Adult ADD: Plan Ahead, If You Want To Stay Consistent

When we created the 12 ADD Axioms, we were consistent about putting them together. We set up an ADD-friendly schedule for the calls. We also took a look ahead and we thought about what might drag us down. We can think. We can come up with ideas. We can do all kinds of things, but we were creating a deliverable system. We were creating something that we needed to be accountable for.

We are both ADD/ADHD adults, so we asked ourselves, "What are the 'boring' parts? What are the parts of this type of project that we don't want to do? Or that we're not good at doing. Or both. then, we needed to think about what those might turn out to be in advance and figure them out. Right then. We couldn't let our ADD brains get hung up on things. We had to figure things out and just get them handled right then.

Some examples of things that might be sticky for us because of the ADD were:

* How would we deal with customer service?
* And how about the many, many, many individual questions that people would write in to us that we wouldn't have time to answer because we were working on creating the curriculum for the ADD Axioms?
* How would we work through differences in our own thinking?
* How about audio editing?
* Transcription?
* How about creating the download page for the recordings?

All of these things and more were things that we sat down and consciously thought about because we, like everyone with ADD, can be consistently creating. We can be consistently moving forward, and we knew-because we'd done something similar before-that there would be areas that we needed to make sure we could handle, to be responsible.

You're put in this situation where you need to think ahead a little bit about it and you don't always know exactly how things are going to come together, and it can make even people without ADD anxious. The fact is, for different projects that you put together, sometimes you're going to have a bunch of smash hits, and that's great, but you're going to have projects that just fall flat on their face, too. You're going to have duds, things that don't quite work out.

You don't want to spend a whole lot of money and time, effort, energy and resources on something that could very easily turn out not to be an amazing product or an amazing project that you're working on. How do you deal with that?

You do this thing that ADD-ers are pretty good at doing--you take it as it comes.

Especially when you have ADD, it's important to think ahead of time about "Where are these sticky points?" and you realize, "We're probably going to need to get this and that taken care of. Let's get this thing launched and get those things plugged in as they become issues so we don't spend six months trying to set up everything in advance, but there's no pressure because the deadline's not set yet and blah, blah, blah, blah."

And if that happens, if ADD people get kind of dragged down, all of a sudden, we might lose interest, things might not seem as good as they had seemed and the project might really, really drag. It's multiple, moving parts that need to happen.

Like we said, we gave forethought to the boring piece so when we got to it, we said, "Okay, we have to do this. Let's get it happening, let's make it happen," and we're able to focus on moving through that so we can keep going and be consistent in creating, in this case, the ADD Axioms. So there were no surprises.

If you have ADD, remember this when you're planning any big project. Decide where the sticky points might be first. Don't let them slow you down, just be flexible and find a way to deal them so that the don't become an ADD issue.