It’s been quite some time now since I discovered that my particular brand of organisation has a name; attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Now, I could fill tomes with how and why this name is not only inappropriate, but also fundamentally misleading, if not to say downright offensive. If there is any glimmer of helpful information therein, it is that, yes, we do tend to have issues with regulating our attention. And this can lead to organisational models that not only stray off the beaten track, but out of the beaten universe.
自从我发现我的特定品牌组织有名字以来，已经有一段时间了；注意力缺陷多动障碍（ADHD）。 现在，我可以用这个名字如何以及为什么不仅不合适，而且从根本上误导，如果不说彻头彻尾的冒犯的话，我可以用来填满。 如果其中有任何有用的信息，那就是，是的，我们确实倾向于在调节注意力方面有问题。 这可能会导致组织模式不仅偏离了人迹罕至的轨道，而且偏离了人迹罕至的宇宙。
Much like the Universe, this flavour of organisation can look much like chaos to the untrained eye. When I first started poking into the research in 2020, the most common resources around organisation skills and resources for ADHDers focused on Executive Dysfunction, impaired working memory and cognitive inflexibility.
就像宇宙一样，这种组织的味道在未经训练的眼睛里看起来非常混乱。 当我在2020年第一次开始研究时，围绕组织技能和多动症患者资源最常见的资源侧重于行政功能障碍、工作记忆力受损和认知不灵活。
Before learning that label, there were others. “Day dreamer”, “away with the faeries”, “head like a sieve”; a head that I would forget if it wasn’t screwed on, to name but a few. And it’s true, with the working memory of a carrot, I had to find ways to get organised that looked very different to those of pretty much everyone around me. I tried lists, I tried charts, I tried trying harder. I got used to the yelling.
在学习那个标签之前，还有其他的。 “白日梦者”、“远离仙女”、“像筛子一样的头”；如果不拧紧的话，我会忘记的头，仅举几例。 的確，有了胡蘿蔔的工作記憶，我不得不找到與我周圍幾乎所有人的組織方式截然不同的方法。 我尝试了列表，我尝试了图表，我尝试了更努力。 我习惯了尖叫声。
To this day, there’s nothing that will send me into orbit faster than the innocuous phrase “Just use a planner”, or it’s first cousins, “Put it in the calendar”, “Set a reminder” and “Use the Pomodoro technique.”
时至今天，没有什么比“只需使用计划表”或“把它放在日历上”、“设置提醒”和“使用番茄技术”这些无害的短语更快地让我进入轨道了。
Listen, the one thing I know about ADHD with a great degree of certainty, is that if you’ve met one person with ADHD, you’ve met one person with ADHD. Some of my sparkly friends swear by bullet journals, some by setting alarms. Some of them even use the Pomodora technique, albeit with maverick timings. Some lean into the disorganisation and some have become militant in their routines, but every single one of them has challenges around being organised in a world that runs by neurotypical standards of timeliness and cleanliness and orderliness.
听着，我非常肯定地知道关于多动症的一件事是，如果你遇到过一个患有多动症的人，你就遇到了一个患有多动症的人。 我的一些闪亮的朋友用子弹日记发誓，有些人用设置闹钟发誓。 他们中的一些人甚至使用番茄技术，尽管时机很特立独行。 有些人倾向于混乱，有些人在日常工作中变得好战，但他们每个人都面临着在一个按及时性、清洁度和秩序的神经典型标准运行的世界中组织起来的挑战。
One common issue is working memory, or lack thereof. Researching for this piece, I LOL-ed at the sheer number of comments that begin:
一个常见的问题是工作记忆，或者缺乏工作记忆。 在研究这篇文章时，我大笑，因为开头的评论数量如此之多：
- If I didn’t write it down, you didn’t tell me.
- I forgot what I was going to say.
Or:
或者：
- Don’t sit down.
- Don’t you dare sit down.
- I wrote this 50 minutes ago and forgot to post it.
So with that disclaimer in mind, here are some hacks that work for me. And before you recoil in horror at what I am about to share, let’s remember that ADHD isn’t “just” an attention deficit disorder, or a tendency to move about a lot. It is a complex mental disability or difference, depending on the context, replete with a panoply of hyper-emotions and unruly hyper-focus.
因此，考虑到这一免责声明，这里有一些适合我的黑客。 在你害怕我即将分享的内容之前，让我们记住，多动症“不仅仅是”注意力缺陷障碍，也不是经常移动的倾向。 它是一种复杂的精神残疾或差异，取决于上下文，泛泛着过度情绪和不羈的过度专注。
Disclaimer: there is no order to the following methods for staying organised. And I’ll probably forget some.
免责声明：以下保持组织的方法没有顺序。 我可能会忘记一些。
- For peak organisation, it is essential for me to have everything in plain sight. If not, it vanishes permanently from my mind. Books I need to read, lessons I need to write, tests I need to grade; all of this must remain somewhere within my field of vision. The same is true of my kitchen. Recently, a friend was waxing lyrical about their new kitchen robot and the revolution of culinary ease that followed in the wake of its purchase. And I remembered, “Hey! I have one of those. In the cupboard”. Sacrificing the counterspace and visual pleasure of having a clean and tidy work area can, and will diminish the efficiency of my process. I do try to keep things relatively orderly, despite their abundance, but inevitably this looks like the ADHD pile of piles. Nonetheless, it works, and in the disorder, I can achieve organisation.
- When these piles become unruly, one nifty little life hack is to invite people over. Those piles disappear faster than “a thing I’ll do later” from my short-term memory. Can I ever find them again? Well, they do enter the vortex, which is why the next pro-hack is so beautiful, and again, paradoxical.
- Never own only one of an essential item. Computer chargers, water bottles, spectacles, headphones, earphones, scissors, guitars, keys; if it is essential to my well being and functionality, there must be a multiplicity. The vortex is real. Once I realised that sometimes it claims things as its own and learned to solve for that, both my stress levels and my ability to stay organised improved exponentially. Everything eventually re-emerges. This morning, I found the corn-starch in the tea-towel drawer. There are no why’s or wherefores as to how it came about to be there. We just accept the chaos and learn to live with it.
- And speaking of headphones or earphones, the better the noise cancellation, the more effective in eliminating distractions and getting on with the work at hand.
- Launch/landing pads. These are strategically placed receptacles for all things necessary for worldly adventures- keys, phones, chargers etc., near the door. Dump all essential items in there upon arrival, and grab them again before you leave. People often (always) laugh at my gargantuan handbag, but rarely, if ever, do I forget my necessaries anymore. Of course, the inevitable may still occur when said item disappears, refer to item 3. above when this comes to pass.
- Post-its. Some of my neurosparkly friends rely on tech, but I can ignore that as easily as alarms of calendar reminders. A post-it, however, has a compelling magic about it; a tiny nugget of organisation that I can stick anywhere, on the bathroom mirror, my MacBook, other peoples’ desks, other people. Sticky fabulousness.
- Easy in, hard out. This hack was a real game changer. Based on the principle that certain documents are necessary to move through the world; passport, birth certificate, rental contract, etc. but that storing these bits of paper in any kind of coherent filing system is not the strongest suit in the ADHD skillset, an easy-in storage system is not only helpful, it’s almost divine. Sure, it may be easy to chuck all of these documents into a box or drawer, and sure, it may take half an hour to fish it back out again. But you know where it is. Even if it is a little harder to retrieve than from a carefully organised, colour coded set of folders, which we would never keep up to date anyway, it’s certainly not as hard as searching the entire house, multiple times.
- And finally, the one that has soothed my soul and given me solace is this, and I quote, “Half-ass is better than no-ass.” Be kind to yourself. It’s ok to be different. It’s ok that your organisational style may look like you’ve just been burgled and just moved in at the same time. It’s ok to be imperfect. Having ADHD means figuring out a way to do things that’s not standard. Probably the greatest boon has been finding like-minded people who understand that the struggle is real.
October is ADHD Awareness month, this year and every year. What chaotic life hacks have you discovered to maintain a sense of organised chaos?
十月是多动症意识月，今年和每年。 你发现了哪些混乱的生活窍门来保持有组织的混乱感？