092 - Turd Mountain

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Oh boy, today we have a fun metaphor, and I cannot wait to talk about it. So let's get our boots on and head into the field. We're gonna be going to Turd Mountain. You are listening to ADHD Big Brother, the podcast for adults struggling with their ADHD and comorbid depression symptoms. I'm your host, Russ Jones, author of Descend You to the Top, believer that you can actually have a smile in your life despite this diagnosis. So let's make some sense out of the struggle. Let's learn some stuff, let's laugh at some stuff. Ladies and gentlemen, here's some stuff. Okay. Welcome to the show. Uh I love coming out here and talking to you guys. It makes me so happy. Uh I have to say, the ADHD community, I love adults with ADHD. You guys are the best. I have to tell you guys this. I was sitting at a coffee shop uh working on this, writing this episode, and I'm just sitting there and my leg is bouncing like crazy. And then I noticed that both my legs were bouncing and my body was like kind of bobbing to music that wasn't playing. I was just kind of like just rocking and bouncing. And I caught myself and looking up and looking around, and everybody in this coffee shop was just sitting there quietly sipping on their coffees and tippity tappitting away on their computers, just sitting there motionless. And I'm like, what are these people? Are these zombies? What is going on? And I kept trying to practice, I kept trying to see, like, can I do that? And I I would stop and I would take a deep breath and I would I would stop my body from moving, and it felt so uncomfortable. It felt so restricting. And I was like, this sucks. Oh my god, it was awful. And I so I just went back to bouncing and I'm like, these people probably think I'm either A on drugs or B, have to pee really, really bad, but I'm refusing to go until I get my typing done. I just couldn't do it. I just, it felt so unnatural and uncomfortable, and it just made my heart break for all the children in the schools right now that are having to sit in a desk. I feel you, dudes. Yeah, but that's my this is my that was my real long-winded way of saying. I love you guys. I love all you fidgety can't sit stiller types. Uh, I get it. Let's lean into it. You know, unless you're in a job that requires you to stay absolutely motionless and then maybe work on that skill or maybe get a new job. Okay, let's talk about Turd Mountain. I honestly, I honestly, I kind of want to apologize because it's a very juvenile name. But when I tell you what it is, I think you're gonna be like, oh yeah, oh yeah, Terd Mountain nailed it. That's exactly what this is. So it's it's hard enough to manage a life with ADHD. There's the daily grind that can be overwhelming. It can be riddled with forgetting stuff, being late for stuff, losing stuff. It's a real grind sometimes. And then anything that is extra is just automatically becomes this no, no, I have to make a phone call to an insurance company. Oh no! It's so dramatic and like, ah, it's too much. Oh God, anything insurance related, getting new shoes, scheduling a doctor's appointment, selling an unused piece of furniture that's sitting in the garage, or you know, getting new guitar strings or or getting a new iPhone or looking at my finances to see if I can afford getting a new iPhone, taking my car to the shop, getting the car washed. It's just oh, it's so uh and we shel that stuff. We file it away. It's not urgent enough. I'm gonna add it to an ever-growing mountain of shit that I have to do. And you know what I call that shit pile? Turned Mountain. My steaming hot pile of undesirable and unurgent to-dos. Blah. The problem with Turd Mountain. I just like saying it. So I think that's why that's why I've coined it that is because it makes me giggle. Because I'm I'm a child. I'm an adult child. Um, the problem with Turd Mountain is that it it starts off as just one annoying turd. It's not a big deal. You know, we can walk around it. It doesn't really stink too bad. Kind of like when your dog poops in the yard, but he poop, it's not in a place that you ever walk. So you kind of just leave it, you'll deal with it later. If it's out of sight, it's out of mind, right? That's the start of it. And then a couple more things happen, and eventually some more turds get put into the pile. And then it starts to look like maybe we should take care of it. But I've got other stuff going on, you know, and it just kind of irks me every time I see it there. There's some stuff that I need to deal with. Uh, I don't want to. And it'll pop into my head from time to time, and it'll it'll sometimes be in the form of a list that it just goes from thought to thought. Like I'll notice that my car is dirty, and then my brain will point out the turd, and I'll be like, that activates the other ones. Oh, I need to get my car washed. Oh yeah, but I sh I do need to deal with other stuff with my car. I gotta get my oil changed. And then there's other stuff that I have to do on the road, and that connects the dots. Oh, but I should go get my labs done because the doctor's on my ass about getting my labs done, and then in the pharmacy for my medicine, and there's the turd pile. How do you do? And with enough time, that turd pile becomes a turd hill, and then suddenly it becomes turd mountain. This giant mountain of shit to do, of inconsequential and not currently urgent, stupid shit to do. And none of it's moving my dreams forward, none of it has any compelling qualities to it, it's just shit I have to do. Errands and chores and obligations, responsibilities. Ooh, glorious. And I've actually been sharing with you guys my actual Terd Mountain. A lot of the things on that list were my actual those are my actual turds. I'm just sharing. Those we got I got some nasty ones, don't I? But I want to get to the hopeful part of this. This is where we take Turd Mountain down. It's where we're gonna eat it one bite at a time. Not really. That's that's gross. We're not no, we're not gonna eat it. Come on. We're gonna get a bucket and a shovel and we're gonna scoop some poop. There is a way to get on top of the overwhelm and conquer Turd Mountain. And this uh and this is how. This is one of the ways that that can be done. So follow along, give it a thwack, or don't. This these are just some ideas to try. The step one is on a piece of paper, set a timer, and name as many turds as you can. This is also called a brain dump. For ADHD specifically, we have to get this stuff out of our heads so you put all them turds on paper. Every stupid chore, errand, purchase, sale, every phone call, conversation, everything that your brain keeps swirling with a you gotta do this, you should do this, this has to get done. Anything you have to do, purge it, get it out, create the physical embodiment of turd mountain on that piece of paper. And I like to keep it to a timer session. I keep it to like 20 minutes because if you're like me, then you're gonna feel like, oh, am I missing something? When will I know it's done? So uh you're done when the timer goes off. If stuff pops up later, great, just add it to the pile. And now look at all that crap. It's gross. I tend to feel a little bit of relief once I get everything out of my head because then I can stand back and I can look at it. I can be behold, this my steaming pile of poo. I shall get to all of you. One shovel full at a time. Everything I don't want to do is lovingly placed on this evil piece of paper. Next up, this is where I get to have fun with you. So without knowing what you're going to work on, you pick a time when maybe you have an hour or two, maybe on a weekend. This is gonna be your dedicated appointment for turd work. I personally call these bullshit tasks because I hate them, they're dumb, and they are preventing me from enjoying my life fully. This is me saying, I have two hours to put towards this, and then the rest of the weekend belongs to me. It's mine. It's for my whims, for me and my whims and whatever I want to do. And in that two-hour window, I will get my shovel and my bucket and I will dig. How this helps me is that I know that there will always be stuff continually adding to the pile. Life is super fun that way, but I have a system in place that is specifically geared toward dealing with that pile. And that system allows me to contain it within a bubble of time. And so it's not like, oh, my life is filled with chaos, and there's always something, and this is also this is all too much. You know, and that's true, by the way. I mean, that's our lives that we're we are always filled with chaos. There is always something to do, and it's most certainly too much. But Saturday from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m., I've already dedicated time to it. Oh my god. So there's a little bit of a reprieve there for me that I've already scheduled time for this stuff. And here's a few of the caveats because some of this stuff uh it attacks my all or nothing thinking. And so I also know that I won't get all of it done, but that's okay. I can at least confidently say that I have a plan for it. It will get done eventually. I can be confident in that. And that's probably helpful too. Like if you're in a relationship, like with a non-ADHD person and that they know that you have it on your radar and that there's a specific plan and a time to accomplish some of these bullshit tasks. You know, I imagine that would be comforting to them. I don't know. I'm I wouldn't know. I'm single, so I'm I'm imagining for you. It's helpful for me to know that these tasks, these are, these are aspects of life that have to be taken care of. They were always gonna pop up. There's never an end to it, but they will not run my life. I'm going to slot them in accordingly. So another question might be well, but some of the things are appointments and some of the things are errands, some of them are overdue chores, some of them require multiple steps to complete, some can't happen until a certain time. So how do I slot all this stuff? And I feel you, I'm in the same boat. So let's talk about how we chunk things. Now that you've got this list in front of your face, you can do things with it. You can organize it. I use the Eisenhower matrix, that's a big one for me. And forum folks, you guys can find that in the resource section. Everybody else, it's easy. Google research. You grid out the tasks in four quadrants. It's based on urgency and importance. So the it's like urgent and important, that means your house is on fire, you kind of got to deal with it right away. Um, if it's not urgent and important, those are the turds. Those are the turds that we know we gotta get done, but there's no immediate consequence, so it's a hard pass. We're always gonna shel those, and yet they're the ones that we need to do. Then there's the urgent and not important, and that's like an email notification or any of your alerts on your cell phone. And then there's the not urgent and not important, and that's video games. That's when things get to be too much. That's where we live. That's our kind of like our escape quadrant. That's the comfy, cozy quadrant. Not a lot of good stuff goes down in that quadrant. We have to figure out how to focus our time on some of these turds. Another way to play with your mountain would be to lump things together. Things that you have to drive to do, maybe, things uh that are on the computer, maybe phone calls. You can create your own, like it's like Play-Doh. You mush a bunch of the turds together and then you get them all done in one chunk. Then when you have things grouped together, you can then schedule them for tomorrow. You schedule that hour or something, and then you pull a few shovel fulls of crap off the mountain. Here's the situation with some of these things is we tend to swirl all of these tasks in our head. And they just take turns acting like they're really important because they popped into our head. It's like, oh yeah, oh my god, yeah, I gotta do that. I just remembered, I gotta do that. And then we filter them through. Well, is it an urgent nightmare? No? Okay, move along, buddy. I'm doing something else right now. And that's how the mountain grows. And I'm hopefully showing you guys how you might go from guy standing paralyzed in front of Terd Mountain and just watching as bulldozers of shit just keep getting added to it, to guy walking up to Terd Mountain with a shovel and a bucket and the rubber boots of confidence and doing the thing. And that would be my challenge for you guys this week is to have your mission with Terd Mountain, get it all out and then plan some stuff the night before. Spend 30 minutes picking up that dumb thing at that dumb store that you've been putting off. And oh, look, it's in the same category as picking up the dry cleaning and hand deliver that form to that dumb place. So if you set an appointment for tomorrow for one hour, you could maybe get all three of those nightmares done in one clip, create an appointment, and then when the time comes, set the timer and go for it. And if the timer goes off after only two of them get done, then I might. I actually might quit. I might actually be like, nope, I only said I was gonna do it for an hour, so I'm done. But guess what? I did two of the three things. Victory. That to me is a big win because that's two bucketfuls of crap taken off of Turd Mountain. Alrighty, guys. I hope that helps. And I'll I hope this has been helpful, and thank you for enduring an entire podcast episode dedicated to references to poop. You've been very patient uh with my metaphor. So join me next week as we talk about Vomit Lake. Yeah! Just kidding. I'm just kidding. I really just want you guys to have a fantastic week, and I will talk to you later.