Adult Add: Flex Time And How To Manage It

When do you want to see clients?

When do you want to return phone calls?

What do you want to do in your business that’s not so structured and when? Setting up your "time zones" is very important for someone with ADD.

But when thinking of this kind of time that we call "flex" time, remember that it's one of the three types of time--focus time and free time being the others. Choose a specific period of time for flex time, just as you would with focus time and free time, and use this as a way of controlling your ADD.

For example: Tell clients, "I won't be able to see you, except on Tuesday or Wednesday afternoons." When clients ask, "Why?" You say, "Because those are my hours."

Think about it. When you call the dentist, or the doctor, and you’re calling to make an appointment, does the doctor say, “Tell me your schedule and let’s see what’s available for you first”? Of course not. They say, “All right, you can come in on this day or that day.”

Build flexability into your scheduled time too, because that's what flex time is all about. It's important to give your ADD brain structure, but structure that you and your attention deficit can live with. So, you can do this in different ways.

You might like to pull one full day of flex time, if you can. If you can’t, pull a couple of hours, or half a day. Be careful with whole days, though. With ADD, if you pull a whole day for flex time, you might get bored and then, nothing will get accomplished. Variety helps ADD people from being bored.

You may want to structure your flex time in terms of “themes,” too. This is often helpful for people with ADD.

What are themes?

You can have theme days, theme months, and theme years. For example: You might want to write a book, and your theme would be to "get a book published this year." Breaking time down by the month, the theme might be “write chapter five” month or "make sure your office is clean” month.

You can also have theme days. For example: If you have to manage money--the statements and the bank and all that stuff, you can have a theme for one day as "Money Day." You might teach your ADD brain that Monday is that day. And perhaps on Tuesday, you set your time aside for educating yourself on better ways to deal with attention deficit. Wednesday can be returning calls, and so on. And maybe each day, your time will be four in the afternoon until 6.

Then, when a client calls in and says, “I need to speak with you Thursday at four o'clock,” instead of scrambling around to see if you can accommodate them, you just say, “I’m sorry. I’m busy at that time.” Doing this may not be easy for you at first, especially when you have ADD, but it will get easier the more you follow your schedules.

You may need to include a partner in this. It can be a family member or one of your co-workers. Explain that you're working on structuring time to accommodate your ADD, and even if they don't have ADD themselves, they'll pitch in and help you. It's about a feeling of accountability, which may help to keep your ADD brain on track. You can find different ways of including accountability into your plan, as well.

Decide how you want to structure flex time, and then, stick to your new schedule. Get someone to help you do that in the beginning, until you're on track every day. By doing this, you will control your ADD and make your life go forward very smoothly. You can actually use your ADD to focus on the structure, and to start doing things in a more powerful way.

By: Tellman Knudson And Stephanie Frank -