00:41

Hello!!  It’s Ai, That ADHD chick coming to you from the BURBS of Northern California 

00:46

Today I’m gonna talk about MULTITASKING.  There is SOOOO much data out there on this subject, that I can’t get into everything about it in ONE episode or we’d be here all day. I’m not here to tell you that ADHDers can’t multitask. I’m actually here to tell you that Multitasking is mostly…not a thing.

01:06

In this episode, I’m gonna talk about 4 ways we try to Multitask.  T
he FIRST WAY is simple and can be productive and efficient. I call it Behind-The-Scenes tasking.

01:18

The SECOND WAY is the classic multitasking. It’s what we think of when we thing of multitasking. Like trying to vacuum and read a book at the same time. I think or Barbara Billingsley in Leave it to Beaver. And YES, I just dated myself. I was a genXer who also watched re-runs of Brady Bunch and Gomer Pyle. OK let’s use another example, how about Texting and Driving, now THAT hits a nerve with all ages.

01:49

The THIRD WAY is the classic ADHD-style of multitasking, which is rapid task switching.  That’s when we keep moving from one squirrel to the next, without a roadmap and sometimes with no end in sight.

02:03

And then their’s the last way of multi-tasking which causes the most distress. This is commonly called Interrupted Task Switching. And we’ll get into that in a little bit. 

At the end of this episode, I’ll go into how we can navigate through that overwhelming 3rd one and  therefore alleviate some unnecessary anxiety, stress and burnout. 

02:24

So let’s go back to behind-the-scenes tasking. That’s when you’re doing one thing while, something else ,which requires little to no brainpower is happening behind the scenes.  Some examples are Taking a shower while listening to music.  Or doing jumping jacks while watching TV or preparing dinner while a load of laundry is washing. Easy peasy right? It even sounds productive as well as efficient.  That’s because it takes very little brainpower to do things that are already ingrained in our muscle memory…like taking a shower.

02:59

Now classic multitasking is another story.  This one is the one that we think of when we use the word multitasking. When I was younger it used to be a source of pride to tell people that I was an amazing multi-tasker. And NOW I’m embarrassed to even reminisce about it.  I mean who knew, I wasn’t really doing two things at the same time.

03:22

What my brain was really doing was taking turns doing one and then the other, but doing it really really fast. Something I call SwapTasking, which is a highly inefficient way to achieve two tasks…I was essentially robbing Peter to pay Paul, Or is it borrowing from Peter to pay Paul? Hmm it’s one of those, or maybe both of those. Y’all know I mess up idioms all the time. But You get the gist. 

03:50

I sometimes hear people say, the only thing that can multitask is a computer.  And that’s not completely true. Deep in the brain of the computer, which we call the processor, it too has to swap tasks. Each micro-part of the processor has to communicate with each other using their ones and zeros (think of the Matrix) to get a task completed.  Multitasking is only possible in a computer which has 2 processing cores. Which means a computer with two brains.  Now I’m thinking if we humans had two brains, we could also truly multitask :)  

04:37

So… back to us humans, everytime we think we’re doing 2 tasks at the same time, what’s really happening is that we’re switching back and forth from the first task to the second and then back.  But so fast that we don’t realize it’s happening. But it means that when we’re were doing one thing, the other would degrade in some way.  For example, I can bet there are a lot of you out there that find folding loads of laundry so tedious, that you do it while watching TV or while listening to your playlist.  Heck you may be folding clothes right now while listening to me. Who knows!

05:17

I once watched my 21 year old daughter fold clothes while watching a Korean drama on Netflix (now we are not Korean and we do not speak the language) so she was reading subtitles.  And I swear it took her almost an hour to fold one basket of clothes... 

Like what? Hey, I’m not dissing her… I am totally guilty of doing the same thing sometimes, but the difference is that I already know going into it, that one of those 2 tasks will suffer and I have to be okay with it.  Soooo, I will either be ready and okay with missing some dialog in the TV show or accept that some of the laundry won’t be perfectly folded. 

05:58

However, full disclosure, if the shirts specifically, are not uniformly folded in a 6 by 9” rectangle, it would trigger my OCD and therefore cause me to re-fold them to meet that criteria. Thank you Mari Kondo. Sadly, that’s a TRUE STORY Guys… Listen, I’m proud to say that I’ve overcome a lot of mental setbacks in my life…but that one? 

Not so much. “but I digress…”

06:27

The best thing you can do in that situation is to Watch MINDLess trivial TV shows, not an Academy Award winning movie or a foreign subtitled TV show.

06:39 (The Task-switching Exercise)

There’s an actual exercise you can do to prove this theory.  I first learned it from one my mentors, JT DeBolt. He’s a great resource for highly motivated entrepreneurs who are truly driven. I’ll put a link to his podcast on the show notes for this episode, if you wanna check him out. Tony Robbins also does a similar exercise.  You can try this later, and I’ll make sure to add it to the show notes, so you can have your friends try it too… get a blank piece of paper, something to write with, and a timer. You’re going to time yourself writing first the letters A through Z in succession and then below that, you’ll write the numbers 1-26 under each coinciding letter. You’re probably going to need someone who can hold the timer for you. Record your time.

Now you’re gonna to time yourself again, but this time, you’re going alternate letters and numbers. So First write A and then  1 under that, then a B and 2 under that, then C and 3 under that and so on. You get the picture.  Now compare your times.

There’s a 99.99% chance that it took you much longer to do the second exercise. And even if you got close, check to see if the second one is degraded in any way. Does it look messier? Did you miss a number or letter or write 2 of the same numbers or letters? And did it cause you any stress while racing through the second exercise.  These are key points to observe when trying this.  

08:26

I thought, wow, that was a great example of how swaptasking is not a very efficient or productive process. Kinda like folding laundry and watching a riveting movie. If I would just fold the laundry first, I would be able to do it in half the time or less and then I could relax with a bowl of popcorn watching and enjoying the award winning movie of the year, without any distractions.

08:50

I know the story about the laundry seems minor, but apply that same theory to a task that is less trivial, like being in a team meeting at work and at the same time checking your email on your phone. The consequences of missing a sentence or two from your boss may impact you in a very negative way. So, maybe put the phone away until after.  We all know that those email messages will still be there when we return. That kind of swaptasking is self-inflicted, though, so we have SOME sort of control over it. Yes, even as ADHDers, we can practice control. Or control can be thrust upon us, for example,

I’ve been to workshops and seminars where they’d actually tell us to put our phones and laptops away while the speaker was training. I mean it makes sense, right? I paid to be there, I’m not gonna want to miss anything important. 

09:51

And then there is the 3rd multitasking way commonly called Rapid Task switching, You know the thing I said earlier about the squirrels with no road map. Yah that thing. Or a more practical occurrence would be while checking your email you stop to read a text message and reply and then continue to read other missed text messages and replying to those, then you happen to glance to the side and notice that the dogs made a big mess of their water bowl, so you get up and start cleaning that up, then you your alarm goes off to take your vitamins, so you go and do that, and on your way back, you see that the sink is full of dishes, so you start doing that and while you’re looking out the window, you notice that the sunbrella has fallen over, so after the dishes, you go outside and prop it back up and then you see the dogs are not in the yard, so you go out an start looking for them so on and so on until you forget what you were doing in the first place. So you’ve done all this stuff without a roadmap and you’ve gotten yourself lost and you can’t find your way back to where you started. Day’s done, rinse and repeat. Hopefully not!

11:22

Now for the last form of multitasking… we call Interrupted Task Switching. This may not feel or seem like it’s multitasking because you’re not intentionally trying to do a lot of things at the same time. This is when you switch from one important task to do another one… that seems just as important, at that moment… This is the scary type of multitasking where you drop one task and end up not finishing it or neglecting it completely.  In my case last week, it was the latter. 

11:56

It actually caused me to completely shut down.  Unfortunately, shutting down is another side effect of having ADHD, so it’s so important that we have tools in our toolbox to help us avoid these things.  

12:12

I had my day scheduled out perfectly.  I gave myself the morning to check my schedule and task list and make any changes if I had to before the day began.

I’d prepare my coffee, take my supplements (yes I have to write these things down or I tend to forget). I had a 2 hour zoom call with my business partners, then made myself and my mom some lunch, she has a very strict diet that I have to adhere to, so that takes some time.

12:42

Then at 1:45PM, I leave to drop Mom off at the dialysis center where she stays for 4 hours, giving me ample time to finish and edit this podcast. NO multitasking in sight. Whew! I’m on a roll, I’m thinking.

But here’s where the fun (no-so-fun) thing happened. There was a contractor scheduled to arrive at 2PM to give us an estimate on a bathroom remodel. I asked Angel, my husband, that morning to help me out by being there to explain what we needed from the contractor.  Mind you, I’m the engineer, so normally I take care of any type of home repair, renovation, whatever.  

13:23

But this time around, Angel said he would help.  Surprise surprise… he didn’t even last half an hour before interrupting me from my task of writing my podcast episode and handing the contractor off to me. It was like tag-teaming in wrestlin or handing off the baton in a relay. 

13:43

But why did I let this happen? Umm, coz I’m ADHD. Why else? We distract easy and we also think we can fix anything and handle more than we actually can. I also knew that Angel had been up since 5AM and it was his naptime. But what I really noticed was that he was doing what he usual does in this situation… I’m pretty sure that he has ADHD, too, coz he exhibits many of the classic symptoms, one being impulsivenesss.  So, what he usually does is gets carried away with something that will cause a significant increase in cost. 

14:21

The contractor was here to do a simple bathroom renovation in the guest house. But by the time I was tagged, we were somehow painting the entire interior, fixing cracks caused by earthquakes we were adding a window. And we were doing this in the guest house and the main house as well as redoing some waterproofing in our steam shower, and who knows if there was any more. I had to put the kabosh on half of it.  Dammit…. The contractor was here for close to 3.5 hours!!! The estimate was supposed to be 90 minutes. 

14:58

The brainpower stolen from me caused me to shutdown, I spent a total of ZERO hours on my podcast, OK maybe 15 minutes… I never checked my emails or messages after 2:30PM. I was frustrated and the thought of my plan being ruined made me hella cranky for the rest of the night, I drowned my anxiety in comfort food and even partook in some revenge sleep procrastination by bingeing Netflix until 2AM. TRUE STORY. And if you don’t know what Revenge Sleep Procrastination is, google it, it’s a THING.

15:40

This was completely unacceptable and destructive ADHD behaviour. I didn’t even realize I was doing it until it was too late.  Sigh!

15:53

So Here’s where I get into the teaching moment…But before I get into it, I’ve just demonstrated that even with all the skills and tools I have in my ADHD toolbox, I can still crash and burn on occasion. I think it happens to me once every 2 weeks.  

Now, I could have avoided some of the stress and anxiety by applying 1 or 2 of the following FOUR strategies.

16:17

First, write down and lookover your schedule carefully every morning.  Decide which is the most important and do that first.  That way if you get sidetracked, like I did, you will at least have worked on the most important thing.

16:34

Second, Make sure that every scheduled task is reasonable and doable in the time you allotted for it. Be honest with yourself.  If you know that you sometimes take longer to complete a certain task, then add more time to that time block. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. We ADHDers sometimes need more time. And that’s okay, coz you know we’ll do a damn good job. Once you accept that, you’ll find that you will be able to get more things completed than you ever did before. Do all that before you begin your day.  This way, you won’t be disappointed at the end of the day just because you miscalculated how much time it takes.

17:16

Third, since many of us ADHD people suffer from time-blindness, we also would benefit by using timers for each task, so once the time goes off, you can stop and move on to the next task. Look up the Pomodoro technique and you’ll see what I mean. Remember, ADHDers thrive on deadlines.

17:40

And Four, learn to say NO. If a task is thrown at you last minute, and you know it’ll derail you from your schedule that day, respectfully decline and tell that task-giver that you will be happy to schedule that task for tomorrow or next week or whatever time is appropriate. That person will either accept that or find some other unsuspecting soul to do it.  

18:10

I could have avoided the whole contractor debacle last week if I applied either 2 of those 4 strategies. One, I should have prioritized my podcast and scheduled that first, knowing that it was more important than having a contractor out for a free estimate.  I ended up falling victim to the intrrupted task switch and got burned.

18:31

TWO, I should have confirmed with my husband that the meeting with the contractor was actually doable.  I should have known that Angel wouldn’t be able to talk to the contractor about the renovation. It’s not his fault, it’s just not in his wheelhouse and I should not have insisted on it. In other words, I wasn’t being honest with myself when scheduling it. 

And those 2 strategies = one fix … reschedule the contractor for another day. 

19:00

But guess what? I didn’t beat myself up about it, I’m not even beating myself up about the destructive behavior afterwards. LOL. It was a learning moment or I should say a RE_learning moment.  I have ADHD, so often times I have to keep re-learning valuable lessons.  And even after that, It’s still possible to F#@! It up the next time.

19:24

But again, I continue to give myself grace. When I do this, I keep myself in the right mindset to continue to evaluate these situations, so I’ll know what to do next time I’m faced with something similar.  And I hope YOU will do the same when faced with a situation like that.

19:44

Well, that’s all she wrote. There’s more about multitasking that we can dive into, but we’ll do that in a future episode. Before you go, a reminder to try out that cool multitasking exercise I talked about earlier with the alphabet and numbers. It’s actually quite fun and challenging. I’ll post the instructions later on today on thatadhdchick.com/episodes/multitasking. I’ll also add the link to my mentor, JT DeBolt’s podcast called True Driven for the driven entrepreneur. 

20:16

Finally, if you’ve found this episode helpful, please leave a review and share it with others who you think may also find value in it.  Now my friends, as always,  stay safe, stay well and live abundantly. This is Ai, that ADHD chick, signing off!