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Hacking Your ADHD

How To Give Yourself Some Slack (rebroadcast)

Hacking Your ADHD

William Curb

Mental Health, Health & Fitness

4.8702 Ratings

🗓️ 25 October 2021

⏱️ 19 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Often when I think about productivity I envision something like a well-oiled machine - everything fits together, everything has its place and when it is running smoothly it produces amazing results. But the part that my imagination doesn't usually pick up is a few important words - well-oiled machine... what does it mean to be well oiled - well, for one thing, it means that there is someone maintaining the system. It means, that left to its own devices that the machine would break down - and for a machine like this, it means it's either running at peak capacity or not at all.

As you can imagine this isn't exactly the route we want to be going - we're going to have setbacks in life and we're going to have times where we have to do less - we're not machines.

In today's episode, we're going to be exploring this idea of capacity, as well as how we sometimes go above and beyond, and then also how we can work on building some slack into our systems.

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Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/buildingslack

This Episode's Top Tips

  1. Always doing more isn't always our best option - it is easy for us to overreach our capacity and find ourselves doing more than we're able to handle. Once we get past capacity we're more like to drop the ball on everything we're doing. Giving ourselves breathing room isn't being lazy, it's a way for us to focus on what's most important.
  2. When we're in times of crisis many people with ADHD can thrive by using their surge capacity - however, our surge capacity is limited and we can only access it for so long before we start burning out.
  3. We can add more capacity to our schedules by adding more slack to our calendars - that is buffer time that allows us to "pick up the slack" when we're running overtime on something unexpected or just need more time to finish something than we thought we would.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Welcome to Hacking Your ADHD, part of the ADHD Rewired Podcast Network.

0:09.5

I'm your host, William Kerb, and I have ADHD.

0:12.8

On this podcast, I dig into the tools, tactics, and best practices to help you work with your ADHD brain.

0:19.4

Often, when I think about productivity, I envision something

0:22.7

like a well-oiled machine. Everything fits together. Everything has its place. And when it's running

0:28.9

smoothly, it produces amazing results. But my imagination also usually ignores a few of the important

0:35.3

words there, like, well-oiled machine.

0:38.4

What does it mean to be well-oiled?

0:40.8

Well, for one thing, it means that there's someone maintaining the system.

0:44.2

It means that left to its own devices, that that machine would break down.

0:49.1

And for a machine like this, it means it's either running at peak capacity or not at all. As you can imagine,

0:56.0

this isn't exactly the route we want to be going. We're going to have setbacks in life,

1:00.5

and we're going to have times when we have to do less. We're not machines. In today's episode,

1:06.4

we're going to be exploring this idea of capacity, as well as how sometimes we go above and beyond,

1:11.8

and then also how we can work on building some slack into our systems.

1:16.1

If you'd like to follow along on the show notes page, you can find that at hacking your

1:20.0

ADHD.com slash building slack.

1:23.5

Before we get started, I also wanted to give a huge shout out to all you listeners because hacking your ADHD just passed a milestone of 1 million downloads.

1:32.0

So that's the cumulative downloads from all the episodes.

1:34.9

This comes at the two-year anniversary of the podcast.

1:37.6

This is absolutely something that couldn't have happened without all of you, so thank you to everyone listening, and again, thank you for everyone recommending

1:44.4

the show to their friends and family. I'm planning on doing a celebration later in the year,

...

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