As long as you know when your appointments are, it’s fine.

Okay, so if you don’t like folders and binders aren’t for you, you could try cubbies. Now, what I’m thinking of is something like this (store link, easiest way to describe it, not affiliated etc. etc.) so that’s what I’ll be speaking to here.

What you need:

a pencil

a filing cubby structure

recycling bin

shredder

some Bankers boxes (put together)

coloured paper or labels

scissors

clear tape (Scotch or packing)

a black marker

Post-Its

What you do:

Pick up the first piece of paper in your box of papers to file. Decide if you need to keep it.

If you do not need to keep this paper, put it in your recycling bin.

If you do need to keep this paper, put it in a Bankers box. Use your pencil to write what it is on a Post-It and stick it to the box. Think big categories for now: money, writing, vehicles, etc.

Repeat steps 1-3, grouping your papers by type.

Once you’re finished with this pre-sorting, you have some decisions to make.

Start by deciding a time frame for what you will keep accessible. For example, the current year’s financial papers could be kept accessible until you’ve done your taxes.

Take a box and begin sorting the contents by where they’re from or what they’re about. You might have a pile of documentation bout your vacuum cleaner, another for the washing machine, etc.

Sort each pile into chronological order, if applicable.

Divide the piles into what you need to keep accessible vs what can be put away.

Put the papers you want to archive back into your Bankers box.

Set your “accessible” piles on top of your Bankers box.

Note how many categories you have on the Post-It.

Repeat steps 1-7 for each Bankers box.

Total how many categories you have all together.

Decide how you are going to set up your cubbies. You might want to group all financial things together but use more than one cubby for it.

Decide if you want to hand write your labels or print them off the computer or using a typewriter.

See what colours you have available in your pens or labels/dots and assign a colour to each Bankers box category.

Create your labels and stick them onto the edges of your cubbies (bottom or top edge).

Place your papers into the applicable cubbies.

@taskbreakdowns has been doing a series on filing and the first post is about using file folders for it. So that’s step-by-step instructions on how to do it. (The second post is about using binders, the third post will be about using cubby holes, and the fourth will be about combining the different methods to make something truly individualized that works for you. I know this because I am writing the posts.)

Once you have your filing system established and it’s one that works for you, the key is to just file your papers as soon as you figure out that you need to keep them. That’s not always possible, for a variety of reasons (including executive dysfunction) so I would recommend setting a box on top of your filing cabinet that is your “to be filed” box, and then just doing all the filing once a week or once a month (depending on how much paper you have to file, some people have lots and some people don’t). You still have to put your papers into the box but at least you don’t have to take the time to find the right folder right in the moment.