Two years? Thats ADD for you

I was really pleased that i had managed to make some regular posts to this blog, but then as usual my focus wandered and this became dusty.

The important thing I've learned while dealing with ADD is that just happens. It's how my brain works and I shouldn't hate myself for it anymore than I should hate myself for having weak ankles that ended an otherwise hopeful soccer career in high school. It just is. You just find another sport you can do and enjoy and move on.

I started a great book (in print no less) called The Wave Watchers Companion ( author escapes me and I'm posting this from my iphone so I'll update later. ) In this non fiction book the author examines all kinds of waves -- from ocean waves to brain waves -- and guess what? Research has discovered that the ADD brain operates in a constant state of the brain waves most people have right before they fall asleep, when everything is clear, and lucid, and totally wild and random. This is why they prescribe stimulants to treat ADD, to artificially "wake" us from semisleep. My mother began treating me at age 2 with coffee on the advice of a country doctor who told her "it works on their brains differently, it will calm her down." Which isn't really true as I can't function most mornings without a cup (due to the sleep deprivation of always looking for another project or activity up to the moment of exhaustion), and the caffeine definitely helps the body. I had always operated on the notion it helped our bodies keep up with our racing minds.

Anyway, definitely interesting reading.
Hopefully my next post won't be so far away. I feel like I should talk about the help I'm getting organizing my house if nothing else.

Bloglines - Newspaper on Demand, but not too much

A long time ago I messed around with RSS subscription on a news aggregator that I downloaded to my mac. The result was I had 4000 news items coming in daily and instantly felt overwhelmed by the overload. After a week, I shut it off and never opened it again.

Bloglines is friendly for people with ADD because if there are 100 updates to a website since the last time you visited it, it will tell you. If you go there, it will instantly reset that number to zero, and give you the impression that you are all caught up -- which really, you are.

Depending on the blog, if you check your collection weekly, you can have zero-six posts. Some big league technorati blogs or newspapers will have quite a few more, but not everything will be read worthy past the first paragraph.

You can save entries as you go through to check back later, and you can go back at any time and look at all previous posts to the blog or rss source, or skip on ahead to the important things you do -- like live.

ADHD iphone apps (1st installment)

I promised in an earlier post I would present some iphone apps that I found made my life easier with ADHD.

Here is the first of probably many reviews to come:

Evernote Cost: Free
This app is an iphone interface for the evernote website: http://www.evernote.com. The evernote website is the real miracle here, as it allows you to store notes from text, photos and webpage clippings and index them here so you can later pull them up in a web browser, or on your iphone. It's cross platform, so I can take notes at work on the windows machine, bring them up on my mac at home and vice versa.

What I like to do with it most is take photos of the post-it notes I make for myself during the day and then tag them by topic so I can retrieve them later. I also find myself typing small blurbs from magazines that I want to remember, since the iphone isn't exactly great about photographing small text clearly.

Now there is a polycarb shell for the iphone advertised on evernote's site ($35 retail) that promises to bring the focal point for the phone's camera from 18 inches to 4, which should solve most of those text clarity problems. I plan to invest in it sometime this year. I'll post my results.

But Evernote has cleaned up my desk and ended my other habit of taping those post-it-notes inside of a large binder and organizing them by month. Organizing by subject, and having it in my pocket, is a huge improvement.

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Things Cost: $9.99
I looked at several free and $1-2 to do lists before settling on this one, which I think is totally worth the price and more.

Things allows me to create project lists and group my things to do either into those projects or just in my inbox, if I'm in a hurry.

It also keeps a record log of things I've done, so I can look back and see when I got something turned in, or when my last activity on something took place.

It also has a "today" box which prompts you with a little number on the iphone app icon to let you know how many items are in your today box -- not the total number of items on your to-do list.

I like that feature because I can plan for things ahead of time and build lists of steps to get a project done, and it will only pester me when I have things due or overdue. Also, you can tell the app when you want something moved to your today box, so if you need it to show up there a day or a week early, you have that option. Very friendly to your own schedule.

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Balance Cost: Free
This little app simply allows you to keep a checkbook ledger on your iphone. It isn't connected to any websites or accounts, like say Mint.com, which I have downloaded the app for but am reluctant to use the service (call me paranoid, I can live with that). It does require you to remember to put things in, like that app you bought at lunch from iTunes or the gas or groceries you picked up on your way home, BUT... if you are like me and have a lot of your monthly bills set to auto pay, this app is a great way to know how much you will have left ahead of time by subtracting all those bills the moment you deposit your check. You can set each entry with a date, so it will put them in order them for you. Just make sure to check now and again to make sure you didn't forget somthing.

Having this in my pocket as a reminder is great when I'm away from wifi and I need to decide whether I really can afford those extra items I'm always distracted into thinking I need.

Read more books without trying

Even though I love reading, I often start books and then lose track of them a few pages in when I get busy with some other task or distraction. It never seems like I have enough time in a day to squeeze in reading.

So instead I squeeze in audiobooks. I borrow them from my library and listen to them while I clean the house, drive to and from places, or while I do other things online.

My library offers audiobooks in four formats: books on cassette tape (these are phasing out since most people do mp3 players now instead of tapes), books on CD, "Playaways" -- a kind of pre-loaded mp3 audiobook about the size of an mp3 player, and electronic audiobooks which I can download through my library website. Not all libraries offer those, but many do.

You can also buy audiobooks at booksellers, or through itunes or other online audio vendors. Audiobooks on CD are expensive, often double the price of a book, but digital audiobooks cost about as much as the print version -- $10-$20.

There are also sites online that offer free audio versions of public domain books read by volunteers. A simple google search will pull up several options, but I've used Librivox.com and like it, especially since it offers several versions of the same works.

The only word of caution I can offer is while most audiobooks are done by excellent readers, some voices may not sit well with you. I chose a book early on in my new hobby that was read by a celebrity reader. The voice was so grating I could not get very far into the story. And with the free services, not all volunteer readers are equal. Try a different story, or start with books read by actors whose voices you know and like.

The nice thing about audiobooks is they can be shared by more than one person at once. A long road trip or just family night can become an event with good memories for everyone.

I'm in a friendly competition this year with two friends to read as many books as we can this year. We have agreed audiobooks count, so I might have a chance.

How to organize just about everything

Read enough books that tell you how to organize things, and they all start to sound alike. 100 pages of photographs later and you've seen the perfect but unobtainable goal, feel even worse about your own clutter and now need chocolate.

Peter Walsh's How to Organize just about Everything (Full title: How to Organize (Just About) Everything: More Than 500 Step-by-Step Instructions for Everything from Organizing Your Closets to Planning a Wedding to Creating a Flawless Filing System) is nothing like those other books.

The cross-referenced lists give you step-by-step instructions for closet cleaning, weekly home maintenance, how to keep your car clean, or open a restaurant, or find Mr. or Mrs. Right. There are no pictures, no expectations to meet, just lots of simple, clear lists.

Don't take my word for it. Maybe it isn't the perfect book for you. But you can check it out at your local library, and then if you're like me, be sure to read list #41: Return rentals on time.

I'm really looking forward to spending more time with this book.

iphone as life organizer

I have been using an iphone since last summer as a personal organizer, and I highly recommend it for fellow ADD/ADHD'ers.

Admittedly it can be a HUGE distraction device. There are thousands of games -- let alone other apps -- available, and I probably spend about $10 a month trying new apps, plus looking at free ones.

With that in mind, I still say this tool is designed for distractable people in a good way, and here's why:

It's easy
(It's intuitive and cross referenced.)
When you fill in contact information, the device gives you a keypad for a phone number or buttons with [.com] for one-touch pushing for email addresses. Once you have your contacts put in, it auto links the phone field to the phone, the email address to your email, and the address field to google maps. It's so smart it's easy to use.

It's fun
(It's kinesthetic.)
Even if you're a notebook freak like me, there are limitations to any paper-based organizer. All the neon-colored ink, stickers, tabs and color-coded cross references in the world can't beat five minutes with the iphone's sliders and buttons.

Sliders bounce when they get to the end. You zoom in on pages by a movement so simple it will blow you away. You can't actually feel movement on the slick screen, but your brain fills in the gaps and you get the experience of using a three-dimensional device. Set it up for sound or no sound, it's just fun to use. Fun means I'm more likely to use it and want to use it.

It's small but huge
(It's portable and adaptable)
This can go with you anywhere and as long as you keep track of this ONE THING... you have a phone, phone directory, day planner, to-do list, etc. There are also lots of apps out there -- and websites with app connections -- to help improve your organization. I'll review my favorites in upcoming posts.

I have a mac, and I sync my iphone with my native mac programs, ical, and the apple address book for instance. I can't speak as to how well it works with a PC. I suppose if I were a PC user I would be really intrigued by the blackberry storm, which has a lot of iphone-like qualities.

But I think I'm a mac person in part because of my ADD, and therefore an iphone person for the same reason. Apple's design is really top notch, setting standards other organizers are trying to catch up to. There is no indication this will change any time soon.

One of the biggest challenge for ADD/ADHD'ers is our breakdown in organizational skills. By that I don't mean that we don't have them. Actually, our systems are quite complex and often amaze non add'ers. However, while most people limit their information intake, we do not. Further, because of our distractability, we face gaps in the process and end up storing huge amounts of information with poor processing.

A device that allows me to write (or photo tag) it all down and keep it in my pocket is just the thing.

ADD as a gift

This really great article from the NYT's International Herald Tribune talks about viewing ADD as a gift.

I have been advocating this point of view for a long time, and encourage everyone else to do so as well. The title of this blog was chosen to emphasize the good qualities of ADD.

Having ADD means we have a neurotransmitter processing deficiency. It does not make us deficient people. For some situations this can present challenges, but as anyone who has ever tried to brainstorm solutions to a problem -- or get through a crisis -- can attest, being able to throw ideas out quickly and creatively can sometimes be an asset, not a challenge.

A critic in the article suggests thinking of ADD as a gift is dangerous thinking, but let's use a few parallels to examine why it is not only more helpful for ADDers to think in terms of positives than negatives, but also perfectly justified:

-- Caucasian people suffer from melanin deficiency.

-- Being left handed is not as good as being right handed.

-- We should not encourage those with physical handicaps to think of their challenges as a gift. There is nothing good about being blind or deaf.

Pretty quickly we see that these statements are not only ridiculous, but pretty insulting.

My own personal theory, and one I know not everyone will agree with, is that ADD is an evolution of the human brain, one that makes some of us more apt for dealing with the overload of information our society has reached, and therefore is becoming more prevalent.

I know some people have a hard time believing in evolution, but let's also consider a faith-based approach: I have a heartfelt belief that I am as valid a human as the person next to me with six fingers and the person next to her with a heart capable of pushing him to win the Tour de France seven times. Instead of looking at how we can prevent or treat these conditions, maybe we should look at how these unique traits can help us all advance as the human race.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/arts/snparker.php