Jamie

Working from Home with ADHD: Setting up your Workspace and Schedule

Covid-19 continues to increase its impact on the lives of everyone I know. Or perhaps it’s better put that we as a people are increasing our response to the virus by the day. Where a few weeks ago this was something I’d heard of that was on the other side of the world, it’s now turned my entire life upside down.

I work in public education in Washington state. As of last Tuesday all of our schools have been ordered closed for six weeks by order of Governor Inslee. My staff and I continued to work at our site for a few days, but as of today, we are all working from home. This is such a drastic change in how we operate. I can’t tell you how little thought I had ever put into possibly doing my job from home.

So that’s why I’m here. I’ve now been forced into figuring out what this looks like. How do you set up your workspace? How do you schedule your time? How do you stay motivated and avoid distractions? I don’t have the experience yet to say I’m an expert, but I’m happy to share what I’ve come up with so far.

Setting up your workspace

Whether you’ll be working from home for a few days, weeks, or long-term, you will need to find an appropriate workspace. If you actually have a full or partial office with a desk in your home, consider yourself lucky, and you may be able to skip this step. But more than just a desk to work from, there are a few things you should consider before settling on any workspace in your home.

What types of work will I need to accomplish at home? Does this space allow me to adequately carry out all of them?
Does the space lend itself to video chats? Remember to look behind you to see what others in your chat will see.
Is the workspace somewhat stimulating, but not so far as to be distracting?
How close is it to some of your regular distractions? For me these would be food and television.
If you live with others, is the workspace in a heavily trafficked area or is it somewhat secluded?

Start by considering all spaces with a flat surface large enough to accomplish your work. In my own home, I can consider a built-in desk in the kitchen, the dining room table, the living room coffee table, a small desk in a bonus room upstairs, and a sewing table in a guest bedroom.

The built-in in the kitchen seems ideal, as there’s already a computer with webcam and ample desk space to get work done. But it’s also in a heavily trafficked area and very close to one of my main distractors, food. The dining room table and coffee table both fail the traffic and distraction tests. The bonus room desk is close to passing but is somewhat small and right outside my daughter’s bedroom.

By elimination, the sewing table in the guest room wins. The table itself may be inadequate, but I have a folding table I can put in its place if needed. There is a beautiful view from a window in that room, but no one will be coming through, and it’s far from television and food. This all bodes well for me making it work.

Having chosen it, I will organize the space as much as possible as I did at work, making sure I have all things at-hand so I can do my work without leaving the space. I’m thinking computer, pens, post-its, journals, contact lists, schedules, etc. And please, maybe most important of all, make sure you have a comfortable chair.

Scheduling

Especially if working from home is a change, you will be operating on a new schedule. It’s okay to change. Build something new that works for you. Elise Kumar wrote about why this is important on her recent post about changing gears.

Make sure you block out time on your calendar for all tasks you intend to accomplish for the day. Schedule each one longer than you expect it to take, so that you can account for transition times. You may even find that you need to schedule transition times separately, or operate on a timer system so that you keep yourself moving between tasks. If you’re plagued by time-blindness like me, you may find that timers are life-saving.

As you’re scheduling your work, try as much as you can to switch to different types of activities. If one task requires high levels of concentration while working at the computer, try following it up with something different like checking in with someone by phone. You should also be mindful and intentional about scheduling breaks, so if you do have two or more similar tasks to accomplish, you can at least make sure you get a break in-between.

As you consider breaks, remember that not all are created equal. Here are a few different ideas you can try.

Get up and dance to an up-tempo song or two
Watch a funny YouTube video
Go for a short walk
Get a snack
Call a friend or relative, but make sure they know your time limit
Read a chapter from a novel
Lay down and rest for a few minutes
Play a level or two of a retro video game

With any of these, you want to consider what task you’ve just finished, and what task you’re going into next. For any of them, you might consider a timer or alarm to remind you when it’s time to transition back. But do make sure you break as needed.

What next?

Once you’ve got your workspace and schedule set up, it’s time to get to work. But maintaining focus and motivation to do work at home is another great challenge to overcome. Originally I was going to include motivation tips in this post, but that grew into a big enough topic to tackle all on its own, which you can now read here: Working from Home with ADHD Part 2: Staying Motivated.

Have you set up a workspace and schedule using any of the tips above? I’d love to hear how it went! Let me know in the comments below or on Twitter.

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ADHD Voices: Deighton

It’s hard to articulate after so many years, but I remember noticing I had attention issues my first year of middle school. I had noticed something was off earlier, but I had never heard the term. I got good grades, so it was hard to make my family understand. I remember going home once I learned more about the disorder and trying to tell them, but they said, “your grades are great- you don’t have ADHD.”

I didn’t officially get diagnosed until I was fifteen, and my problems had gotten noticeably worse. I was self-medicating a lot. I had a lot of trouble with school, but I maintained good grades by shutting myself off and spending hours forcing myself to finish assignments and teach myself the material. I hardly slept during high school, and I felt like I was walking on eggshells in almost every situation. The lack of sleep took a huge toll on my mood; I was exhausted with racing thoughts constantly, and my temper got ridiculous. I felt like a ticking time bomb half the time, and the other half, I just felt like I was alone.

After getting diagnosed and prescribed medicine, it got a lot easier to quiet my thoughts in general. I used to (and sometimes still do) get scolded constantly for all sorts of things that I didn’t realize were symptoms; things like fidgeting or moving all the time, talking rapidly, being loud, and blurting out answers in class.

This all has made me a very reserved adult. I get self-conscious and scared to speak in groups, and I bite my tongue a lot. When I am feeling more energetic, I tend to talk a lot, and I have trouble realizing how loud I can get when I’m excited. A lot of people have made me feel like it’s a negative trait and even though that is now the idea that it’s bad is ingrained in my brain, that’s not something I agree with.

I think it’s kind of cool to still have the ability to get excited like a child. I’ve noticed a lot of people I know don’t seem to have that ability, but I still get anxious about those qualities showing themselves to people. I feel like others are going to react negatively and make me feel like I should be ashamed about how I am.

I’ve found ways to cope and try to keep my symptoms in check, but it often feels like I have to give up a lot of myself to appease others. I find that I tend to avoid situations where I have to be in crowds or around strangers because a lot of the time, when I try to be social or make friends, they seem overwhelmed with me or appear to do things that make me feel like I’m being scolded again or being “too much.”

I get uncomfortable when I get into conversations at work because I’m in customer service, and I can be kind of all over the place with conversation. I overthink constantly, and I often feel like when I try to vocalize my thoughts to friends, they don’t understand me or what I’m saying. I feel like people who know me tend to tune me out when I talk because they’re used to me talking so much, and it seems so random to them that they don’t seem to care or listen to what I have to say most of the time.

I feel like nobody understands me a lot of the time–when I talk, what I mean, or just in general. It makes opening up and connecting to others very difficult because it makes me sad when I feel that way, so a lot of the time, I don’t even try. At this point in my life, it takes me ages to actually open up and make friends, and I think people get tired of trying well before I get there. It’s difficult for me to process things and articulate what I mean in a way that others understand, so it’s easy for me to feel lonely when the few people I am close to are busy or aren’t around.

I think my life has gotten easier by knowing what to look for in my behavior and how my brain works, but it’s far from easy. It seems a lot of people don’t have much knowledge of ADHD, so they don’t know how to be present or helpful. Having the knowledge has helped me because I can find support from other people who also have ADHD, and I can research general symptoms and supports myself. It’s helpful because I have a place to start. I wish people were more educated and understanding of neurodiversity, so people like me could feel more comfortable and more accepted in general.

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If you’d like to connect with Deighton,
she can be found as @DeightonHeath on Twitter

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ADHD Voices is a series dedicated to sharing the stories of folks like you and me who have ADHD. Posts in the series are written by guest authors, sharing windows into their lives and struggles, written by them, for you and me. If you’d like to share your story, please contact me on social media or through my email, ADHDsurprise @ gmail.com

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How to cope with COVID-19 anxiety

TW: COVID-19, Coronavirus

I’ve struggled with writing this post because I’m struggling myself with how to cope with what’s going on all around me in relation to COVID-19. I’ve found that my ADHD has pretty much frozen me into inactivity due to anxiety with everything that’s going on. In helping to calm my own anxiety and figuring out what supports I need in place because of my ADHD, I thought I’d share those with you too, and hopefully we’ll all be better off for it. And while I’m writing with the lens of ADHD, what follows would work for anyone.

What is going on around us

We are currently surrounded by people in various states of panic. Civic leaders, neighbors, business owners…nearly everyone is in a state of heightened anxiety either directly or indirectly related to COVID-19, Coronavirus. We can see countries farther ahead in the progression of the virus. Some people are in country-wide quarantine and various states of lockdown.

Every day the local climate is changing as new directives are brought down from the leadership. Schools are closing across the nation. Restaurants and entertainment facilities are being shut down. Gatherings of 50 or more people are being prohibited in certain areas, and gatherings of fewer than 50 people may have serious restrictions.

Social media is full of images that are frightening. Long lines of people waiting outside of stores to buy toilet paper and water from empty shelves. Crowds of people being held together for hours in airports to clear security and customs checkpoints. It’s so hard to see these images. It’s easy to give in to overwhelming fear. Or to turn to anger towards leadership that lets these things happen.

But no one has planned for this. Everyone is doing the best they can to cope with a problem that is changing daily and has massive implications. The more we focus on the problems that we cannot do anything about, the more panic we will feel and the worse off we will be. With that in mind, here are the things I’m going to do to help keep myself from joining the ever-growing hysteria.

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God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.
– The Serenity Prayer, by Reinhold Niebuhr

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What we can do about it

Let it go. As we are reminded in the serenity prayer, it’s important to accept that there are many parts of what is going on that you and I simply have no control over. Let those things go.
Follow published guidelines. Wash your hands, avoid meeting in large groups. Practice social distancing. Please. For your sake and that of those around you.
Take care of your basic needs. Make sure you have enough food, water, and other supplies to get you through a few days at least. If you’ve got a few days, then work up to a week, two weeks, etc. With food, it’s best to stock up on non-perishable items. Check your prescriptions, and if you’ve got one that needs refilling, make sure to schedule time to get it done. If you’ve got a car, make sure you’ve got plenty of gas.
Ask for help if you need it. It can be so easy to ignore our own needs, or to be too proud to ask for help if you simply cannot meet them. Many folks may be out of work because of all of the restrictions that have come out and are still coming out. If you cannot meet your own basic needs, ask for help. Start with family and friends. Then go to church or government sources if needed. Call around to local charitable organizations too. You might be surprised by how much help you will get just by asking.
Check on your family and close friends. Once you know you have your basic needs met, check on your family and close friends, even if they don’t live close to you. Connecting to your social support network will help ease anxiety in two ways, by just being able to talk with them and also because you can ease your mind regarding their welfare. You may also need to urge them to take step 3 and get help for themselves too.
Monitor your self-care. After your own basic needs, continued self-care is a must. If you’ve created your #10for20Challenge list, make sure you do something from your list daily. If you’re in a situation where you’re spending more time at home instead of going to work, consider doing several items from your list each day. This will help improve your mood and outlook. Also make sure you include time to shower, get proper sleep, drink plenty of water, and eat regularly.
Help your neighbors and community. If you have the means and can safely help in some way, reach out to your neighbors or local charitable organizations and see how you can help. When I am stuck in a bad mood and don’t know how to lift it, helping others has been a surefire cure. But again, make sure you can keep yourself safe and include proper hygiene and social distancing in any volunteering you engage in.
Create a new schedule. If your regular schedule included work or school and that has been completely disrupted, create a new schedule for yourself and/or your children. We humans thrive on routine and our minds feel calmer when there’s a plan. Make one. Start with a desired wake up and bedtime. Fill in with meals and appropriate activities in between. Remember time to be active and time for your #10for20Challenge.
When all else fails, play a game. Especially if you’re facing days or weeks of a new, unfamiliar routine that you didn’t plan for, you may find large chunks of time that you don’t know how to fill. Games are a great distraction and help to ease stress. If you’ve got kids in that scenario, consider breaking out the old board games, puzzles, or family-friendly co-op video games. Games are a great way to connect with each other and pass some time, especially if TV and movies are getting old.

So that’s my plan to start things off. The biggest struggle I’ve had related to ADHD in this mess has been a tendency to get stuck in inaction. I will take in some new bit of shocking news and just sit there in a kind of unthinking state and do nothing. Giving myself a clear path to follow, like the list above, helps to know what to do and will move me to get things done.

This whole Coronavirus thing is very overwhelming. But it will become less-so if we focus on what we can actually change. So start with what’s on this list. Figure out what you can do to improve your situation and then look to see how you can safely help others. Can you think of other things that should be on this list? Comment below or let me know on Twitter. If this has helped you, please consider sharing it with others.

We will get through this.

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