The work you do that remains invisible might be the tripwire between what you want and actually making it happen.
When best-laid plans fizzle into oblivion, it's all too common for people with ADHD to conclude they're unproductive, unmotivated, or just don't care enough.
Many of my ADHD coaching clients make thoughtful plans for getting the important stuff done, but feel like they can’t follow through on their intentions for their time.
Many do all the things that countless productivity gurus have preached as gospel. They create SMART goals (not my fave for ADHD brains, but that's another story), break their goals into steps, and maybe even allocate time for those steps.
ADHDers are great at lots of things, but can be pretty woeful at noticing where their time, energy and attention really goes.
For people with ADHD, the hidden workload of daily life often goes truly unnoticed and can be particularly challenging to manage.
Your time, energy and attention are finite resources.
Yet many of us - and especially ADHDers - will doggedly try to stretch the possibilities of our time, energy and attention. If we fail to account for where we're depleting these resources, it's no wonder we remain stuck never finding more of them to create the change we want to see in our lives.
I wonder how much invisible work we all do but never acknowledge. Stuff that has to happen, but never makes it to your task list or your calendar. The things you believe should be so easy, so quick, so inconsequential, that there’s no point in letting them take up space.
Time management strategies fall over when we don't make work visible.
Here's how it tends to go when we notice that we don't have enough time to get our stuff done. We conclude we need to get better at bending and managing our time.
You might:
- Make an unprioritised list of all the things you need to do for all of eternity
- Maybe you take it a step further and book things into the calendar
- Perhaps you might even try a further strategy, like the Eisenhower matrix (TL; DR but there are quadrants with urgent and important, etc.)
- You might even go black belt and try time-blocking your calendar to get to those non-urgent but important things.
All of these are just fine strategies and not inherently wrong. But something happens between these elaborate colour-coded plans and making them come true.
And the conclusion that many of my clients will come to is that they can’t stick with anything. Here’s another reason why planning is a waste of time. They believe that they can’t motivate themselves to get it done. Okay, maybe there’s some truth in that.
But when you drill in and account for what’s happening with your time, you might uncover a heaving pile of work you never acknowledge.
Invisible work nicks time, energy and sanity.
Invisible work, a term coined by sociologist Arlene Kaplan Daniels, encompasses tasks that are essential but often overlooked or undervalued.
Daniels described invisible work as the unpaid labour of women that takes significant time, energy and effort and is critical to the fabric of our society. She advocated for the expansion of our concept of work to dignify this contribution that comes without a paycheck.
Happily, things have improved since Daniels' call to arms in 1987, but women are still more likely to shoulder more of the household's unpaid labour burden.
Beyond the gender gap that still exists, all men and women need to notice their work. We need to make our work explicit and visible, not just to others, but to ourselves. This is essential for our self-compassion, sense of agency and having a sense of accomplishment of purpose.
There are countless valuable tasks all of us do - whether you're a man or a woman, whether you have kids or not - that we never clock when it comes to our time, energy and attention.
Beyond household work, these invisible tasks range from planning and coordination to emotional labour and relationship maintenance.
And these hidden tasks can be insidious little timesuckers at our paid workplaces, too.
In her book Making Work Visible, Exposing Time Theft to Optimise Work Flow, Dominica DeGrandis identifies five "thieves of time". And these five consistently throw a stressful spanner in the works for people with ADHD:
- Too much work-in-progress (WIP)
- Unknown dependencies
- Unplanned work
- Conflicting priorities
- Neglected work
If I could add a 6th category for my ADHD clients, context switching between different activities and the time it takes to move from one thing to the next would be right up there.
We need to ask ourselves: What’s really on my plate?
How often do you put these things on your calendar or account for them in your plans?
- Time to find a parking space and walk to work
- The daily chipping away at a never-ending pile of laundry
- Phone calls from your kid’s school and the endless stream of emails that interrupt your focus and demand action
- Your biological needs as a human (😬 I once enthusiastically made my own time-blocked plan for the week that was in 10-minute blocks, with not one wee, water or eating break accounted for)
- Last-minute ingredients or lunch box shops after everyone in your house chomped through the food at an alarming rate
If you don’t acknowledge everything that’s on your plate, here’s what happens:
- The obvious: you’re not allocating time where this could happen. This will either mean that it doesn’t happen, creating stress and those dropped balls that we kick ourselves for. OR something else that was on your plan gets squeezed out to make space for the must dos that you didn’t account for
- The insidious: when your work stays invisible, you’re not taking the credit for it. This counts at work and in relationships. And it counts even more for your own self-esteem and sense of accomplishment.
- The energy drain: a high volume of invisible works means heaps of context switching, jumping from one bucket of your life to the next. Evidence shows that switching costs drain the executive function of all brains. Imagine the toll this takes on an ADHD brain where executive function is already compromised. On the days where you feel extra exhausted, consider: how many times did I switch hats today?
- The treadmill of reactivity: Tasks that never get clocked mean we’re pinging from one urgent task to the next, keeping us in a reactive state.
How to get your hands around what’s really on your plate
Take stock for a day. Either look back on your day yesterday. Or, if you’re anything like me and your working memory is a little shoddy - particularly when frenzied - track yourself for a day.
Step 1: How many different hats are you wearing?
What are all the project buckets in your life? What are your roles? For example:
- Parenting
- Work
- Relationship
- Friendships
- Housework
- Health
- Keeping everyone fed
- Caring for parents
- Life admin
Step 2: Track what you do for a day
I’m only asking for one day here, and I know that’s a big ADHD lift. But the evidence will likely shock you. Keep a timesheet of all the things you did throughout a day. For example:
7am: Made lunches
7:15am: Email school about an early pick-up today
7:20am: Chuck on a load of washing etc etc
Step 3: How many hats did you wear in one day?
Take stock of how many of those hats you wore throughout the course of the day. Called a friend? Friendship hat. Popped into coles? Feeding the hordes hat.
Step 4: How many times throughout the day did you change hats?
Now look at your timesheet again. How many times did you take one hat off and put another one on?
More like this
ADHD and executive functions
The Hidden Workload: Why Your ADHD Brain Feels Overwhelmed
ADHD Parenting & Setting Realistic Expectations
Life with ADHD doesn't have to be so hard.