In this column, Owen T. Muir, MD–a specialist in child and adult psychiatry–shares a strategy to help people with ADHD improve their productivity.
The Big Picture: Dr. Owen Muir, Child and Adult Psychiatry, “Here’s a quick and easy approach to be more productive if you have ADHD by using the Cube Timer Hack!”
A Doctor’s Expert Insights to Super-Charging Your ADHD in DeKalb County, Georgia
For many people with ADHD, distraction and attention, can be a daily battle.
Take this article as an example, if you have ADHD–you’re likely to start reading this article, and then suddenly, you’re going to get distracted and wander off! Was that a new text message, breaking news, the cat needs water?
And then, it’ll be something else, and… oh, where was I going?
This is the paradox. ADHD allows for remarkable feats of hyper-focus, but it also predisposes people living with the condition to be wildly inefficient and have frustrating experiences.
That is if they don’t take their ADHD into account.
Before we continue, You should know that ADHD makes it hard to plan things.
Optimizing Your ADHD Brain for the Tasks at Hand
The Timer Cube Hack
Above is a timer cube. It’s the lowest tech timer of all time! It’s also less capable of distracting you.
The 3 steps to be more efficient with ADHD:
- Set a timer for five minutes. And then, try to do something boring. See if you can get through it.
- Set a timer for the next increment up, and try to do something boring. See if you can get through it.
- Note the time: When you reach a point where you can no longer complete a task without becoming distracted, you will have a clear measure of your personal limit for staying focused. I call it the “quantitative measure of your own distractibility time limit.”
Next, if you’re using a stimulant medication for treatment and management of your ADHD–it’s time to take that…
Read the full article here
