Keeping a Watchful Eye on ADHD-fueled Projects

All this month, we've been discussing various steps you can take to rein in your ADHD and get some projects done for a change. You've limited your projects, picked the ones with the most key interest, and made plans to work on them. Now what?

[caption id="attachment_530" align="alignleft" width="250" caption="Photo-0108 by Micah Sittig"][/caption]

Unless you know yourself really well, you're unlikely to pare down your project list successfully on the first attempt. You may even have slipped off the horse and traipsed through the shiny fields of distraction to newer and greener pastures again. Until I learned this last step, I was out there traipsing along with you.

Periodically Reevaluate Your Projects

Are you still passionate about your projects? Have they been replaced with new ones? If you are overwhelmed or losing steam, do you need to prune again and refocus, or is your mind trying to tell you that maybe you are working on the wrong projects? Or are you just bored?

I have to confess. This is part seven of the project series and I am so bored of writing it that nothing short of superhuman will is helping me see this article through to the end. Boredom is the enemy when the sparkly joy of the initial idea has long since faded into the drab dullness of drudgery. It is then that only one's will/conviction/motivation can carry one through to completion.

How badly do you believe in what you are doing? How badly do you want that proverbial feather in your cap? When writing series like this for my own blog (A Splintered Mind), there were many times that I reached this point and wandered off, never to finish the series.

The way I avoid that now is through a barrage of reminder notes, goal statements, ToDos, and better discipline through practice. All our epiphanies amount to nothing if we don't force ourselves to follow through to the end. Continually reevaluating our project list is one way to accomplish this.

I'd always know when it was time to reevaluate. I'd either be crushed by the immense weight of all the projects I had taken upon myself, or I'd get frustrated with my lack of progress. I had one question that I asked myself: Was I a published author yet? If the answer was "no", I still had some work to do.

In summary, our tendency as adults with ADHD is to take on new projects when we get bored. This either means we are taking on too many projects simultaneously or we are leaving a long trail of unfinished projects behind us.

• First, we need to acknowledge the we might need to do more than one thing at a time. As long as we limit our project list, this can help us avoid boredom and still stay on track.
• Second, we need to pick the most interesting project to be the main one of focus if we plan on accomplishing anything within this millennium.
• Third, we need to take things to the next step and actually make plans to work on those projects. For some, this will be the hardest step.
• Lastly, we need to periodically reevaluate our project list.

Since it is a process of trail and error, we may discover we aren't spending our time wisely and that something else should be the main focus. For example, being king of Wikipedia when you should be writing the great American novel or working on your freelance assignments is something reevaluating can help expose.

Then repeat the process all over again. In time, you will refine your project list to the most optimal one for your personality, abilities, and interest. Good luck!