jessicameats:

spoonie-living:

jumpingjacktrash:

umaruspeaks:

cleaning with ADHD is a nightmare. it’s an endless cycle of finding a half-finished chore and stopping the one you were already working on, then remembering that something else needs to be done and getting started on that, then finding half-finished chore and

i have the solution! i call it ‘junebugging’.

have you ever seen a junebug get to grips with a window screen? it’s remarkably persistent, but not very focused. all that matters is location.

how to junebug: choose the location you feel you can probably get some shit done on today. be specific. not ‘the bathroom’ but ‘the bathroom sink’. you are not choosing a range, you are choosing a center; you will move around, but your location is where you’ll keep coming back to. mentally stick a pin in it. consider yourself tethered to that spot by a long mental bungee cord.

go to your location. look at stuff. move stuff around. do a thing. get distracted. remember you’re junebugging the bathroom sink and go back there. look at it some more. do a different thing. get distracted. get a sandwich. remember you’re junebugging and go back to the bathroom sink.

nt’s will go crazy watching you, and if they demand to know When You Will Be Done you will probably have to roll them in a carpet and stuff them up the chimney. you’re done when you feel done, or you’re too bored to live, or it’s bedtime, or any number of other markers, you get to pick. but the thing is, by returning repeatedly to that one spot, you harness the ‘hyperactivity’ part instead of wasting all that energy battling with the ‘attention deficit’ part.

not only will the bathroom sink almost certainly be clean, and probably the mirror and soap dish too, you might’ve swapped in a fresh toothbrush, a new soap, you might’ve unclogged the drain – you will probably also have cleaned or fixed up several things in the near vicinity, or in the path between the sink and where you get the fresh toothbrush, or maybe you did your grocery shopping cuz you were out of soap, or maybe you couldn’t find a clean hand towel and ended up doing laundry.

this is good. you got shit done! it wasn’t necessarily Cleaned The Bathroom in the way nt’s think of it, but screw ‘em. things are better than they were.

plus you worked off enough energy to be able to sleep. which is not small potatoes when living the ADHD life. 😀

Don’t let the adorable name fool you—this is some Seriously Good Advice. May be useful for brain fog and depression, too!

My cleaning method is to start a timer running and then just start doing stuff. There might be a particular thing I want to tidy so I’ll start with that. I generally start with something obvious, like picking up bits of rubbish that’s scattered around the living room and putting them in the bin. If the bin’s getting full, I might go and empty it. Then I might notice something on the floor and put it away, etc.

After I’ve done a bit of cleaning, I check the timer. If I’ve cleaned for more than 15 minutes, I’m allowed to stop. If it’s been less than that, I go find something else I can clean/tidy.

Because I start with the most obviously messy things, even 15 minutes can make a huge difference to how tidy the place appears. It’s not necessarily the most thorough or structured approach, but it means someone could come to my flat and I wouldn’t die of shame.