Ok, as promised, it’s time for “I am a disabled person with perfectionism issues and the Pomodoro method is still useful to me after a fortnight of use; let’s figure out what’s going on and why” - a thread that will be updated little by little as time allows. 1/many.

Disclaimer: I am disabled, but my disability has to do with both body & brain in a complicated way that doesn’t fit neatly into neurodivergence. For shorthand, I am not neurodivergent in the ways people mean when they talk about ADHD, autism, or executive dysfunction.

(Back later to actually keep going on this, because I’m using it as a break activity between chunks of Work Task I want to do.)

Right. So. My disability has to do with time and it has given me a very weird, nebulous relationship with time and work, one that is compounded significantly by what the fancy educational theorists call ~giftedness~ or whatever.

In brief: I have a vision impairment called nystagmus. It’s different for different people. For me it makes my eyes sort of wobble rather than staying still, and rather than messing up my perceptions, it means I take longer than the average person to visually focus.

How much longer? Basically I’m in the lowest percentiles in the population - like, bottom 2-3% - for any sections of an IQ test that involve a combination of speed and visual processing.

The easiest way to explain how much this matters and the specific ways it does/doesn’t matter is: I can do photorealistic portraits in pencil, but I can’t safely drive because I can’t see the changing landscape or new obstacles in time.

There are absolutely weird things going on there with distance vision as it interacts with focus - my actual perception at a distance seems to suck more than it should based on the boring old astigmatism I have, and isn’t resolved by wearing glasses for the astigmatism.

But the short answer is: I see more slowly than others.

This is a mindfuck, and it has had a particularly mindfuck-y effect on my understanding of my own working capacity.

Because, according to the various metrics/norms/Western scientific ways of measuring, I don’t think more slowly than others, & I don’t form ideas/solutions more slowly.

(NB: it wouldn’t be Bad if I did think slower. I’m not being defensive, just describing complexity.)

But a lot of thinking work is also looking work. Writing an essay is both; doing research is EXTREMELY both (when your disability is about extra time focusing, going between a reference text and a notebook steals so much time). File noting is both. Emailing is both.

Complicating the matter further: one of the traits for which my work receives consistent praise, one of the reasons I get hired for certain kinds of roles, is thoroughness.

In addition to being physically slow at documenting my thoughts or absorbing new thoughts via written word, I’m also detail-oriented, and tend to make things that cover all the bases. This can slide into unnecessary perfectionism but it is also heavily rewarded.

Then, also, truthfully: I have not lived a life of good or healthy work habits, because I often haven’t needed them in earlier stages, and because of a strange sort of resentment that I feel about time, and how time doing work seems to expand into forever because of the above.

(More later.)

At uni, in undergrad, it was typical that I would start assignments as late as I possibly could.

All nighters gradually became less all-nighter-y and more “only starting in the last week when I had a month and a half”, but the reason was the same: I don’t want work to eat my life.

Between how long things take me, how much I get into them once I start, and how much I care about accuracy and completeness of work - how hard it is for me to even see supposedly “middling” work as satisfying even my own basic goals for the work...

I’ve always felt sure starting earlier would just result in more eaten time. Starting as late as possible was the only way I knew for protecting my leisure time and avoiding a complete perfection pit of slow and complex refining of the work.

Also I got used to only pushing through using adrenaline and fear of not completing the work as impetus to finally start on the tasks I resented for taking so long, even though I wanted them done and knew I could do them well.

These problems didn’t tend to come up as much for any task in a group - collaborative script writing, or chunked deadlines for a group endeavour, or anything where the process wasn’t “do written task, then hand it in”.

I think that’s partly because when I work with others, often it is easier to recognise and acknowledge conversation as work (something I do fast, something where I don’t resent time).

But it’s admittedly also easier to avoid total detail orientation or despair about time when someone else is screwed over if I don’t deliver.

And- maybe most importantly, I don’t know- doing things in a cohort of fellow workers helps me understand how long “regular” people take?

Sometimes my thoroughness also translates into me giving something more detail than it needs, and a curative for that is seeing others give it less detail and seeing it work out fine anyway.

Sometimes, uh, being monitored by others makes me work whether I resent the time or not.

Anyway, a sudden rapid transition from “office based work with lots of regular client meetings and collaborative work” to “complete work from home due to a stressful global crisis” was ... not good for me.

(Forgot to add: my vision gets slower with more hours of screen time or more emotional stress. Fun! Like I said, it’s neurological, and it’s complicated!)

Partly bc of pandemic stress, but partly bc of a lack of built up coping mechanisms for dealing with the complex resentment knot in this new, tailor-made-to-suck-for-me situation, I started having a lot of the same problems as people who usually have executive dysfunction.

It was helpful and important that I avoided a lot of panic and self-recrimination by acknowledging that pandemic stress was happening to everyone, and as Melbourne got less stressful, things did get better. But it became really hard at times to do everything on my work list.

So I started using a tool I had already begun to find useful before the pandemic, which was bullet journaling - great because it helps with noticing how much you’re actually trying to do each day and prioritising stuff all laid out in a list together.

And I would use that in combination with a whiteboard stuck up near my workstation where I would list each day’s tasks, prioritise them, and then mark which hour I would do each task in.

This ... somewhat worked, but there have been some meaningful issues. The biggest one is that I hadn’t nailed how to figure out how long anything actually took me, and things always took me longer than I expected. And so resentment-procrastination would kick in.

You know how folks with ADHD sometimes talk about how if they have one thing to do at 5pm, the whole morning and early afternoon is ruined because they go into waiting mode?

Yeah, so: first thing to go into the calendar was always meetings or client contacts. Immovable, specifically timed, I don’t feel Behind and Slow every second that I’m doing them. The perfect work tasks for me because they go as fast as I feel I should be going on the inside.

And then I would have a lengthy list of tasks that uh, like most things, involve both slow eyes and thorough brain, and no one around me who can go “oy, do that one without these things, they look essential to you but they’re extras”.

I would look at the gaps between the meetings and have no idea which tasks I could conceivably fit in them. Also, I started new roles right before the pandemic, so I had no idea how long some of these tasks ought to take or what level of detail was favoured per org standards yet.

So this is where the Pomodoro method comes in for me:

Despite my best efforts, because of the weirdness of my body-mind and the weirdness of the pandemic, I don’t know how long it will take me to finish tasks yet. But I need to be able to start them reliably anyway.

If I have a list of tasks, that is useful for knowing what I need to do and prioritising what I need to do today vs what can wait for next week.

It isn’t useful for getting me to start without facing the resentment-uncertainty-despair wall.

Pomodoro-ing seems to solve that.

(Oh I forgot to mention - typing and writing and drawing are slow even without looking, because in addition to the vision impairment I also have some stuff going on with speed of gross/fine motor skills. Like I said - bodies and brains are wild.)

The reality is, thinking about how long things are going to take is not moving me towards any solutions, but breaking from thought and feeling and moving toward just doing things anyway can be hard sometimes, especially because some degree of time planning does actually help.

Pomodoro-ing involves setting a timer, working for 25 straight minutes, and then always taking a 5 minute break at the end before setting the next timer. Every 3-4 sessions, you take a longer break. This addressed a few of the issues above for me.

I replaced the “do these tasks” list next to each hour of my working day with two check boxes. As long as I was doing 2 Pomodoros in an hour, I could feel SURE I had done as much work as was reasonable and possible for me, even if someone else might have done more in that time.

This was hard and weird and then IMMEDIATELY good for me. I find it very hard to eg charge for my work by the hour because of the whole speed thing, the fear that my hour is worth less than someone else’s hour of equivalent skill, knowledge and experience.

But this wasn’t about charging by the hour - it was literally just about going “ok you’re going to work for most of this hour and as long as you do that, whatever you did in the hour was enough”. This seemed to flip some switch in me almost immediately.

At the end of each day, I no longer felt despair that I hadn’t done enough, or awareness that procrastination might be more of a problem than inherent limitations. I felt sure I did what I could in my actual work hours - which is something that lets me feel good about stopping.

And, as it turns out, knowing I will feel that certainty also lets me feel good about STARTING. It seems to make the resentment procrastination less likely, because contained within the rules of Pomodoro-ing is the promise “this won’t eat your life”.

This has also helped me finally - and I can’t emphasise enough how much you should read the word “finally” with a great relieved exhale of breath - figure out HOW LONG THINGS ACTUALLY TAKE FOR ME.

It is so disorienting not to know. Especially when you are prone to procrastination, or to allowing yourself to lose focus as a specific tactic to avoid the “work eating my whole life” experience, it is really hard to time your work.

Some people do 45-min Pomodoros. This is too long for me, bc 45 mins is enough time for me to start feeling the resentment procrastination wolf at the door, whereas my brain LOVES 25 minutes. “You’re saying I don’t ever have to work alone for a full half hour without a break?”

So I get these clear 25-minute very slightly eustress-fuelled chunks of time where I KNOW I was working for sure, and I get to finally find out it eg takes me four of those chunks to complete a certain assessment or procedure. Two whole hours of me actually trying my best.

That certainty feels so freeing. I finally know how long things take me for disability reasons without procrastination/resentment reasons stirred in. I finally feel empowered to maybe even ask my colleagues whether those times are different for us, and how different.

(I work in jobs where I have already chosen to disclose my disability and the perspective it gives me is seen as an asset. Your mileage may vary.)

I can use THAT knowledge to figure out other things, even maybe check if their work is equally detailed or less detailed than mine as well, so maybe I can figure out if some of the time is because of thoroughness and not just disability. Maybe it can help with accommodations.

This is such a good question. I allow this to vary a bit more depending on how the day is going - when I can feel I’m on a roll I do 5 min breaks for 3-4 sessions and then a longer break of even up to 30 mins. When I’m moving slower, sometimes 10m. https://twitter.com/wanderlustin/status/1355438697290756102

(Breaks are different after client sessions because emotional re-combobulation between clients is something I know I MUST count as work, so sometimes if I have two clients back to back my only work between them will be to recombobulate.) https://twitter.com/wanderlustin/status/1355438697290756102