On ADHD, Time Management, and Self-Worth

Created by Jason Ripple, CMDI Former Arts and Graphics Editor

It’s 5:30 p.m. on an average Tuesday evening. I’ve just finished working at my full-time job and I have a list of tasks I need to complete before I can relax for the evening: working out, showering, preparing dinner, fulfilling a few orders for my side business, and washing the dishes. All told, this list should take me about four hours to complete, if I get straight to work.

I head to the kitchen, where I figure I’ll prepare dinner first and load the dishwasher while my meal cooks. Multitasking saves time, right? I’m having a quesadilla, so I set the pan over medium heat and grab the necessary ingredients.

Out of the corner of my eye, I can see into the adjacent laundry room, and the closed lid of the washer reminds me that I need to transfer my clothes to the dryer. No problem, I think. The pan’s preheating, and I’ll come right back to it. I transfer the laundry to the dryer and start the machine. While I’m in the laundry room, I notice that my hamper is still full, so I throw a new load in the washer, add detergent, and start the cycle.

As I walk back into the kitchen, I begin assembling my quesadilla. I chop up the cooked chicken, slice the onions, and realize that my nonstick pan has been sitting on the heat for too long without anything in it. To avoid damaging the pan, I take it off the heat to cool while I finish the assembly.

First a layer of shredded cheese, then a layer of chicken and onions, then another light sprinkle of cheese, and – I’m missing something. During the warmer months, I always try to include fresh minced herbs from my garden in my cooking. Summer only comes once a year, you know.

I go out onto my balcony and trim a few choice stems of parsley. While I’m out there, I notice that my tomato plants have some yellowing leaves, so I trim those as well. And my oregano plant is trying to choke out its neighbors, winding spindly stems around the roots of adjacent plants. I can’t just leave it like that. So I trim my oregano as well, figuring I’ll mince it up with the parsley and toss it into the quesadilla.

As I come back into the kitchen, I can feel heat radiating off the stove. How long was I out there? I touch the pan, which I’d previously removed from the heat. It’s cold, so I put it back on the burner to warm up again. My half-assembled quesadilla is taking up most of the space on my cutting board, so I gently shift it to the side before rinsing my herbs. After I dry them, remove the leaves, and roughly chop them up, I sprinkle them onto the quesadilla in a nice, even layer. A bit more cheese and I crown my creation. No salt.

I sigh, removing the top tortilla, and sprinkle a pinch of kosher salt over the fillings before covering it back up again. Finally, I carefully lift the whole quesadilla and prepare to get in on the heat. No oil.

I set it back down on the cutting board and spray a coating of oil onto the pan’s surface. It smokes aggressively. I must have let it get way too hot again. Immediately, I turn on the overhead fan and remove the pan from the heat. After wiping the rapidly blackening oil from the pan with a paper towel, I let it rest for a minute or two before placing it back on the burner. After thirty seconds, I spray on another coat of oil, which the pan accepts this time without any more fireworks. I transfer my quesadilla into the pan and it sizzles pleasantly.

Now that dinner is on the stove, it’s clean-up time. Before I can wash my cutting board, I need to empty my sink, so I begin loading the dishwasher. By the time I’m done, I smell that my tortilla is teetering on burning, so I give the quesadilla a hasty flip. It’s a bit overdone, but some blackened bits never hurt anyone. I start the dishwasher, brush off my cutting board, and start to wash it. Wait a second – I’m about to cut the quesadilla on this board. I stop myself and dry it off.

My quesadilla finishes cooking, so I turn off the stove and remove the pan from the heat. I move it to the cutting board and slice it into eight equal pieces before plating my creation. Ever the perfectionist, I add a neat little dollop of sour cream and reach for my phone to snap a picture.

The screen blinks on - I’m stunned. It’s 7:45 p.m.

By the time I finish eating, I won’t get to the gym until 8:15, meaning I won’t be done working out until 9:15. After I return and shower, it’ll be nearly 10 o’clock. I haven’t even started on the orders for my side business! I guess I’ll be working late tonight.

When people without ADHD imagine the disorder, I think they often picture someone who’s fidgety, hyperactive, and impossible to hold a conversation with - a sort of flighty, immature, childlike individual with no attention span. Many of my peers have dismissed the disorder outright, stating that “everyone’s a little ADD” or “we all would be more productive on stimulants.” I’ve been told to simply “make a schedule and stick to it,” or “stop wasting time scrolling on social media.”

I wish it were so simple. Everyone who knows me will attest to my obsession with efficiency and time management. I’ve tried more organizational tools than I can count, from written reminders, to schedules, to whiteboards, planners, Google calendars, Apple calendars, physical calendars, timers, alarms – the list goes on.

I don’t have most social media apps on my phone, as many of them are designed to prey on my worst habits. The omnipresent attention economy profits off my distractibility. Social media companies employ entire teams of engineers for the singular purpose of making my ADHD symptoms as hard to manage as possible.

Even with all my defenses and organizational structures in place, my ADHD still affects my life every day. Mostly, I struggle with managing my “mental stack” – small tasks enter my awareness, piling up and creating tension in my mind.

Think back to my quesadilla – why did things spiral so far out of control? Why did a 30-minute dinner become a 90-minute debacle that derailed my whole evening? One by one, small unplanned tasks piled up in my mental stack, and I couldn’t bring myself to delay them until later.

Rather than viewing this as a symptom, I think my inability to postpone small tasks is an adaptation I’ve made to help me survive with ADHD. Over the years, I’ve learned by getting burned many times.

Once, for instance, I received a letter containing a bill for a toll. Immediately, I logged onto the listed website to pay it. After entering my information, the website threw an error and asked me to try again later. Fast forward a few months, and suddenly my $20 toll became a $300 delinquent payment penalty.

Through negative reinforcement, I have grown hypervigilant. If I don’t do it now, there’s a chance I don’t do it at all. Taking that chance – trusting myself to come back to a task later – has proven too risky, and my brain has figured out how to protect me from those consequences. Get it done now, while you still can.

Tasks that I can complete now offer me a fast resolution of any discomfort and a hit of well-earned dopamine to boot. When a task comes up, if it will only take me five or ten minutes, I usually tackle it immediately. I feel good, I fulfilled my responsibility, and I don’t have to worry about it anymore. Tasks that reward me in short term, whether they’re beloved hobbies or just quickly actionable chores, are the ones I find very easy to complete.

But what if a goal requires sustained, consistent effort – the kind of effort that doesn’t pay off in any sort of clear timeframe? I’m talking about long-term, life-improvement goals like growing a business, building a website, losing weight, or applying for jobs. These are the types of responsibilities that my ADHD most interferes with. It’s even worse if the work involves sustained focus and isn’t fun on its own – in fact, it can feel downright impossible.

With my ADHD, completing job applications can be an insurmountable task. Who likes paperwork? Even worse, who likes doing unpaid work for a company that will, in all likelihood, never respond to you with more than a form letter, letting you know that your efforts were all for naught?

Scientific research has established that adults with ADHD are much more likely to experience depression than adults without the disorder. This can be related to feelings of worthlessness which may stem from being ill-suited to achieving success in modern society. Imagine feeling nearly unable to perform the one task that stands between you and securing self-sustaining employment. On top of that, imagine being consistently invalidated by others with offhand remarks like “nobody likes applying for jobs” or “just get over yourself” or “it sucks for everyone.”

The truth is, however, that it doesn’t suck for neurotypical people like it does for me.

I’m far from averse to hard work, or even tedium. I’ve commuted long hours, worked part-time jobs while maintaining high standards of academic achievement, excelled in data-entry internships, written term papers, and have held down a stable desk job for half a decade. In addition, I add more to my plate voluntarily, just to keep busy and feel productive.

During college, I led a student club for three years, organizing weekly events, completing paperwork, and attending required seminars. While maintaining my current job, I have started and grown a side business, handling everything from bookkeeping, to sales, to interfacing with customers, to shipping orders.

But all this is just preface to what I want to share. I want to be sure that neurotypical readers fully understand where I’m coming from. I need to clearly state that I am not, and have never been, a lazy person who simply shies away from hard work.

Ok, here goes nothing: for me, at times, the prospect of sitting down to complete a job application feels so colossal, so insurmountable, so painful, that I earnestly feel I would prefer to lose everything, become unemployed, and eventually become homeless. It is a task that can move me to tears.

I can sit and stare at the screen in front of me for hours, unable to make any progress. I have eliminated distractions. I have put my phone in another room. I have even tried printing the application out and disconnecting my internet router. Nothing has helped.

Devoid of any promise of reward or positive reinforcement, I can find myself completely unable to even get started. As the time ticks by, I work for small bursts until my mind wanders. I sometimes come to minutes later, realizing that I’ve lost my focus midway through answering a prompt, and now my answer is nothing more than muddled, irrelevant nonsense. On my third try getting through a task and failing, I contemplate whether it’s even worth the effort to hold down a job and live up to the expectations of society at all.

I’m far from a lazy person, though I feel I’ve lived most of my life with that label. From bearing the casual invalidation of others, to facing my own intermittent inability to fulfill the basic expectations of working life, laziness worked its way into my self-perception. It has been a long journey to unpack and distance myself from that demeaning description, even just in my own mind.

ADHD does not define me. However, it has fundamentally shaped the person I am today, and I have no doubt it will continue to be an obstacle I face for the rest of my life. I work hard at overcoming my limitations, from religiously scheduling my life to creating checklists that “gamify” tasks and give me small dopamine hits even when the tasks themselves are joyless or uninteresting. I set alarms and overall lead a productive and effective life by anyone’s standards. I adapt, I cope, and I overcome. But the disorder persists.

Above all, I want those without ADHD to understand that it’s not some excuse for one’s failings. Though it’s certainly possible to fake it and try to gain access to restricted substances like stimulants, that doesn’t invalidate the real problems it causes for those who struggle with it.

Like most people with ADHD, I work harder than the average person to consistently accomplish my daily tasks and meet the demands of modern life. Every single granular task that seems automatic for neurotypical people, from brushing my teeth to watering my plants, must be planned for, managed, and scheduled, otherwise I risk not getting it done.

I may find it easier to focus on a video game than a job application, but that’s not a reality I’m happy about. ADHD is not an excuse to do things I like instead of working hard. In fact, it's one of the most consistently distressing aspects of my life, and I fight to improve that reality every day.

I am scatterbrained and easily overwhelmed. I often lose an hour to a seemingly endless stream of insignificant tasks, each of them taking twice as long as they should. I catch myself scrolling mindlessly on social media and feel ashamed for the time I’ve wasted, despite the engineers behind those applications working tirelessly to circumvent my defenses and capture my attention. I am sometimes moved to cartoonish feats of procrastination by my inability to put sustained effort toward a long-term goal without the immediate promise of some emotional reward.

One thing I am not, however, and will never allow myself to be called again, is lazy.