I’ve found that breaking a daunting task down into concrete steps and eating away at it in baby steps helps me get it done. When I take Concerta, it helps me focus on the boring nitty-gritty bits, and it enables me to focus on activities like reading where you don’t have to do any planning. But the actual process planning/task breakup stays just as cognitively straining as before and becomes the new bottleneck to my productivity. Can this also be fixed with a pill, or does everyone have it this hard and is it a skill that you get better at over time?
There are multiple ways to break up tasks but for myself, and with practice, the best approach I’ve found isn’t to break down a whole task at once but rather to shave off one small chunk and focus on that then revisit the task and shave off one small chunk again. I, personally, get overwhelmed if I have a long list of little steps so my task list usually looks like
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Do this small thing
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Come up with a new #1
It may sound silly and irrational but it works for me.
Hmm yeah this is what I’ve been doing as well. It’s just that step 2 is tiring
It definitely is - that’s why ADHD is considered a disability. Shit is just hard for us and not even medication is a complete fix.
I think the most important thing to do is to try and align what parts of your life you can to make yourself most likely to succeed (i.e. perform in society at an acceptable level) and, fucking crucially, forgive your damn self when you fall short. You’re dealing with a disability, a shame spiral leading into depression won’t do shit - be kind to yourself and let your brain relax when you are able. It is tiring to act un-neurodivergent but most of us need to do that to keep food in our belly - so let your brain indulge itself in your off time.
Hmm, that makes sense
Ah. The “eating the pie” methodology.
- Take a small bite
- See where you can bite next.
I don’t often algorithm, but when I algorithm I do so greedily.
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You can try the todo from goblin tools, you describe the main task and it tries to split it into sub tasks for you. I’ve tried it a couple of times and it wasn’t bad
Nice one! It can even break down the sub tasks again and again and oh my god, I have watered down „cooking Potatoes“ to 54 sub tasks that take around 8h 😁😁😁
Interesting
i treat tasks as a quest. understanding that each quest ends with a new obstacle. this helps me. i still struggle with starting a task/quest. once i get going i can keep conquering quests/tasks.
Oooh, micro-accomplishments to get that dopamine hit on the wins. This is smart too as it retrains the brain to seek it out. One day, one day, it’ll fight this process less, because it wants that sweet dopamine micro-hit.
This is what Scrum is all about
No. Scrum is more than a label on common-sense problem breakdown. If it were, then it’d just be riding the coat-tails of established canon.
Common sense is a fundamentally broken concept and you should remove it from your vocabulary.
Yeah “common sense” is normally just “things I believe with no justification so I can’t explain why I believe them.”
