Resolutions and Routines, Intention and Attention

It’s that time of year again – time to hand-wave my way out of conversations about what my New Year’s Resolutions are. I’ve never liked this tradition; at first because why wait for the calendar odometer to roll over to start doing something? but as I’ve gained in years and learned more about my own patterns and received a late diagnosis for ADHD, I’ve also come to realize that, like many people with ADHD, I’m starting new things all the time, and that year is the wrong timescale for me to measure things on, because the real challenge isn’t resolving to do something: I resolve to do things multiple times an hour, and thanks to discipline and medication I can follow through. No, it’s making that New Year’s Resolution stick and actually following through. Following through requires a timescale on the order of days.

There is however power in the edges of calendar cycles. I use the first Saturday of the month as the day I schedule a lot of recurring household maintenance tasks; many of these are things that could happen every six weeks instead – but not eight! – but it’s easier for me to have one predictable day I can block out to handle them, and it provides some slack in the case of exceptional situations like traveling. The end of the year is a great time for longer-cycle tasks, such as swapping out expired or expiring emergency supplies or culling my bookshelf or wardrobe or pantry.

What I’ve found for my initiatives is that while I will start something new whenever the ADHD brain feels like it, if I really want to make it work, I have to make it automatic, part of a routine. I started taking my current ADHD medication almost two years ago, and my morning routine starts roughly like this:

1. Measure coffee beans, put into coffee grinder, start coffee grinder.

   1. If my partner appeared to be asleep when I left our room, step outside to grind the coffee; the grinder is plugged in right next to our side door.

2. Rinse coffee carafe, get water for coffee after faucet has ran for at least 15 seconds to remove water sitting in the pipes overnight which my partner doesn’t like for it’s metallic taste.

3. Pour water into coffee machine, put carafe in machine.

4. Ensure grounds area of machine is empty; put new filter in, put grounds in that.

5. Start the coffeemaker.

6. Get a mug, go to the refrigerator, put a bit of water in the mug, and set it on counter. If we are not observing Daylight Saving Time, put a drop of Vitamin D in the water.

7. Get two plates from the cabinet, and a packet of wet cat food from on top of the refrigerator; open the packet and divvy the gravy up between the plates. Set used packet of cat food next to my mug. Place cat food dishes for the cats.

8. Retrieve my mug and the cat food packet from the counter, proceed back to the coffee machine, discarding cat food packet on the way; Retrieve medication from cabinet above coffee maker, take the pill with the water in the mug.

9. Swap the mug and carafe on the coffee-maker’s hot plate; pour coffee from carafe into the mug while the mug catches the still-brewing coffee.

I can generally handle exceptions for the mornings when my partner is downstairs first and feeds the cat and makes the coffee, but if I am doing all of these, I cannot deviate from this pattern lest it all fall apart and I forget to take my medication or even get coffee. If I try to take the medication before feeding the cats, I will get to the refrigerator and the cats will be mewling and rubbing my leg and I will think “I should feed the cats” and entirely forget about the water or the medication. If I don’t get coffee while I am standing at the machine after taking my medication, I might get sucked into my phone and will either delay or forget my morning cuppa – which is an augment to my medication – and my morning is a lot worse for it.

Perhaps I could come up with a new routine to do things in a different order, but I’d have to replace the one I have, and I’d still have to follow it in some form of muscle memory or mental checklist. And routines are often fragile – I can have routines I’ve been doing solidly for years break down because I went out of town for a few days – returning from travel often makes it so my usual patterns aren’t usual anymore.

So instead of making resolutions I don’t have the spare executive function to keep on top of the resolutions I’m making all the time, I’ve decided to use this time to instead figure out how to reinforce and strengthen the routines that aren’t as strong as they could be; to instead figure out how to continue doing something, even in the case of disruption.

I also spend some time thinking about timescales. Talk about new year’s resolutions are often in the vein of what one is going to do over the next three hundred and sixty five days, which from a feedback-loop-building perspective is an eternity. You want to read fifty books this year? Great – I’m going to focus on reading four books this month, and calibrate based on how well that went; heck, I might even see how it goes to read two books in two weeks and adjust my goals from there towards something I can realistically achieve – feeling like you’re not living up to your potential is a common thing among the late-diagnosed, and part of the cure is both building discipline and better-understanding what you’re capable of.

The end of the year is a great time for thinking about this kind of routine-strengthening because it’s generally a time of disrupted routines to begin with. My kid is off school for two weeks and while that’s an edge case for my time management, I’ve found that if I can make something work for a common edge case like that it’s going to be a lot more resilient to other disruptive situations.

If this idea speaks to you – strengthening your weaker routines instead of starting new initiatives – please join me in helping make it a more culturally-accepted practice.