The need for others involvement in order to get things done.

Also inorder to be able to "make up my own mind."

Social impacts.

Three interesting topics

I look forward to the first one
The need for others involvement in order to get things done.


but I also wish to comment on the other two as it starts to role

I have this trouble too... if someone else "assigns" me something to do, I am a LOT more productive than if I am trying to do it for myself...

Which annoys the HELL out of me, let me tell you!

I am trying to make sure that the thigns I need to do are directly needed by someone at a real assigned time.

But I have taken to going to the library to read, because I cannot read alone in my house! I need someone else around.

As a kid i needed someone to watch what i was doing. they didn't need to help, in fact, I objected if they did or tried to. I just needed their attention on the process for me to be able to do it.

Seemed weird. It now is documented in several books for children with ADHD.

I like someone else around but I DON'T need someone else around.

i like someone to watch what i was doing. they didn't need to help, but I dont mind if they do

As long as they have a half an idea of what there doing

Does having someone else around increase the likely hood that you'll be reminded of the task you were really on and finish it instead of three unrelated projects?

That is a very good observation wheel that I never ever considered but makes total sence

I showed it to my wife also and she agrees with your observation

thank you for another piece of the puzzle

My answer to David's question is a definite yes. Having someone around WILL keep me on task....no question about it...If for no other reason that I'll be too embarrassed to be OFF task if I know someone is "looking". It's what they "think" (of me) that's everything...

I still need a keeper, not a micro manager.

Originally posted by Wheel1975
I am trying to make sure that the thigns I need to do are directly needed by someone at a real assigned timeand who will ask for them in time to get them done in time.

But I have taken to going to the library to read, because I cannot read alone in my house! I need someone else around.

As a kid i needed someone to watch what i was doing. they didn't need to help, in fact, I objected if they did or tried to. I just needed their attention on the process for me to be able to do it.

Seemed weird. It now is documented in several books for children with ADHD.

Red added.. I forgot it before.

Is this just 'learned helplessness' or lack of confidence? Are we attention seekers or are we incompetent?

Learned helplessness has not been demonstrated in people and can be explained with alternate cognitive structures.

why does it have to be simple and only be one of the abouve? Why can't it be all of the above?

I have learned, sometimes correctly, sometimes incorrectly, what I cannot do.

I do want attention, sometimes.
I am incompetent and /
or unreliable
or unreliably competent.

Mix it all together and try to tell what is what!

David

Tudorose: Have to agree with David...both.....BUT I think the "attention seekers" idea is not far off........So going to a "bookstore" to do my grunt work -- is a good idea -- as it seems as if I'm saying from the table at which I sit (unspoken) -- hey look at me...aren't I "good"....I'm doing my grunt work....

and to continue....

And you're stuffing your face on latte's and doing nothing...Aren't I the greatest....And of course I imagine I'm getting lots of attention...even if not a soul is looking at me.....

Okay there's my neurotic confession for the night....:)

So we need others coz we're attention seekers, incompetent and lacking in confidence? I guess so. I continually see this demonstrated in my kids. They're like, "Look at me look at me - I'm doing NOTHING but look at me". It's so annoying.

Originally posted by tudorose
So we need others coz we're attention seekers, incompetent and lacking in confidence? I guess so. I continually see this demonstrated in my kids. They're like, "Look at me look at me - I'm doing NOTHING but look at me". It's so annoying.

Actauly, personally, I think that is only the begining.

: (

Well with me it's weird. I'm a "lemme do this myself" kind of gal and I need to ALWAYS do things "my way", I find it nigh-on impossible to admit that I need help or am lost with something, and work best if I can do things my way. I am at my most creative and productive (work/home) when I am doing something that started out as my idea, although if an idea grips me I can also get quite enthusiastic about other people's ideas and solutions.

HOWEVER without anyone providing constant feedback or reminding me to get things done, even the most enthusiastic project ends up frazzling out into nothingness.

Now when it comes to things I am either not aware of (i.e. don't see/notice the thing that needs sorting, for example that there is a mess on the shelf because it's dusty or things are piling up) or do not count high on myt list of priorities then I can live happily ever after and will never get going or sort things out unless someone sparks me off or pushes me along the path.

I have definatley noticed that I like people to see what I'm doing... to know how much time I'm spending... etc. In high school I would sit in my room for hours doing history and always hope my mom would come in and notice. when she did, she would comment "wow!! you're actually doing your work, good job!" and then mention it to my dad later "have you seen christiana? she's spending so much time..." but my dad only ever cared about results, so it kind of hurt.

Now in college I always try to recruit my friends for study groups, becuase I knwo that if they are there I will be more motivated. when they finish their homework though and i'm still going it's so easy to give up...

the only problem is that if they TALK to me then i'm a lot less productive, so the best is if they are just doing their own work next to me. somehow the feeling that i'm not the only one working does a lot for me also.

the other thing i wanted to comment on was people keeping you on track.... that's HUGE for me.

my mom played that role when i was young (school projects and things). I woudl get carried away with one tiny part and ignore the rest, or I would make lofty plans and never be able to execute them.

I have two more examples (both really scare me):

1) this summer I had a project during my internship - I was supposed to re-design a calibration facility for one of the measurement tools, and also get it built. It was MY kind of project - large scale and hands on and everything... but unfortunately it also involved a lot of planning and coordinating between various people and companies, AND learning about all the stuff I didn't know (tons). The worst part was that it was entirely my project... no team to draw on.

I actually did complete the project, but the whole time I kept trying to bring in other people. I would bother the engineers with questions all the time, and ask my boss if this and that were ok... what he thought.... etc. My boss was terrible with people, and I always felt like I was annoying him. In reality I think I was looking for support, and also for direction... I would get TOTALLY lost in what I was trying to do. it was terrible.

I would wander around the building trying to figure out what i was supposed to do next, what i had planned, forgeting why i'd even gotten up... i'd go to the stock rooma nd sift through drawers forgetting what i was looking for. I'd start working on one thing only to realize i didn't know enough about somthing else to make any decisions....

I made it through by making tons of lists and constantly asking people what they thought. They would always tell me "you don't really need to do all of that.... you don't NEED to search the web for companies that make nylon bolts - why don't you just use this other thing instead?"

part of it was that i was learning, but part of it was definately ADD and the need for structure and direction.

-----
2) I am on a student project team that designs/builds an off road race car - last year I designed the rear suspension. Again, I was the only one on that task... again I didn't have any clue what I was doing.... I was only a sophmore! I was very ambitious about it - reading tons of books and asking lots of questions, but I lacked direction. I mean, where do you START? I couldn't decide what TYPE of suspension was the best for us, how could I even begin looking at details? I spent 3 months thinking about what I should do and doing research. Finally on the advice of others I decided to use the same type as we had the year before, and I had to build a computer simulation of it. There were two types of software I could use, the complicated one which incorporated things specifically for a car, and the simple one which was more general.

what did I do? I decided to try the COMPLICATED one, even though i didn't know the software, just becuse i thought it would be more accurate. I spent another month or more (probably well over 100 hours, outSIDE of school) just trying to get a model to work - it never did. Someoen else finally told me that i should try the other software... i was like... oh yeah... fine.... (stubborn). I spent even more time trying to get THAT to work,when it finally did I didn't know what to do next. i didn't know what my goals were, or how to get there. I kept remembering and forgetting, I'd go off in a random direction which didn't have anything to do with anything. This one grad student kept putting me back on track - "ok christiana, you need to check the clearances for the rod ends now..." and i would work on it. but everytime i ran into a problem i would lose focus again. for example I spent several days trying to understand euler vectors (way above my head at the time) becuase i thought that was the key to somthing. it wasn't.

Ok, now i'm rambling... true to my style! I guess what was happening was that I would spread out in all directions losing my focus. Then someone would come in and make me pull it all back into one thing, but as soon as they let up I would lose it again.

It was definatley amplified by my inexperience, but I'm seriously afraid that I'm going to do that when I get on the job. I've done it in so many school projects... it's terrible!!

i realized long ago that i need to have a "boss" or someone to impress/please in order to be productive. I tend not to get things done on my own - meaning I'm not a "self-starter".

It seems to me, that maybe because part of ADD is social immaturity, we spend our lives looking for approval we feel we need, and that could be a part of it....

I hate to have anyone watch me work, i also tend to become lazy when i am part of a team. I tend to get distracted by the other people there and end up doing little of the work and a lot of time wasting. I find people distracting, they never just stay still and not talk (then i am one of 3 ADHDers in my house).

Hubby and i get on perfectly, i have the ideas and the inspiration and make the plan and then he follows through. Usually finishing the job long after i gave up and went onto the next thing. The only downside to this is the guilt i feal for not doing my share of the graft.

My ADHD son hates people to be around to watch him. He gets incredibly angry if he is writing or drawing and you sit and watch. He likes to call me back to look at his work every 30 seconds but then i have to feign disinterest.

I also find that if i even suspect the person watching me is appraising my standard of work, or judging my technique, i stuff up badly and get very clumsy.

I recall finally getting round to painting the Nursery for my first child, two weeks before she was due. I actually rushed the last part of the job to get it done before hubby got home from work, i just couldnt stand the thought of him coming in and helping me finish it.

I prefer to work alone in my own way, at my own speed, and get praise for the end product. I think this is because i know i do things in an unconventional way. I forget stages of the process and end up having to undo stuff and go back to it. I make silly mistakes and lose things part way through jobs. So praise for the end product and no mention of how i got there is generaly the best way to go.

Often i find hard to motivate myself.

My ability to act depends very much on the "quality" environement (social, professionnal, family ) i am at the time i need/must to do something.

Often it seems to me as if there is something missing in the society as a whole.

May be it's because at these moments i'm tired. Maybe it's because after many failures and difficulties the ADD people must make their place where the competition are less intense and the opportunities for contacts are less frequents

Is it a feeling others recognise ?

Perhaps the need for interaction results from the inability to organise well my work, my life so i need others to show me directions or to give me new thoughts

This is my theory of whats happening in my unmotivated brain.....lots of analagies included.

My biggest problem appears to be Memory.....

My short term memory has limited room compared to others who do not procrastinate. For example, a standard memory may have 100 spots, whereas mine only has 20.

When trying to plan a task, if it has more than 20 actions, then I can't keep the whole picture in my head. I'll do either of two things.

One.
I'll try and force the activity to complete, hoping somehow that some extra spots will magically become available. This never works and as such, I'll get to some critical point, not have the answer, and fail miserably. This is a reason I hate people watching me or forcing me to do tasks I cannot see the whole picture on. I hate being seen as a failure :(

Two.
I'll not start the task, spending copious amounts of time running through options in my head until I somehow imagine that I'll be able to hold all 100 steps in my limited 20 spots. This never works either, causing endless procrastination.

I relate the above two options to my everyday life and it helps explain the following:

Dishes..
The dishes don't get done as I have 22 tasks that require prioritising and as such, I can't ever get them sorted (always two being juggled). As I don't know which order to do things, the dishes fail to get done as I KNOW they are definately a low priority task, and the time spent on them should be better spent elsewhere.

Cleaning the house...
Same as the dishes. It's a low priority task where time should be spent on the more important task...if only I could work out just which one it is to do.

Maintaining concentration..
Staying focused on something requires the topic and/or person to be the MOST rewarding of all activities that I have the option of at the time. My mind tends to wonder as it is not sure that something else isn't happening that should have that attention, and my mind wonders till it finds something else to hold it's attention. This is bad as it is rude, unhelpful, and 99 times out of 100, the new ficus of attention is less interesting than the original focues. The reason I think I get stuck on the second item, is that I have satisfied the "is there something else important" urge which then allows my to focus.

Why can others motivate me...
I think that I work well under other peoples directions as they take over the prioritisation process that my limited memory cannot resolve. If someone says to take 1 month, for 28 days I'll do nothing as I will fail at deciding each day which is the highest priority. However, if the same person gives me 14 instructions, one every two days, with only two days to do each task, i'll probably complete them as there is only a limited amount of time which allows it to fit in my 20 spot memory.

Last minute Legend...
I think that leaving things till the last minute is a variation of using other people to prioritise. As the time ticks down, the importance of spending time getting a job done increases. As a percentage, 1 hour out of 4 weeks to do a task is about 1% of the time, which my mind converts to plenty of 1% spots left.

When it gets to the day before, and there are ony 4 available hours left, the task now requires 25% of the time. This I can equate to being important, but still not as important as when there is only 1 hour left. At 1 hour left, I understand that I must do it now and as such, if i TRUELY believe it must be done, it gets done(normally at twice the speed!!).

I have found also that I am not good at tricking myself. I cannot say it MUST be done, if it really doesn't. If it can slide, I let it slide....something else more important should get my precious time. It doesn't matter that I then spend 4 hours, rolling odeas around in my brain trring to determine what the higher priority taks is. I will be at least satisfied that the time spent thinking has been constructive in deciding what is important.

Even though I tend o procrastinate alot, I don't tend to think of myself as lazy as nearly all my procrastinating time is spent trying to work out just what to do. If I was lazy, I woudn't care what I do, whereas I am the opposite, I have too many things to do, I just can't get the order right to do them.

I know when I try to push something I have not clearly understood as the concentration causes me to get a slight headache just at the front of my head, and if I persist, I end up asleep for about 1-2 hours. If I don't stop when the headache starts, I become dangerous and have ended up drilling holes in fingers, dropping doors on feet, falling into the bathtub, etc. the best I can figure is that by pushing myself, I actually reduce the usable memory spots, making each task significantly more difficult the more I try to complete it.

An opinion on medication...
I believe that the medication that works for some people, works by making more of these memory spots available, allowing for people to determine the priority of the different tasks, and by doing so, they can also see how each one can be done from start to finish, or have enough spare spots to allow for the plan to evolve as it is being worked on. An increase to 40 spots from 20 would make my life wonderful, unfortunately it hasn't happened yet.


I see other examples like forgetting keys, wallet, birthdays (that has some serious consequences!), etc. I just need to empty out spots in order to bring in the imprtant things. I now pay very keen attention to key selection. I have three keys that I mix up, depending on my level of concentration. The more I am thinking of somnething else, the more I choose the LAST key I chose, rather than the NEXT key I need. If I think "rember to get the right key", I tend to gewt the one NEXT to the right one, it being the SECOND LAST key I used. If I stop completely and think about getting the right key, I'll get the right key and wonder why I keep getting the wrong key (I think I just worked it out!!).

I'm not sure how to fix my problem, but I am at least observing it, procrastinating over how to rry and imporove it, and unfortunatley stuck with about 50 items to try and prioritise with only 20 slots left.

My next try is to find someone willing to let me dump ALL 50 items onto, not judge the items, but to do one of those sorting type games where by asking questions about each task, a priority can be set for each one and an order can be determined, and hopefully some progress can be made.

Sleepz.

PS..I think somehow that under stress, adrenaline provides extra memory spots whereas for others, it takes them away. I seem to be able to see very clearly and can see which is the obvious action, whereas non procrastinators seem to get stuck and cannot move.

Somewhere on the net i have read this about ADD spirit :

" the processing of the pentium, the memory of 486"

Your comparison with memory slot may explain why we need other people to help us to stop proscrastination :

Globaly ADD people are fast thinker with little memory. Other people have more memory and keep a slower pace.

When there is interaction beetween ADD people and non ADD people, the last one will wait for ADD thinker to conduct the interaction. But this one can't because he don't have enought memory to think about the subject of the interaction AND to conduct the interaction.
It can explain some of the misunderstanding beetween ADD people and other people.

OH that was so awesome!

Let me get psychological here -- most people have this internalized "other" who is the audience to whom they play. An imaginary audience is a great way to keep oneself on task, because, more than anything in my case at least, POSITIVE input from others feeds my ability to "stay in a straight line," even if that someone is the imaginary "they" I have created.

Perhaps people with ADD tend to feel more self-conscious than others because of how often we unintentionally garner their attention via goofy mess-ups in behavior and actions!

I do MUCH better when I have a "loose structure" provided by someone else -- it's almost like a touchstone between the "then" (what I needed to do), the now (what I am supposed to be doing), and the future (what I'm supposed to be getting done). My husband's face will flash in front of me, and I'll think OH, the bank and buy dinner, because I relate those things to what I need to do for him.

I think ADDers live in a nicer sense of time, a diffuse sense of time, that doesn't fit well with America's obsession with down to the minute timing.

Such precise time is a modern invention, any way!

sleepzalot,

Your theory seems very feasble.
It describes very well how I feel when unable to prioritize.

My previous post seemed to jump out of nowhere and I just put it down as a basis for further understanding/comment.

Since my last post, I have been observing my poorer decisions, and have tended to notice more my ever poor attempts to jump the knowledge chasm where I can't picture in my mind the whole solution.

I have modified my view of last minute priority. My current thinking is that my last minute motivator is fear driven rather than choice driven.

If I have gotten to the last minute and it must be done or there will be trouble, I experience fear. Fear will drive my fight/flight system and will begin to operate as most ADD people do when they are in chaos mode.

The reason for the change was an article read on the similarity cheically between norepinephrine/epinephrine and ADD medications based on mehamphetamines.

Basically, for us ADD people, fear causes us a sense of self-medication that allows us to see what needs to be done..and we do it. Without the fear, it is likely to be pot luck as to if it gets done.

If we plan to go shopping and then forget, there was no fear associated so no motivation. If we were to pick up out children, the grief we would cause at not doing so is high so it drives up out fear which drives our motivation circuit.

Interestingly enough, pleasure is another driver of our motivation circuit. If an activity holds enough pleasure for us, we will push all other non-rewarding activites out the way till they become urgent.

One of the graphs in another thread from a medical conferance shows ADD people have a slower initiating reward system but have a higher reward peak. In other words, it is harder to get us going, but if our interest does kick in, we will percervier longer than most others, with a higher likelyhood of over enjoying. For example, a book that takes forever to get started on, becomes interesting and you stay up reading it for hours past when you should be asleep.

Computer games are another example of the peak reward.

Will continue to see just how far I can go with this concept, but enough for now.

As for the neurotic confession, I suppose it is an apt desciption of my current state till I can either fix my neurotic degeneration, or medication allows me to detour round my neurosis.

Until then, I and myself shall continue.

Sleepz.