Do you start with the hard part or the easy part when you're working on a project? If you're ADHD, what are some tips you can share about working in a professional environment? @bobbyfingers : Fabio and the Goose: ruclips.net/video/2RIEPKEhE2s/видео.html @theslowmoguys : 75mph Bird to the Face: ruclips.net/video/w9i9rwg1L_A/видео.html Join this channel to support Tested and get access to perks, like asking Adam a question: ruclips.net/channel/UCiDJtJKMICpb9B1qf7qjEOAjoin
I always start my day with the most difficult tasks and then finish the day with the easiest. My brain isn’t wired to work on difficult tasks as the day goes on so when my brain is at its best is when I want to tackle the hard stuff.
I work in a very different field, translation, and I do the "saving easy parts for bad moments". Sometimes I do not have time left today to tackle one of the major sections, so I will do one of the small, easy ones so that I get the feeling of progression. Specially because minor ADD makes it hard for me to sustain effort when the end is not in sight, and those minor victories help.
I spent a few years teaching FMEAs as a tool to help figure out what will be the hard stuff, and what's the easy stuff (and approximately how important), it really made it easier to prioritize for me and my team. Especially when working on projects that are fundamentally new to you.
Almost everything you said is applicable to software engineering. Although, we definitely have to prove out the highest-risk implementation details first. Often times the rest of the project is built assuming that part works.
It probably depends on the person(s) and the task at hand. That said, for me, there's definitely something to be said for "low hanging fruit". Getting the easy stuff done and out of the way, gaining momentum, and making things less overwhelming by the time you get to the harder stuff.
A very similar approach to "hard part first" that I'm accustomed to from software engineering projects is "riskiest part first" or "least understood part first", because those are the ones that can (figuratively) blow up on you and potentially require a completely different approach, or more time, etc.
Exactly. My exception would be when I have brain fry from the hard stuff--I'll switch tasks and do something insanely easy, like cleaning up my e-mail or reading through some documentation. Or if I know my concentration is affected--say a Friday afternoon, Monday morning, terribly hungry, etc., I've found it better to stop working on something than to try and force my way through poorly. It's way better not to write a piece of buggy code late on a Friday than to spend all of Monday (or all weekend!) debugging what you messed up on Friday. I used to work with a team at a major company that released code on Fridays, ensuring that at least a handful of people would always be working to the bone over the weekend. Fridays are not for firewalls.
I agree with the 'riskiest part first' because if it is important and it is unknown, the entire product could be a dumpster fire. That said, its also the part that can drag on and on as you go through things that don't work to try to get what will. That looks like not going anywhere to many managers. They like to see line items moving across the chart or a good velocity. For some of them, A (super hard) and B (pretty simple but a bit of work) both are the same - each has a line on the chart/or the velocity. There's also another codicil which is: If the really risky problematic thing is NOT the most important thing, knocking out the other high priority work and being able to show good work... then the bosses feel a little better about the middle part of the project where you get to the riskiest bit. Sometimes this was a 'dream feature' and it eventually is looked at and the conclusion is the cost doesn't justify the effort and it just goes away from your list of things. There are a lot of experts in motivation and neurology of the brain such that they will tell you, at the beginning of a day, if you have the option, take one small piece of work that you are highly convinced can be done (or a work unit of it done), that's what you should do first. Why? Because it does gives you some sense of momentum and you can take that into the hard stuff - you've ALREADY done something... the next thing should also be doable! (It's really a way to direct your brain to run with the early morning success and let that encourage you for the rest of the day). But those should be small items but something you can say 'Hey, one thing done! We're moving!'.
@@jorymil Ugh, yes. That and the 'Let's release on Dec 23rd!'. Really? If I ever run a software company, there will be NO heavy delivery unless it is 1st of December and there's enough time to get it into production. The point of rest and of getting away from the work is that it primes your brain and helps balance your life so you do better work the rest of the time. "It's way better not to write a piece of buggy code late on a Friday than to spend all of Monday (or all weekend!) debugging what you messed up on Friday."
It is a general concept in business where you have high risk activities, to take these as early as possible and spend less efforts on the rest if these do not pan out.
Doing this also helps to iron out dependency issues early on in the process as from my experience it's the little dependencies in the complicated sections that seem to cause lots of the release based issues
The question about focus reminds me of a comment by Ira Glass; "All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it's just not that good. It's trying to be good, it has potential, but it's not." Knowing you need to improve is half the battle to improving.
Ya same here, I'm not a mechanic but run a machine shop. I really dislike large production run of the same thing over and over. That's not were I thrive. But gotta do it from time to time. Mainly a small job shop.
Same here.. just dive in and do the shit work first, get it over with rather than working your way up to it dreading it the whole time. Once I get myself into a job and actually focus on the problem it's usually not as bad as we tell ourselves it's gonna be.
It makes sense to tackle the challengings things first because if you can't do that then nothing else really matters. Everything else you did was wasted too. You only win if you clear all of the hurdles and cross the finish line. Second place is just the first loser.
I have ADHD and Autism and it makes soo much sense now why Mythbusters was so meaningful to me as a kid and scratched an itch like nothing else. Happy holidays Adam, thank you for everything you share on this channel
Im terribly adhd. At one point was on two prescriptions for it from my doctor because i had reached the legal limit for the first (that was rough). I eventually switched to lifestyle changes and started learning how to set up the environment around me to accomodate my needs to mimic the functionallity other people have. Alarms to track the passing of time, sticky notes everywhere. The advantages ive found is because im constantly triple checking my work due to being unsure if ive actually remembered everything, the quality of my work is often great and my ability to learn a new task quickly due to quickly catching and correcting mistakes has made me a valuable part of the team im a part of. My adhd tip is, organize tasks in a manner that reduces the amount of times youll have to shift focus between each objective for the task. This reduces the window of opportunity for distractions from your task that can affect the outcome of your work. You have to do things in a nonstandard way, but ive often found if your end result is great, some nonstandard variance in an operation is acceptable. Sorry if there are too many typos in my comment, on a new phone and adjusting to the keyboard differences. Have had to make maaaaaaany corrections while typing this lol.
The triple checking and double guessing yourself is an immense mental drain however. People often have no idea how much effort will have been put in for a final piece of work
One other reason to do the hard part first - Hard usually also means higher risk of screw-ups. Do the hard part first so you have less time wasted if you set yourself back and need to start over. It just means you have less riding on doing the hard part right the very first time.
I remember taking a calligraphy class in highschool as an art elective. The teacher would tell us to do the lettering first on our projects, then any decorations around it afterwards. Someone looking at a framed piece is more likely to notice if you tried correcting a spelling or spacing error in the lettering than a small mistake in the decorations. My final project was the prayer from Boondock Saints, with Celtic knotwork around it. There are a few mistakes in the knotwork, but I'm probably the only one who ever noticed them.
Getting started is also the hardest part, so usually what I do is get started on something by doing the hardest part first. Let's say something in a game, building a house that will surely take hours you always start with the walls and the roof before you add the doors and windows. The smaller stuff will come naturally.
I write software and build servers for a living. I constantly catch myself judging my past work. Mindfulness helps. When you notice your mind harshly critiquing your work, step back, take a breath, and appreciate the lessons you learned. Over time, your mind will naturally appreciate instead of judge. This leads to a happier, more productive life by removing the stress and emotional fog generated by internal harsh critiques, freeing the mind for creativity.
Realizing that your stuff pales in comparison to that of others, and seeing the shortcomings of your work, means that your eyes' skills have leveled up, like skills in video games. With this new skill level, you can work on leveling up your hands to iron out the shortcomings your eyes see in your work. That's how it was laid out in a video I watched ages ago, about how to handle this phenomenon, in relation to drawing. It's a skill that's improved gradually, so the aforementioned sudden realization can sting - as Adam mentioned.
"I asked the Mythbuster and he said no, so I asked the other guy" - Bobby Fingers. The writing of that was hysterical. Thank you Adam for being you man.
I really enjoy these just slightly longer 15min videos - they seem so much more longer than the previous 8min videos that used to only cover about two questions. It's just so captivating to hear Adam talk about these topics... and it's such a treat whenever Adam gets to answer a question about Mythbusters.
Adam is such a fountain of knowledge. I've learned so much from him, not only about science and engineering, but about life. I know we shouldn't idolize people, but I truly am very grateful for Adam and I firmly believe that he's making a big difference in a lot of people's lives. A small ripple can cause the biggest waves.
A few years ago, I hit a major roadblock in my development as a musician so I made the decision to start taking guitar lessons from my original teacher from high school and after a rather long search, I found a vocal instructor to help me learn to sing properly. Setting my ego aside was hard but I have really started to see the benefits of that in the past few months.
So true! "A change of work is the best rest." -- Sherlock Holmes. When I got burned out on my instrument, I took up drums. Then 7-string guitar. I have a way deeper appreciation of music after playing rhythm section instruments.
I've only been playing for 2 years or so, but I'm trying to do the same. It's hard to get over the mindset of just giving up because I'm not "good enough."
Tackling the hard part: Known as "eating the frog". Very helpful for professionals and as Adam points out, if you have a choice, the harder part needs priority. Good reminder/knowledge for everyone!
The amount of information in Adam’s brain is incalculable. The fact that he shares it with us makers (and others) in a palatable way is vastly more important because then we can share it with others. THANK YOU, Adam! 😊😊
When you said you had to re-do work and the second one was better...oh my god yes! I've flunked so many things and been extremely salty/angry/sad that I have to do it again but my experience has ALWAYS been that the second version is an improvement in every way. It's still hard to deal with the initial reality of having to do work again but if you can handle it it always work out for the better.
@ good advice for sure! Not always applicable sadly. I made a video about building bike wheels, I made drawings, filmed for hours, spent two days editing and only towards the end did I think to colour code the spokes. It would’ve been easy to just carry on but I knew it would bug me forevermore. I scrapped nearly a weeks worth of work and spent another week re-doing the whole thing (which was more work than the original due to the extra colour coding) but I’m glad I did as the second one was way better than the original! Same thing for when I’ve made a video out riding and had my audio fail…absolutely raging about it but went out and filmed again and the second video turned out much better. Also had it happen with voiceovers, spending over an hour recording only to find the connection was loose and the audio was terrible. Then the second attempt failed too, even more raging! But by this point I’d had more practice with the actual voiceover and the third one that worked sounded much more natural
I noticed that, then even when he was talking about making a LIST, the 2nd one is always better/more refined 😂😂. There's just no way around it. It takes time and experience. And there's no shortcuts for that.
With ADHD, it's more difficult to break down tasks into parts and also to prioritize by importance, so ANY job that gives you a structure that helps to focus that, while being specifically dynamic will help a lot. (Reliable schedule with specific hours helps). Ex: I changed jobs every year until I started to work in software development. With that, I could know a structure for what I was doing and how to prioritize a big picture process, but the specifics of what was being developed and tested were constantly changing, where that imporance was and what specifics needed to be done were always new and keeping my interest while providing the importance & structure. That is EXACTLY what ADHD brains want to help optimize function since they're interest driven and need additional structure and importance emphasis.
Having had ADHD all my life (currently in my mid-50s), I long ago realized that I thrived in certain categories of employment and certain company sizes, and have largely managed to remain within those lanes. For me, being a (primarily electronics) repair technician has been the best fit for a slew of reasons: the constant challenge of diagnosing failure origins; high degree of mobility/traveling; constantly varying customer locations; a clear emphasis on priorities; an environment where performance matters far more than conformity to arbitrary and usually nonsensical procedures; and more.
Working in a school, I see the need for education to adapt more to kids with ADHD. The system favours the kid that sits down, asks no questions, and makes no noise. I have ADHD and so does my son and talking to some teachers. I have to remind them how painful, physically painful it is to sit still.
I've also got ADHD. I still take Ritalin, and have done so since I was in my early teens (currently in my mid 50s), but not on a constant basis. I have had to instill a significant amount of self-discipline and working habits to overcome my natural tendencies and be a productive person for those periods where Ritalin was not an option (such as during military service, because military doctors were then all still in a 1950s mindset). Education systems often combine the worst of bureaucracies and academia, neither of which really tolerate the mannerisms of most ADHD-affected people, and I don't think that the typical existing systems can genuinely modify themselves to the necessary degree. It has always seemed to me that education systems need multiple avenues of approach, tailored to categorical variations in learning schema such as those afflicted with ADHD & its cousins, etc.
@@TheBennedy85 Nothing that stands out, really. Probably the only prescription med I've ever received that doesn't have noticeable side effect, unlike my damn gout medicine and others. The generic chemical name is methylphenidate, FYI. I have developed a fairly sensitive awareness of when the med starts to kick in after consumption, in that my self-awareness is far more present.
That line about "straightforward is a kind of easy" really resonates with me, because I do a lot of not-easy things that, since I've done them so MANY times, I know all the steps now, and it IS straightforward, and I have a script for the difficult phone calls that require waiting 2+ hours on hold... Once I've done something enough to know the bits that won't change, I can streamline them. And even as someone without ADHD, I love making lists! I like the phrase, "addendum to the embodied knowledge," because I'm always very happy to get thoughts out of my head and onto paper, where they won't keep shifting and get lost, lol. And I love to cheat on to-do lists, and add things I did just to cross them out XD
Thank you so much for sharing your vulnerability about times that things don't go right. I'm a hobby sewist and it makes me cry when I cut the wrong size (I know, measure twice, cut once... impatience is always my downfall) or, worse, when I cut correctly and the project still comes out like garbage. I get so emotional! When you make something with your own hands and it falls flat or you have to redo things, it can feel like death by a thousand cuts. But it helps to see someone who is such an expert maker feels the same and makes those mistakes, too ❤
Super interesting starting line for me since, in general, people with ADHD gain momentum by doing the easy thing first. Of course everyone is different, even in any given spectrum like ADHD, and I’m not surprised you do the hard thing first. Quite….savage….of you… The time explanation makes a lot of sense I struggle with time blindness, especially when it’s for group of tasks
ADD (no H) here, and for me the difference is whether I can see the end or not. In college exams, for example, I would do the easy bits first to build up momentum and confidence; but when I have a long task at my job where I cannot estimate how long it will take, I need those small victories to sustain my level of effort.
I needed to hear this video today. There is an interview coming up for me next week, and I have many questions which require answering. Being a person who thinks too much, I know of many angles which could be taken. Something you said was and is a good reminder. More specifically, "what is mission critical". When I think about the questions again, I will be verifying them against the former saying.
The title reminds me of that thing with the four quadrants: Not knowing that you can't do it. Knowing you can't do it. Not knowing how you do it. Knowing how you can do it. The fact that you know you can't do it, you're already growing out of the not knowing you can't. So that's in the right direction.
I am a set dresser/specialty builder in the set dec department. My set decorator that I work for would always ask us to build pieces at a high quality in 360 degrees because he knew that our exceptional work would take a background item to becoming a featured piece the moment the director got on set. It made prioritizing where to focus detail very difficult but immensely satisfying seeing that piece get appreciated.
3:20 “Screwed I up have to do it again” You’re not alone I feel the same way, gets me every time. ❤ To counter this I next say to myself “it’s going to be 2x as good” and most of the time it does turn out better. 👍
First I have always loved watching you go through the process of a build-either here or on Mythbusters.The creative problem solving process is enthralling for me. I used to build ropes courses-challenge courses and do some basic building around the house now. And I am a summer camp director and I have been using ideas and inspiration from listening to your stories here to build and refine my summer camp programs-staff training - and environmental curriculum. And it brings me back to the thrill of building courses again. And thank you for your amazing storytelling.
Its so lovely Adam truly takes the time to answer with personal opinion and from the heart, he doesn’t have to do it but does, that shows a lot of character 😊
I was an IT person (sysadmin,deployment,production,development). I made lists daily, had by project lists and an everything (to fix/improve) list. One of my bosses watched to see my to do list, after seeing it, he never ever asked if I had enough to keep busy and needed something to do
This is what ticketing systems are for! Nobody should have a personal to-do list that's more than a month or so out. And nobody should be working without a ticketing system. The first thing I ask on interviews is "how do you organize work?" If I don't get a good answer, it's a short interview.
@@jorymil there was a ticket system for the help desk, not the 5 unix systems staff. I had some small documention, clean up, setup automation on my list (not functional problems). Each of the 5 had multiple systems with customer groups and new systems/application projects. They needed to have dedicated unix system admins on production. We finally got HP Openview later, but still no front line support. :) I left that job over what those issues did to my personal life. ( was single parenting )
I don´t work with props, but in another creative crafting area. Still, Adams advice or recommendations rings so many bells for me. I usually also start with the hard part, but sometimes it is just not possible. I simply have to start and face the challenges as they come. Luckily I rarely have a deadline, so I can work in that way. I totally agree with the lists, I do it all the time. I want everything out of my head and on paper. Then I don´t have to remember it, I can just check the list (IF I remember where I put the effing list after my last try out). Adam gives very valuable advice for any creative crafter here. Thank you!
Oh man, ADHD here and this very much spoke to me. Knowing what the one inviolable priority is can be the difference between a blizzard of conflicting worries and, if not exactly inner calm, a sort of determined grit. I might just start saying “get the bird to shoot and everything else is manageable” as an aphorism.
Getting acquainted with the biggest possible picture for anything is critical for establishing priority on how to do anything, for me. It allows you to make clear decisions on design and make solid suggestions to solve emerging problems. Other than that, my ADHD pushes me to go for, as many other comments mention, the hardest, most obscure and interesting part first.
As a hobbyist I have no real time or economic pressures to contend with but I tend to do the hardest things at or near the beginning of a project. That way, if I find that I’ve bitten off more than I can chew I can reassess my overall ability to do the project at all and if everything works out reasonably well it gives me more confidence and less trepidation that I’ll be capable of finishing the project and I get more enjoyment out of the rest of the process. As for realizing that there’s much room for improvement in your work that’s just a sign of wisdom and growth.
The hard part is the part I'm most likely to stuff up. If I'm gonna stuff up, I might as well not also take good work down with it. Having already finished work that's good on the piece already just raises the stakes for me.
Never really found my "makers" space or place but I've recently gotten into skydiving and in a few weeks I became the lead packer and apprentice rigger for parachute equipment due to having a passion once entering the sport. Some things really do just come with time. When I started canopies looked like bedsheets with spaghetti mixed in. Now when packing and working on equipment I almost immediately get a feeling when the equipment doesn't look right.
Hard part first made instant sense to me, perhaps due to engineering studies but in life in general based on my experiences, playing an instrument and coding and otherwise. Exactly because of that, the hard part takes the most time and provides the most unexpected setbacks and reworks. Except when you inevitably misjudge and what you thought was the easy part was actually impossible. But you live and learn and make the best effort anyway and try to judge better as you gain experience. It also sets up the satisfying arc where first you face all the challenges and emotional pain from failing and struggling to learn and solve, and then you finally get to the cruising part where you cansee the finish line and get success after success. But what Adam said about leaving a nice job for later is also so useful, to alleviate the stress, to balance out burning out from being stuck and getting a sliver of positivity and hope from small success in between struggling. To keep your focus on the goal.
I love you Adam. Thank you for being a beacon of transparency and valuable wisdom in the realm of making. You are in my personal “Hall of Fame” including Hank Green, John Green, Neil Degrasse Tyson, Michael Corrie, Plato, and Gene Wilder.
I got into electronics a couple of years back. My first circuit was a treble boost (so, like 10 parts). I struggled a bit with reading schematics and understanding the concepts behind the circuits. 2 years later i look back and, at no point in those 2 years did i feel at all competent. I always felt i was playing catchup. But now my house is filled with circuits i designed and i can quite quickly come up with ways to build a circuit to do what i want. I started working on hifi amps as they are more challenging. I can read a schematic. Mend it Mark makes me looks like a novice but he's an outlier! 😊 Until today. When i saw a chap build a pendant that models water splashing around on a little LED matrix using an accelerometer, a handful of microchips, an accelerometer and an implementation of some code from an old plasma simulator script.... It was soooooo far beyond not even my current ability, but even my awareness of what CAN be done. Its inspiring, but also a bit exhausting at the same time. I'm 45. I'm not sure i can spare 5 years of free time to get up to speed with programming, milling, microcontrollers and charlieplexes 😂
I can relate. I made a lot of trains for a train simulator, and one day, it hit me: "These models are awful! It doesn't even look like it's made of metal! The textures don't line up correctly! If only I knew about smooth shading back then! Man, I gotta remake _all_ of these!"
A craftsman attains a high level of skill and is satisfied with their product. An artist can ALWAYS see that their work could be a little better. You can’t even start to become better, until you can SEE that someone else did it better, or that your own work is lacking something you can’t quite put your finger on, but you know is falling short. This is why I tell apprentices do not try to make any project perfect, because you are never good enough to make anything perfect. That you only improve in retrospect, for every project you finish, deliver, and move on from. You know you are growing as an artist when you look at your own prior work and all you can see is what you would have done differently if you were to do it today. And like Adam, some of my best moments are when I am looking at someone else’s work and asking myself “ HOW did they DO that?”
Great videos as always! I work in ice cream manufacturing and we never batch up tasks in order to avoid expensive mistakes. When making your jumper cables, we would make one then fit it, make the second, and fit it, etc as opposed to batching up all the cables, then fitting them. When we box up ice creams for example we don't make up the boxes first and then fill them, we make up one box then fill it, seal it, label it. It avoids for example using the wrong box and realising only after you have them all made up. It's one of the Toyota lean manufacturing production principles.
I think the advice about lists is profound, I'm so used to flying by the seat of my pants that it never occurred to me that I always have the high priority things worked out but not the fine details. I think I'll start doing that myself.
As a leader and motivator of people. I always put myself into the hardest, most difficult portions of the job. Lead by example was the basic philosophy. Saying that I tried to get the the tough stuff done first. Making the remaining work a roll downhill.
I love these Q&As. I’ve written comments a few times about how the maker experience often mirrors that of musicians. “Not as good as you thought,” is common among musicians. It’s not hard to get humbled by far better players. But if they’re driven and persistent, they’ll continue to grow and will reach levels they didn’t know they were capable of before. :-)
I work as an emergency service plumber so figuring out the ideal order of operations when approaching a list of problems is top of mind each and every day. From the perspective of my life's work, your approach lines up perfectly with my own. Great advice. All I do is solve new and different problems day after day and being able to properly triage the issues allows me to be hyper efficient and effective in my work leading to an outsized income and ability to go home early almost every day while getting the job done properly.
The "hard part" is the bit that has the most risk and is most likely to go wrong, thus you tackle that first because you then have more time to solve problems and get it right.
Make priorities through planning then do the highest priority first. Use the easy stuff as a mental break from the hard stuff to keep momentum going when you need to step away from the hard stuff. -heavy equipment field service mechanic.
I generally choose the easy part to do first. Having a little extra time to consider how to complete the hard task can help. Having some context of doing the easy task first gives some hints into how to work on the hard task. The easy portion can sometimes refine the overall goal which contributes to how to achieve the harder task. Every situation is different so I don't always approach the problem in this manner. I also see the value in the reasons for starting the harder portion first.
Having had big focus on innovation and professional trouble shooting I really appriciate Adams thoughts here. Not always, but sometimes (when conditions allows it) I do the hardest part first. The core. It is a bit situational for sure, but when having flow and it happens it is really really productive. Sometimes I may become sour politics in the background as the quick sucess and breaktrough may create tension and envy. Having a sponsor, handler or manager that takes some flak of politics helps but even people in very high places are not for ever and they also tend to have an agenda of their own after all.. As innovator and trouble shooter (and nerd?) I tended to be very unintrested in interal politics. Fun to help people and do some magic at times, but do not think reactions are all positive.
I don't know if its an entirely fair question to ask regarding starting with the hard part or the easy part. I find that oftentimes I start with the part that gives me a sense of progress or achievement first, so that the project 'calms' the demons of distraction and inspires me to continue working on it. If its a hard, time consuming slog but gives me that first visions of where I need to get to, I want to get that done first. The discussion on the lists resonated with me; I feel that sometimes merely writing that list cements the information in my head and it becomes something I don't need to refer to. And 95% of the time my long first lists become a second (refined) or third (breakdown) list, which go a long way to keep me on the trail.
Adam, just a great encapsulation of how much a forcing-function can really provide *focus* and (at least for me) fulfillment. _The show must go on_ kind of mindset.
There is always someone way better than you. There is always room to improove. Seing that your old work sucks is great, it means you have made Progress.
Adam, please drift off topic as often as you like, I could listen to you all day mate. I always read nearly all the comments and I'm starting to suspect that many of us here are wired very similarly (neurologically). I always feel like I fit in here, regarding both how I'm made and being a fellow maker. I hope others feel that way too 🙂
I hear ya Adam. I did alot of production machining and I've always said that I dont mind making a mistake. That just happens, and it is how we learn. What I DONT like is making a dozen mistakes in a row!
I paint D&D miniatures as a hobby, and have been doing so since high school. You always start with either the deepest recesses that are hardest to reach, or, say a humanoid wearing armor, start with the bare skin first, and paint your way outward. Invariably you will touch (overpaint onto) parts you didn't mean to. It's way easier to correct by doing the deeper parts first, getting those areas right, and then doing the next outward layer whether that's been accidentally touched or not. Going the other way, doing the easier outer layer first, you're invariably going to accidentally touch the brush to something you're already done with when you're trying to reach that deeper part.
Adam I have watched you since I was a kid, Mythbusters was always the first show on the TV for my brother and I. I can't tell you how awesome and helpful this video is for me right now!!!❤🎉😊
I got into lists after listening to your book. I have ADHD and have always had issues with remembering things, and since I've started doing lists, what you said at 9:45 really hits home. Early on I got annoyed with it because I found that after having spent all that time writing the list and then going back and ordering it, I never had to refer back to it and thought it was a waste of time and stopped for a while. Then I realised, writing (And it has to be hand written. I tried typing it out, and even printing it to have hard copy but it didn't work. It has to be hand written, in an A5 grid book I keep or a tiny pocket size flip book) the list is WHY I didn't have to go back to it. The writing cemented the step/object/component/instruction in my brain so that I didn't need the list anymore, and that made me hate my brain, just a little. Since I got diagnosed with ADHD I've seen it as a super power. I hear everything everyone says all the time (Why I love working from home, I don't get distracted by other people) I feel the doors open and close, I feel the wind direction change and even when the windows are closed, I know what direction the wind is blowing from because I can smell the lavender the neighbours have in their garden instead of the frangipani trees 2 houses the other side. But this little thing of needing to write something down and only then not having needed to write it down really annoys me because remembering to write it down requires me to write down that I need to write it down.
As the kid who was the top performer in class, enrichment class student and people were generally wow'd by, i feel the one question. Yes, there's an important aspect of growing up where we need positive reinforcement. Too much can be a bad thing. All through growing up and to this day, I've always felt awkward from praise. Sure, it's nice to be appreciated, but praise can be weird. Not just socially, but because where do you go from there? If you fail, you fall far in your mind. So there's pressure to stay on top. If you get conplacent, people putting in effort will - with the skill of diligent effort - quickly overcome you. Then, when you hit the real world, you find out the good worl is an expectation and not necessarily going to be praised or heck even acknowledged sometimes. It's also hard to know who to ask for help when everyone seems to act like you're better at whatever the thing is. It's an odd spot to be stuck in and i personally found it held me back at those crucial years from highschool through my 20s. Its a struggle and can leave you with no direction and a sense of imposter syndrome.
I like to tackle the hard part first but I also reserve a super easy portion or two that I can do when I need a break from the hard part. A little win can really help put the wind back in your sails and allow you to go back at the hard part with a little more enthusiasm.
I'm a working musician, and I also do the "hard stuff first" when I'm leaning songs for a show. If I have 10 songs to learn flawlessly in a week, I'll do the most difficult tricky ones first.
I just want to say you are pretty inspirational, for me. Personally, I've always been a bit saddled by being initially very good, practically, at anything technical, that interests me, that I turn my hand to. And I have to confess my reaction to some of your earlier videos has been little like "argh! He has all this amazing stuff and he doesn't know how to use it!" But - and it's a big "but" - I so see a "better me" in your approach. Your'e naturally really good at stuff, too, so you naturally initially kind of miss it when you're not. But where we differ is that you have the courage and self-awareness to make youtube videos documenting these painful realisations. Like your correspondent, (a) often I'm not as good as I thought I was and (b) being pretty good at things initially rather robs one, early on, of the extremely valuable learning experience that is f**king up and having to confront the need to learn and practise much more. I've always found the initial technical and practical stuff very easy, but reliability and mastery in a wider context come much harder, and artistic expression maybe hardest of all. Confronting the need to take a long, hard and often very painful look at ourselves, in the context of working effectively with others to realise a vision that might take us some time to appreciate, identifying areas where we need... some work... all that is *hard*. And I enormously admire the way you put this stuff out there, and I truly value the videos you make. I really hope my child, for example, will see something of himself in your material. TL;DR: huge appreciation for your output, from an admirer.
thanks, i never understood what writing lists is supposed to do or help with when i already feel like i'm drowning and now saying 'they become part of your embodied knowledge' makes a lot more sense.
One PD speaker I was exposed to as a teacher had a list of habits to aspire to in order to increase productivity. The only one that stuck with me was "eat the frog." Long story short, it means that if you do the hard bit first, the rest of a task is the reward. I don't manage to do it all the time, but yep, spoiler alert, it's genuinely some of the most simple and rewarding advice I ever heard and it'll change your life too. Eat the frog!
The unknown part of a project always freaks me out, but I find that the more “hard parts” I do first, the more I learn. This reduces the number of “hard parts” that come up further down the line. I tend to remember what I learned when I do the “hard parts” first. Also, when I save the easy parts for the end, there’s a greater sense of finality. I know I finished it and it turned out the way I want. It helps my OCD brain when I can go, “you did it, it’s done, you’re good!”
Everyone does that with their past work. I’m a digital creator so I know it’s not exactly the same, but the recognition that you can always be better is just so important
I'm both an engineer and casual artist (character drawings in my spare time). Being an artist is very rewarding and challenging because you're constantly wrestling to develop your creative abilities and learn who you are as a unique individual. It's a different journey to engineering where the goal is just to solve problems. After a few years I definitely look back at my early drawings and realise what I THOUGHT were good-looking characters are anatomically wrong and unsettlingly creepy. Over time you gain the ability to see more flaws but also learn many new techniques to avoid those flaws.
You become a seasoned expert BY making mistakes and putting the time in. And, if you are smart, by learning as MUCH as you can from others when and if that becomes something you can do. Every expert or professional was a noob at one point or another. And in my experience, the truly expert in their fields don't call themselves that. Learning so much of a skill so that you can see a glimmer of how much MORE there is to learn is a truly humbling experience.
I sequence steps in a project in the order that makes the most sense for the construction of a build regardless of the difficulty of the individual tasks, for example, plan (including list of deliverables), platform, frame, coverings, details.
I have been writing software for forty years. All different kinds, from startups to Fortune 100. Even now, when I go back and look at code I wrote six months previous, I see the flaws, and I celebrate. I am always trying to move forward. I want my code tomorrow to be better than my code yesterday. A lifetime of seeing new heights and striving for them is not easier, or comfortable, but it is interesting.
I have done a couple of projects for a TV series where I appear on camera with a well-known science presenter. The only way I could get into hyperfocus mode and ignore the screams of the 47 incomplete subtasks in the latest project was to work 36 hours straight in the run-up to the shoot. That built up sufficient stress to get my brain into fast mode, like how your perception of time slowing while you are falling off a motorcycle on a greasy curve at 60 mph. Non-core tasks fall away rapidly in that state.
i really cant help but think that your workshop rather looks like a limb of the ISS, (albeit bigger) especially with the round windows in the background and all the tools and stuff...............as always, i absolutely love your channel and all the content contained within
On finding that the film industry was perfect for your ADHD brain: my absolute favorite job so far has been in a baby biotech startup trying to bring a new drug to market. The limited resources combined with the necessity (and sometimes time-sensitivity) of the deliverables put me in such a state of clarity. In a failure state (which happens a lot in science!), I can go down a list of viable alternative options and quickly evaluate them. Now that I'm getting a PhD, the pace and stakes of things are just so much slower in a way that feels like torture to me. Hopefully one day I can find that flow state again, but until then it's a grind.
5:15 Apart from laziness and procrastination, the lack of ability to see reality (in whatever context), is the single biggest thing that holds people back from success. Applies to every professional and artistic skill. The challenge is to see the flaws and weaknesses and go forward anyway, trusting the process and that’ll you’ll get better over time, even if you keep seeing flaws (which you will).
There is definitely a hand-brain connection with lists when it comes to creativity and problem-solving. Sure, I like making check-off or to-do lists on my phone. But when it comes to brainstorming, conceptualizing, synthesizing knowledge, etc., doing it on paper or whiteboard sparks connections in my brain that just don't happen with screens. Being in the IT world, my way of doing things is often viewed as an anachronism and I'm often forced to adapt to accommodate others. But it's what works best for me, so I will still grab a notepad behind the scenes.
The "Eat the frog" (do the worst thing first) approach assumes you work in an environment where you kind of *have* to work... where there are immediate consequences for not working. For a lot of self employed people (WITH ADHD), that's not how it works. Getting stared on a project can be much harder if you think "start with the boring difficult bit". Starting with something small and achievable may be a better way to "get into the zone" where you are engaged and able to continue. But every ADHD person is different. It's difficult to imagine Adam being bored and unmotivated, and his endless enthusiasm and perfectly aligned career path and interests have helped him be highly successful. For a lot of people with ADHD, the need to carry out boring and repetitive tasks is an unavoidable need, but also a soul-crushingly difficult thing to achieve. Worse still, things that were passions lose their attractions and become chores. In those cases "pick the bit you like first" may be the way to go.
I have the opposite problem (as a person on the autism spectrum) - generally the difficult bit *is* the thing that interests me. If I start with that, then I often find I lose the motivation to actually finish the project - so even if the easy part would only take 10 minutes to do, the project will sit unfinished for months or years because I've done the part that interested me in the first place. This is especially true if the completing the challenging bit gets the project to the point of being functional but unpolished. As an example - I pulled ethernet through my house during the summer. It's all working but there's a single spot just has a wire coming out of the wall and isn't in a proper box and jack. It would take less than a half hour to finish it properly, but since it's all functioning properly I haven't had the motivation to actually take that half hour to fix it. With that said, I definitely agree that starting with the boring stuff makes actually getting started a lot more challenging, so it's a difficult balancing act.
Imposter syndrome is such a common thing, and nearly no one wants to talk about it. Being vulnerable, open to criticism, and looking for help is scary. I think we're trained that you have to be great at something from the start. I'd love to have someone who asks questions and learns rather than hides. Be open, be unafraid, be bold.
Honestly havent watched the vid yet. But from the titlw this has happened to me multiple times. Moving as kid from small to big town, kid to highschool, highschool to college and a few times in my career. Stay humble and open minded.
Something I have found with myself on artistic project is that I focus on the hard part, and that prevents me from getting started for days at a time. Meanwhile, if I pick off an easier part, it gets me moving and then I come up for air four hours later having done a bunch of hard parts. This obviously works better for projects that will takes blocks that are hours long over a few sessions, but even for very large projects it can still be worthwhile to keep some warm-up sub-projects on tap to get you moving.
Having to say that starting with the easiest thing to the hardest feels objectively better at some cases, where warming up is beneficial, or where doing an easy task would give you insights on doing the hard one. Most straightforward example is beating a videogame.
Another reason to choose hard versus easy part is if you are at all tired. Do the hard part when you are fresh, even if it means doing the easy part first and tackling the hard part tomorrow. Lacking any such factor though, do the hard part first, since if you make a mistake that forces you to start over, you have less time invested.
I spent 40+ years as co-owner of a costume shop, and my main job was pattern making and cutting. A hard lesson learned over the years was to take the time to cut ONE and make a sample to make sure it fits / works THEN cut the rest - what ever number that may be. I've had cases where there was not an issue with the size or pattern, but with what some manufactuering processes can do to fabric... like applying steam when pressing that shrinks the fabric. For ex: I once had that happen where I cut out dozens of Civil War uniforms from a wool that was never treated, and as soon as we started pressing seams open the fabric was shrinking.... like REALLY shrinking. We had to scrap what was cut and had to order some other fabric and recut. Of course we were then behind the 8-ball with time. BTW... over time we ended putting the shrinking jackets together and washing them. What were like a mens size 48 were now a large boys size. 🙂
I’ve recently revisited a writing project that has been sitting on my hard drive for over a decade. When I reread the piece I found certain parts VERY cringeworthy. I realized afterwards this was a snapshot of where I was at the time and a point on the path to where I am now. Reworking the piece will make it different than I originally envisioned but a much better final outcome for the characters involved.
The hardest part is accepting that the hard or monotonous parts still need to be done for the job to be complete, I often say "finish the job you are on" in my head.
Your answer about doing the easy/hard part first is absolutely surprising to me... especially when you cited production concerns. In my mind - because production schedules and needs do change... you want to out off the hard thing for as long as possible because the hard part may no longer be necessary after some change in need and you don't want to have been stuck with time wasted on an unnecessary bit
As a dev, when I've estimated work, uncertainty and risk elevates the priority of work. If an approach is not going to work, or it is gonna take longer, better to tell the client 5 days in, than 5 days before the deadline.
Adam says: "lists ... get something out of my brain and on paper which ... means that it's no longer going to get lost". Corollary: getting it out of your brain frees up space *in* your brain for the next thing. Instead of going, probably subconsciously, "I have to remember W, X, Y, and Z -- so many things! Gaaaah!", you can let those go for the moment, breathe a small sigh of relief, and start thinking about Q. The other thing I find is that the act of making the list forces me to think about things in more detail. I'm taking my bike on a trip; add it to the list. What other bike things do I need? Helmet, spare inner tube, tire levers ... you get the idea. Taking the time to add them to the list right then and there is what keeps me from getting overwhelmed (see previous paragraph).
That was such an ADHD answer to an ADHD question. I bet the person who asked it got some insight they liked. I wonder if they got what they needed in order to improve, which... making lists while doing a job can't be the only thing that would help them close their skill gaps. I suspect there's got to be some amount of awareness plus practice. In other words, being acutely aware and honest about what really ought to be better (and you'll probably find that you have to adjust or refine that understanding), and then purposefully planning projects that require those skills to be strained and exercised. In my opinion, setting up the conditions for learning is a better technique than trying to disrupt your flow in the middle of working. Of course, if you hit break points where the flow is naturally broken, using that opportunity to take a step back, evaluate, and possibly dive into something that is worth improving, could be a good habit (depending on whether ADHD makes it a disaster of tangents on tangents).
Do you start with the hard part or the easy part when you're working on a project? If you're ADHD, what are some tips you can share about working in a professional environment?
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I always start my day with the most difficult tasks and then finish the day with the easiest. My brain isn’t wired to work on difficult tasks as the day goes on so when my brain is at its best is when I want to tackle the hard stuff.
I work in a very different field, translation, and I do the "saving easy parts for bad moments". Sometimes I do not have time left today to tackle one of the major sections, so I will do one of the small, easy ones so that I get the feeling of progression. Specially because minor ADD makes it hard for me to sustain effort when the end is not in sight, and those minor victories help.
I spent a few years teaching FMEAs as a tool to help figure out what will be the hard stuff, and what's the easy stuff (and approximately how important), it really made it easier to prioritize for me and my team. Especially when working on projects that are fundamentally new to you.
Almost everything you said is applicable to software engineering. Although, we definitely have to prove out the highest-risk implementation details first. Often times the rest of the project is built assuming that part works.
It probably depends on the person(s) and the task at hand.
That said, for me, there's definitely something to be said for "low hanging fruit". Getting the easy stuff done and out of the way, gaining momentum, and making things less overwhelming by the time you get to the harder stuff.
A very similar approach to "hard part first" that I'm accustomed to from software engineering projects is "riskiest part first" or "least understood part first", because those are the ones that can (figuratively) blow up on you and potentially require a completely different approach, or more time, etc.
Exactly. My exception would be when I have brain fry from the hard stuff--I'll switch tasks and do something insanely easy, like cleaning up my e-mail or reading through some documentation. Or if I know my concentration is affected--say a Friday afternoon, Monday morning, terribly hungry, etc., I've found it better to stop working on something than to try and force my way through poorly. It's way better not to write a piece of buggy code late on a Friday than to spend all of Monday (or all weekend!) debugging what you messed up on Friday. I used to work with a team at a major company that released code on Fridays, ensuring that at least a handful of people would always be working to the bone over the weekend. Fridays are not for firewalls.
I agree with the 'riskiest part first' because if it is important and it is unknown, the entire product could be a dumpster fire. That said, its also the part that can drag on and on as you go through things that don't work to try to get what will. That looks like not going anywhere to many managers. They like to see line items moving across the chart or a good velocity. For some of them, A (super hard) and B (pretty simple but a bit of work) both are the same - each has a line on the chart/or the velocity. There's also another codicil which is: If the really risky problematic thing is NOT the most important thing, knocking out the other high priority work and being able to show good work... then the bosses feel a little better about the middle part of the project where you get to the riskiest bit. Sometimes this was a 'dream feature' and it eventually is looked at and the conclusion is the cost doesn't justify the effort and it just goes away from your list of things.
There are a lot of experts in motivation and neurology of the brain such that they will tell you, at the beginning of a day, if you have the option, take one small piece of work that you are highly convinced can be done (or a work unit of it done), that's what you should do first. Why? Because it does gives you some sense of momentum and you can take that into the hard stuff - you've ALREADY done something... the next thing should also be doable! (It's really a way to direct your brain to run with the early morning success and let that encourage you for the rest of the day). But those should be small items but something you can say 'Hey, one thing done! We're moving!'.
@@jorymil Ugh, yes. That and the 'Let's release on Dec 23rd!'. Really? If I ever run a software company, there will be NO heavy delivery unless it is 1st of December and there's enough time to get it into production. The point of rest and of getting away from the work is that it primes your brain and helps balance your life so you do better work the rest of the time.
"It's way better not to write a piece of buggy code late on a Friday than to spend all of Monday (or all weekend!) debugging what you messed up on Friday."
It is a general concept in business where you have high risk activities, to take these as early as possible and spend less efforts on the rest if these do not pan out.
Doing this also helps to iron out dependency issues early on in the process as from my experience it's the little dependencies in the complicated sections that seem to cause lots of the release based issues
The question about focus reminds me of a comment by Ira Glass;
"All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it's just not that good. It's trying to be good, it has potential, but it's not."
Knowing you need to improve is half the battle to improving.
I have ADHD also and I am a mechanic. On a machine I always start with the part that I don't want to do and save the stuff I want to do for last.
Then I will just never do it!
Yeah that's a discipline à lot of people with ADHD really struggle with. If it works, wonderful, but other people will need to find other approaches.
Ya same here, I'm not a mechanic but run a machine shop. I really dislike large production run of the same thing over and over. That's not were I thrive. But gotta do it from time to time. Mainly a small job shop.
Same here.. just dive in and do the shit work first, get it over with rather than working your way up to it dreading it the whole time. Once I get myself into a job and actually focus on the problem it's usually not as bad as we tell ourselves it's gonna be.
It makes sense to tackle the challengings things first because if you can't do that then nothing else really matters. Everything else you did was wasted too. You only win if you clear all of the hurdles and cross the finish line. Second place is just the first loser.
I have ADHD and Autism and it makes soo much sense now why Mythbusters was so meaningful to me as a kid and scratched an itch like nothing else. Happy holidays Adam, thank you for everything you share on this channel
Same😊
Im terribly adhd. At one point was on two prescriptions for it from my doctor because i had reached the legal limit for the first (that was rough). I eventually switched to lifestyle changes and started learning how to set up the environment around me to accomodate my needs to mimic the functionallity other people have. Alarms to track the passing of time, sticky notes everywhere. The advantages ive found is because im constantly triple checking my work due to being unsure if ive actually remembered everything, the quality of my work is often great and my ability to learn a new task quickly due to quickly catching and correcting mistakes has made me a valuable part of the team im a part of.
My adhd tip is, organize tasks in a manner that reduces the amount of times youll have to shift focus between each objective for the task. This reduces the window of opportunity for distractions from your task that can affect the outcome of your work. You have to do things in a nonstandard way, but ive often found if your end result is great, some nonstandard variance in an operation is acceptable.
Sorry if there are too many typos in my comment, on a new phone and adjusting to the keyboard differences. Have had to make maaaaaaany corrections while typing this lol.
This is liquid gold advice, thanks dor sharing (source: these tidbits match my experience surviving college)
The triple checking and double guessing yourself is an immense mental drain however. People often have no idea how much effort will have been put in for a final piece of work
One other reason to do the hard part first - Hard usually also means higher risk of screw-ups.
Do the hard part first so you have less time wasted if you set yourself back and need to start over. It just means you have less riding on doing the hard part right the very first time.
I remember taking a calligraphy class in highschool as an art elective. The teacher would tell us to do the lettering first on our projects, then any decorations around it afterwards. Someone looking at a framed piece is more likely to notice if you tried correcting a spelling or spacing error in the lettering than a small mistake in the decorations. My final project was the prayer from Boondock Saints, with Celtic knotwork around it. There are a few mistakes in the knotwork, but I'm probably the only one who ever noticed them.
Getting started is also the hardest part, so usually what I do is get started on something by doing the hardest part first. Let's say something in a game, building a house that will surely take hours you always start with the walls and the roof before you add the doors and windows. The smaller stuff will come naturally.
I write software and build servers for a living. I constantly catch myself judging my past work. Mindfulness helps. When you notice your mind harshly critiquing your work, step back, take a breath, and appreciate the lessons you learned. Over time, your mind will naturally appreciate instead of judge. This leads to a happier, more productive life by removing the stress and emotional fog generated by internal harsh critiques, freeing the mind for creativity.
I found this helpful. Thanks!
Well said, can't be too hard on yourself. Beating yourself up about things is not healthy, you have to absorb and then move on. 👏
Thank you for this!
Realizing that your stuff pales in comparison to that of others, and seeing the shortcomings of your work, means that your eyes' skills have leveled up, like skills in video games.
With this new skill level, you can work on leveling up your hands to iron out the shortcomings your eyes see in your work.
That's how it was laid out in a video I watched ages ago, about how to handle this phenomenon, in relation to drawing. It's a skill that's improved gradually, so the aforementioned sudden realization can sting - as Adam mentioned.
"I asked the Mythbuster and he said no, so I asked the other guy" - Bobby Fingers. The writing of that was hysterical. Thank you Adam for being you man.
I really enjoy these just slightly longer 15min videos - they seem so much more longer than the previous 8min videos that used to only cover about two questions. It's just so captivating to hear Adam talk about these topics... and it's such a treat whenever Adam gets to answer a question about Mythbusters.
Adam is such a fountain of knowledge. I've learned so much from him, not only about science and engineering, but about life. I know we shouldn't idolize people, but I truly am very grateful for Adam and I firmly believe that he's making a big difference in a lot of people's lives. A small ripple can cause the biggest waves.
A few years ago, I hit a major roadblock in my development as a musician so I made the decision to start taking guitar lessons from my original teacher from high school and after a rather long search, I found a vocal instructor to help me learn to sing properly. Setting my ego aside was hard but I have really started to see the benefits of that in the past few months.
I too am trying to drop the ego and grow, props to you for finding the gumption to put a plan into action. All the best with your musical endeavors.
So true! "A change of work is the best rest." -- Sherlock Holmes. When I got burned out on my instrument, I took up drums. Then 7-string guitar. I have a way deeper appreciation of music after playing rhythm section instruments.
I've only been playing for 2 years or so, but I'm trying to do the same. It's hard to get over the mindset of just giving up because I'm not "good enough."
Tackling the hard part: Known as "eating the frog". Very helpful for professionals and as Adam points out, if you have a choice, the harder part needs priority. Good reminder/knowledge for everyone!
And eat the bigger frog first.
The amount of information in Adam’s brain is incalculable. The fact that he shares it with us makers (and others) in a palatable way is vastly more important because then we can share it with others. THANK YOU, Adam! 😊😊
Glazing
When you said you had to re-do work and the second one was better...oh my god yes! I've flunked so many things and been extremely salty/angry/sad that I have to do it again but my experience has ALWAYS been that the second version is an improvement in every way. It's still hard to deal with the initial reality of having to do work again but if you can handle it it always work out for the better.
I believe Adam once said you'll make 3 of something before you're really happy. I just get the first one out of the way ( using cheaper materials )
@ good advice for sure! Not always applicable sadly. I made a video about building bike wheels, I made drawings, filmed for hours, spent two days editing and only towards the end did I think to colour code the spokes. It would’ve been easy to just carry on but I knew it would bug me forevermore.
I scrapped nearly a weeks worth of work and spent another week re-doing the whole thing (which was more work than the original due to the extra colour coding) but I’m glad I did as the second one was way better than the original!
Same thing for when I’ve made a video out riding and had my audio fail…absolutely raging about it but went out and filmed again and the second video turned out much better.
Also had it happen with voiceovers, spending over an hour recording only to find the connection was loose and the audio was terrible. Then the second attempt failed too, even more raging! But by this point I’d had more practice with the actual voiceover and the third one that worked sounded much more natural
I noticed that, then even when he was talking about making a LIST, the 2nd one is always better/more refined 😂😂. There's just no way around it. It takes time and experience. And there's no shortcuts for that.
I love these videos so much, they are honestly priceless. Thank you Adam
With ADHD, it's more difficult to break down tasks into parts and also to prioritize by importance, so ANY job that gives you a structure that helps to focus that, while being specifically dynamic will help a lot. (Reliable schedule with specific hours helps).
Ex: I changed jobs every year until I started to work in software development. With that, I could know a structure for what I was doing and how to prioritize a big picture process, but the specifics of what was being developed and tested were constantly changing, where that imporance was and what specifics needed to be done were always new and keeping my interest while providing the importance & structure. That is EXACTLY what ADHD brains want to help optimize function since they're interest driven and need additional structure and importance emphasis.
Nicely put.
Having had ADHD all my life (currently in my mid-50s), I long ago realized that I thrived in certain categories of employment and certain company sizes, and have largely managed to remain within those lanes. For me, being a (primarily electronics) repair technician has been the best fit for a slew of reasons: the constant challenge of diagnosing failure origins; high degree of mobility/traveling; constantly varying customer locations; a clear emphasis on priorities; an environment where performance matters far more than conformity to arbitrary and usually nonsensical procedures; and more.
The title is enough to reflect on. Especially as I start to make my way into hospice.
This is deep and stuff I needed to hear. Fantastic questions that apply to so much of life and equally fantastic answers.
So many amazing comments.
Working in a school, I see the need for education to adapt more to kids with ADHD. The system favours the kid that sits down, asks no questions, and makes no noise. I have ADHD and so does my son and talking to some teachers. I have to remind them how painful, physically painful it is to sit still.
I've also got ADHD. I still take Ritalin, and have done so since I was in my early teens (currently in my mid 50s), but not on a constant basis. I have had to instill a significant amount of self-discipline and working habits to overcome my natural tendencies and be a productive person for those periods where Ritalin was not an option (such as during military service, because military doctors were then all still in a 1950s mindset). Education systems often combine the worst of bureaucracies and academia, neither of which really tolerate the mannerisms of most ADHD-affected people, and I don't think that the typical existing systems can genuinely modify themselves to the necessary degree. It has always seemed to me that education systems need multiple avenues of approach, tailored to categorical variations in learning schema such as those afflicted with ADHD & its cousins, etc.
@ absolutely! Well said! That’s exactly right!! Have you had any side effects from long term Ritalin?
@@TheBennedy85 Nothing that stands out, really. Probably the only prescription med I've ever received that doesn't have noticeable side effect, unlike my damn gout medicine and others. The generic chemical name is methylphenidate, FYI. I have developed a fairly sensitive awareness of when the med starts to kick in after consumption, in that my self-awareness is far more present.
@@dionh70wow! Yeah that’s good then a mate of mine has rapid heart rate now because of Ritalin. Good luck with everything in life! I wish you well!
Education system is only for making obiedient factory working slaves, if you believe otherwise you need to grow up, it wont ever change...
That line about "straightforward is a kind of easy" really resonates with me, because I do a lot of not-easy things that, since I've done them so MANY times, I know all the steps now, and it IS straightforward, and I have a script for the difficult phone calls that require waiting 2+ hours on hold... Once I've done something enough to know the bits that won't change, I can streamline them.
And even as someone without ADHD, I love making lists! I like the phrase, "addendum to the embodied knowledge," because I'm always very happy to get thoughts out of my head and onto paper, where they won't keep shifting and get lost, lol. And I love to cheat on to-do lists, and add things I did just to cross them out XD
Thank you so much for sharing your vulnerability about times that things don't go right. I'm a hobby sewist and it makes me cry when I cut the wrong size (I know, measure twice, cut once... impatience is always my downfall) or, worse, when I cut correctly and the project still comes out like garbage. I get so emotional! When you make something with your own hands and it falls flat or you have to redo things, it can feel like death by a thousand cuts. But it helps to see someone who is such an expert maker feels the same and makes those mistakes, too ❤
“Do it right, or do it twice”. My kids hear this from me frequently.
"Everyone finds the career that dovetails with their pathologies". Thanks Adam for bringing a smile to my face.
Super interesting starting line for me since, in general, people with ADHD gain momentum by doing the easy thing first.
Of course everyone is different, even in any given spectrum like ADHD, and I’m not surprised you do the hard thing first.
Quite….savage….of you…
The time explanation makes a lot of sense I struggle with time blindness, especially when it’s for group of tasks
ADD (no H) here, and for me the difference is whether I can see the end or not. In college exams, for example, I would do the easy bits first to build up momentum and confidence; but when I have a long task at my job where I cannot estimate how long it will take, I need those small victories to sustain my level of effort.
I needed to hear this video today. There is an interview coming up for me next week, and I have many questions which require answering. Being a person who thinks too much, I know of many angles which could be taken. Something you said was and is a good reminder. More specifically, "what is mission critical". When I think about the questions again, I will be verifying them against the former saying.
The title reminds me of that thing with the four quadrants: Not knowing that you can't do it. Knowing you can't do it. Not knowing how you do it. Knowing how you can do it.
The fact that you know you can't do it, you're already growing out of the not knowing you can't. So that's in the right direction.
I am a set dresser/specialty builder in the set dec department.
My set decorator that I work for would always ask us to build pieces at a high quality in 360 degrees because he knew that our exceptional work would take a background item to becoming a featured piece the moment the director got on set.
It made prioritizing where to focus detail very difficult but immensely satisfying seeing that piece get appreciated.
3:20 “Screwed I up have to do it again” You’re not alone I feel the same way, gets me every time. ❤ To counter this I next say to myself “it’s going to be 2x as good” and most of the time it does turn out better. 👍
First I have always loved watching you go through the process of a build-either here or on Mythbusters.The creative problem solving process is enthralling for me. I used to build ropes courses-challenge courses and do some basic building around the house now. And I am a summer camp director and I have been using ideas and inspiration from listening to your stories here to build and refine my summer camp programs-staff training - and environmental curriculum. And it brings me back to the thrill of building courses again. And thank you for your amazing storytelling.
Its so lovely Adam truly takes the time to answer with personal opinion and from the heart, he doesn’t have to do it but does, that shows a lot of character 😊
I was an IT person (sysadmin,deployment,production,development). I made lists daily, had by project lists and an everything (to fix/improve) list. One of my bosses watched to see my to do list, after seeing it, he never ever asked if I had enough to keep busy and needed something to do
This is what ticketing systems are for! Nobody should have a personal to-do list that's more than a month or so out. And nobody should be working without a ticketing system. The first thing I ask on interviews is "how do you organize work?" If I don't get a good answer, it's a short interview.
@@jorymil there was a ticket system for the help desk, not the 5 unix systems staff. I had some small documention, clean up, setup automation on my list (not functional problems). Each of the 5 had multiple systems with customer groups and new systems/application projects. They needed to have dedicated unix system admins on production. We finally got HP Openview later, but still no front line support. :) I left that job over what those issues did to my personal life. ( was single parenting )
I am loving these talks. I grew up watching your shows. So cool to get this advice from you
I don´t work with props, but in another creative crafting area. Still, Adams advice or recommendations rings so many bells for me. I usually also start with the hard part, but sometimes it is just not possible. I simply have to start and face the challenges as they come. Luckily I rarely have a deadline, so I can work in that way. I totally agree with the lists, I do it all the time. I want everything out of my head and on paper. Then I don´t have to remember it, I can just check the list (IF I remember where I put the effing list after my last try out). Adam gives very valuable advice for any creative crafter here. Thank you!
Oh man, ADHD here and this very much spoke to me. Knowing what the one inviolable priority is can be the difference between a blizzard of conflicting worries and, if not exactly inner calm, a sort of determined grit. I might just start saying “get the bird to shoot and everything else is manageable” as an aphorism.
Getting acquainted with the biggest possible picture for anything is critical for establishing priority on how to do anything, for me. It allows you to make clear decisions on design and make solid suggestions to solve emerging problems.
Other than that, my ADHD pushes me to go for, as many other comments mention, the hardest, most obscure and interesting part first.
As a hobbyist I have no real time or economic pressures to contend with but I tend to do the hardest things at or near the beginning of a project. That way, if I find that I’ve bitten off more than I can chew I can reassess my overall ability to do the project at all and if everything works out reasonably well it gives me more confidence and less trepidation that I’ll be capable of finishing the project and I get more enjoyment out of the rest of the process. As for realizing that there’s much room for improvement in your work that’s just a sign of wisdom and growth.
The hard part is the part I'm most likely to stuff up. If I'm gonna stuff up, I might as well not also take good work down with it. Having already finished work that's good on the piece already just raises the stakes for me.
Never really found my "makers" space or place but I've recently gotten into skydiving and in a few weeks I became the lead packer and apprentice rigger for parachute equipment due to having a passion once entering the sport. Some things really do just come with time. When I started canopies looked like bedsheets with spaghetti mixed in. Now when packing and working on equipment I almost immediately get a feeling when the equipment doesn't look right.
They made you the lead because no one else wanted to take the blame when someone died. Shit happens. Tick tock, tick tock
That's not how that works unless someone dies from his incompitance. The company or faulty equipment will be held liable.@@socomcygnusx1778
Hard part first made instant sense to me, perhaps due to engineering studies but in life in general based on my experiences, playing an instrument and coding and otherwise. Exactly because of that, the hard part takes the most time and provides the most unexpected setbacks and reworks. Except when you inevitably misjudge and what you thought was the easy part was actually impossible. But you live and learn and make the best effort anyway and try to judge better as you gain experience. It also sets up the satisfying arc where first you face all the challenges and emotional pain from failing and struggling to learn and solve, and then you finally get to the cruising part where you cansee the finish line and get success after success. But what Adam said about leaving a nice job for later is also so useful, to alleviate the stress, to balance out burning out from being stuck and getting a sliver of positivity and hope from small success in between struggling. To keep your focus on the goal.
I love you Adam. Thank you for being a beacon of transparency and valuable wisdom in the realm of making. You are in my personal “Hall of Fame” including Hank Green, John Green, Neil Degrasse Tyson, Michael Corrie, Plato, and Gene Wilder.
I got into electronics a couple of years back. My first circuit was a treble boost (so, like 10 parts).
I struggled a bit with reading schematics and understanding the concepts behind the circuits.
2 years later i look back and, at no point in those 2 years did i feel at all competent. I always felt i was playing catchup.
But now my house is filled with circuits i designed and i can quite quickly come up with ways to build a circuit to do what i want.
I started working on hifi amps as they are more challenging. I can read a schematic. Mend it Mark makes me looks like a novice but he's an outlier! 😊
Until today.
When i saw a chap build a pendant that models water splashing around on a little LED matrix using an accelerometer, a handful of microchips, an accelerometer and an implementation of some code from an old plasma simulator script....
It was soooooo far beyond not even my current ability, but even my awareness of what CAN be done.
Its inspiring, but also a bit exhausting at the same time.
I'm 45. I'm not sure i can spare 5 years of free time to get up to speed with programming, milling, microcontrollers and charlieplexes 😂
I can relate. I made a lot of trains for a train simulator, and one day, it hit me: "These models are awful! It doesn't even look like it's made of metal! The textures don't line up correctly! If only I knew about smooth shading back then! Man, I gotta remake _all_ of these!"
A craftsman attains a high level of skill and is satisfied with their product. An artist can ALWAYS see that their work could be a little better. You can’t even start to become better, until you can SEE that someone else did it better, or that your own work is lacking something you can’t quite put your finger on, but you know is falling short. This is why I tell apprentices do not try to make any project perfect, because you are never good enough to make anything perfect. That you only improve in retrospect, for every project you finish, deliver, and move on from.
You know you are growing as an artist when you look at your own prior work and all you can see is what you would have done differently if you were to do it today.
And like Adam, some of my best moments are when I am looking at someone else’s work and asking myself “ HOW did they DO that?”
Great videos as always! I work in ice cream manufacturing and we never batch up tasks in order to avoid expensive mistakes. When making your jumper cables, we would make one then fit it, make the second, and fit it, etc as opposed to batching up all the cables, then fitting them. When we box up ice creams for example we don't make up the boxes first and then fill them, we make up one box then fill it, seal it, label it. It avoids for example using the wrong box and realising only after you have them all made up. It's one of the Toyota lean manufacturing production principles.
I think the advice about lists is profound, I'm so used to flying by the seat of my pants that it never occurred to me that I always have the high priority things worked out but not the fine details. I think I'll start doing that myself.
There's an art to punch lists.They're how you get the big jobs done. You eat an elephant one bite at a time.
As a leader and motivator of people. I always put myself into the hardest, most difficult portions of the job. Lead by example was the basic philosophy. Saying that I tried to get the the tough stuff done first. Making the remaining work a roll downhill.
I love these Q&As. I’ve written comments a few times about how the maker experience often mirrors that of musicians. “Not as good as you thought,” is common among musicians. It’s not hard to get humbled by far better players. But if they’re driven and persistent, they’ll continue to grow and will reach levels they didn’t know they were capable of before. :-)
GOLDEN life advice. I don't know if when young I would have the eyes to see, but this rings so true. Thank You
I work as an emergency service plumber so figuring out the ideal order of operations when approaching a list of problems is top of mind each and every day. From the perspective of my life's work, your approach lines up perfectly with my own. Great advice. All I do is solve new and different problems day after day and being able to properly triage the issues allows me to be hyper efficient and effective in my work leading to an outsized income and ability to go home early almost every day while getting the job done properly.
Your brain is amazing! You have so much knowledge about things and processes. I'm in awe.
The "hard part" is the bit that has the most risk and is most likely to go wrong, thus you tackle that first because you then have more time to solve problems and get it right.
Make priorities through planning then do the highest priority first. Use the easy stuff as a mental break from the hard stuff to keep momentum going when you need to step away from the hard stuff.
-heavy equipment field service mechanic.
I generally choose the easy part to do first. Having a little extra time to consider how to complete the hard task can help. Having some context of doing the easy task first gives some hints into how to work on the hard task. The easy portion can sometimes refine the overall goal which contributes to how to achieve the harder task. Every situation is different so I don't always approach the problem in this manner. I also see the value in the reasons for starting the harder portion first.
Having had big focus on innovation and professional trouble shooting I really appriciate Adams thoughts here. Not always, but sometimes (when conditions allows it) I do the hardest part first. The core.
It is a bit situational for sure, but when having flow and it happens it is really really productive. Sometimes I may become sour politics in the background as the quick sucess and breaktrough may create tension and envy. Having a sponsor, handler or manager that takes some flak of politics helps but even people in very high places are not for ever and they also tend to have an agenda of their own after all..
As innovator and trouble shooter (and nerd?) I tended to be very unintrested in interal politics. Fun to help people and do some magic at times, but do not think reactions are all positive.
I don't know if its an entirely fair question to ask regarding starting with the hard part or the easy part. I find that oftentimes I start with the part that gives me a sense of progress or achievement first, so that the project 'calms' the demons of distraction and inspires me to continue working on it. If its a hard, time consuming slog but gives me that first visions of where I need to get to, I want to get that done first.
The discussion on the lists resonated with me; I feel that sometimes merely writing that list cements the information in my head and it becomes something I don't need to refer to. And 95% of the time my long first lists become a second (refined) or third (breakdown) list, which go a long way to keep me on the trail.
Same
I love guys like you, I ever loved it since your role in Mythbusters. An intelligent guy, AD(H)D, I totally recall that. Thank you Adam🙏🏼
Adam, just a great encapsulation of how much a forcing-function can really provide *focus* and (at least for me) fulfillment. _The show must go on_ kind of mindset.
There is always someone way better than you.
There is always room to improove.
Seing that your old work sucks is great, it means you have made Progress.
Adam, please drift off topic as often as you like, I could listen to you all day mate.
I always read nearly all the comments and I'm starting to suspect that many of us here are wired very similarly (neurologically).
I always feel like I fit in here, regarding both how I'm made and being a fellow maker.
I hope others feel that way too 🙂
And you nailed it, Adam.
I hear ya Adam. I did alot of production machining and I've always said that I dont mind making a mistake. That just happens, and it is how we learn. What I DONT like is making a dozen mistakes in a row!
I paint D&D miniatures as a hobby, and have been doing so since high school. You always start with either the deepest recesses that are hardest to reach, or, say a humanoid wearing armor, start with the bare skin first, and paint your way outward. Invariably you will touch (overpaint onto) parts you didn't mean to. It's way easier to correct by doing the deeper parts first, getting those areas right, and then doing the next outward layer whether that's been accidentally touched or not.
Going the other way, doing the easier outer layer first, you're invariably going to accidentally touch the brush to something you're already done with when you're trying to reach that deeper part.
Adam I have watched you since I was a kid, Mythbusters was always the first show on the TV for my brother and I. I can't tell you how awesome and helpful this video is for me right now!!!❤🎉😊
This video and the video about not knowing what to do with your life have inspired me to teach myself game design. Thank you Adam.
I got into lists after listening to your book. I have ADHD and have always had issues with remembering things, and since I've started doing lists, what you said at 9:45 really hits home. Early on I got annoyed with it because I found that after having spent all that time writing the list and then going back and ordering it, I never had to refer back to it and thought it was a waste of time and stopped for a while. Then I realised, writing (And it has to be hand written. I tried typing it out, and even printing it to have hard copy but it didn't work. It has to be hand written, in an A5 grid book I keep or a tiny pocket size flip book) the list is WHY I didn't have to go back to it. The writing cemented the step/object/component/instruction in my brain so that I didn't need the list anymore, and that made me hate my brain, just a little.
Since I got diagnosed with ADHD I've seen it as a super power. I hear everything everyone says all the time (Why I love working from home, I don't get distracted by other people) I feel the doors open and close, I feel the wind direction change and even when the windows are closed, I know what direction the wind is blowing from because I can smell the lavender the neighbours have in their garden instead of the frangipani trees 2 houses the other side.
But this little thing of needing to write something down and only then not having needed to write it down really annoys me because remembering to write it down requires me to write down that I need to write it down.
As the kid who was the top performer in class, enrichment class student and people were generally wow'd by, i feel the one question. Yes, there's an important aspect of growing up where we need positive reinforcement. Too much can be a bad thing. All through growing up and to this day, I've always felt awkward from praise. Sure, it's nice to be appreciated, but praise can be weird. Not just socially, but because where do you go from there? If you fail, you fall far in your mind. So there's pressure to stay on top. If you get conplacent, people putting in effort will - with the skill of diligent effort - quickly overcome you. Then, when you hit the real world, you find out the good worl is an expectation and not necessarily going to be praised or heck even acknowledged sometimes. It's also hard to know who to ask for help when everyone seems to act like you're better at whatever the thing is. It's an odd spot to be stuck in and i personally found it held me back at those crucial years from highschool through my 20s. Its a struggle and can leave you with no direction and a sense of imposter syndrome.
I like to tackle the hard part first but I also reserve a super easy portion or two that I can do when I need a break from the hard part. A little win can really help put the wind back in your sails and allow you to go back at the hard part with a little more enthusiasm.
I'm a working musician, and I also do the "hard stuff first" when I'm leaning songs for a show. If I have 10 songs to learn flawlessly in a week, I'll do the most difficult tricky ones first.
I just want to say you are pretty inspirational, for me.
Personally, I've always been a bit saddled by being initially very good, practically, at anything technical, that interests me, that I turn my hand to. And I have to confess my reaction to some of your earlier videos has been little like "argh! He has all this amazing stuff and he doesn't know how to use it!" But - and it's a big "but" - I so see a "better me" in your approach. Your'e naturally really good at stuff, too, so you naturally initially kind of miss it when you're not. But where we differ is that you have the courage and self-awareness to make youtube videos documenting these painful realisations.
Like your correspondent, (a) often I'm not as good as I thought I was and (b) being pretty good at things initially rather robs one, early on, of the extremely valuable learning experience that is f**king up and having to confront the need to learn and practise much more. I've always found the initial technical and practical stuff very easy, but reliability and mastery in a wider context come much harder, and artistic expression maybe hardest of all. Confronting the need to take a long, hard and often very painful look at ourselves, in the context of working effectively with others to realise a vision that might take us some time to appreciate, identifying areas where we need... some work... all that is *hard*.
And I enormously admire the way you put this stuff out there, and I truly value the videos you make. I really hope my child, for example, will see something of himself in your material.
TL;DR: huge appreciation for your output, from an admirer.
Thank you for the kind words - we will pass along to Adam!
thanks, i never understood what writing lists is supposed to do or help with when i already feel like i'm drowning and now saying 'they become part of your embodied knowledge' makes a lot more sense.
One PD speaker I was exposed to as a teacher had a list of habits to aspire to in order to increase productivity. The only one that stuck with me was "eat the frog." Long story short, it means that if you do the hard bit first, the rest of a task is the reward. I don't manage to do it all the time, but yep, spoiler alert, it's genuinely some of the most simple and rewarding advice I ever heard and it'll change your life too. Eat the frog!
The unknown part of a project always freaks me out, but I find that the more “hard parts” I do first, the more I learn. This reduces the number of “hard parts” that come up further down the line. I tend to remember what I learned when I do the “hard parts” first.
Also, when I save the easy parts for the end, there’s a greater sense of finality. I know I finished it and it turned out the way I want. It helps my OCD brain when I can go, “you did it, it’s done, you’re good!”
Everyone does that with their past work. I’m a digital creator so I know it’s not exactly the same, but the recognition that you can always be better is just so important
I'm both an engineer and casual artist (character drawings in my spare time). Being an artist is very rewarding and challenging because you're constantly wrestling to develop your creative abilities and learn who you are as a unique individual. It's a different journey to engineering where the goal is just to solve problems. After a few years I definitely look back at my early drawings and realise what I THOUGHT were good-looking characters are anatomically wrong and unsettlingly creepy. Over time you gain the ability to see more flaws but also learn many new techniques to avoid those flaws.
You become a seasoned expert BY making mistakes and putting the time in. And, if you are smart, by learning as MUCH as you can from others when and if that becomes something you can do. Every expert or professional was a noob at one point or another. And in my experience, the truly expert in their fields don't call themselves that. Learning so much of a skill so that you can see a glimmer of how much MORE there is to learn is a truly humbling experience.
I sequence steps in a project in the order that makes the most sense for the construction of a build regardless of the difficulty of the individual tasks, for example, plan (including list of deliverables), platform, frame, coverings, details.
I have been writing software for forty years. All different kinds, from startups to Fortune 100. Even now, when I go back and look at code I wrote six months previous, I see the flaws, and I celebrate. I am always trying to move forward. I want my code tomorrow to be better than my code yesterday. A lifetime of seeing new heights and striving for them is not easier, or comfortable, but it is interesting.
I have done a couple of projects for a TV series where I appear on camera with a well-known science presenter. The only way I could get into hyperfocus mode and ignore the screams of the 47 incomplete subtasks in the latest project was to work 36 hours straight in the run-up to the shoot. That built up sufficient stress to get my brain into fast mode, like how your perception of time slowing while you are falling off a motorcycle on a greasy curve at 60 mph. Non-core tasks fall away rapidly in that state.
For myself, it was photography that required enough step-by-step thinking to allow me to concentrate on the creative side.
i really cant help but think that your workshop rather looks like a limb of the ISS, (albeit bigger) especially with the round windows in the background and all the tools and stuff...............as always, i absolutely love your channel and all the content contained within
On finding that the film industry was perfect for your ADHD brain: my absolute favorite job so far has been in a baby biotech startup trying to bring a new drug to market. The limited resources combined with the necessity (and sometimes time-sensitivity) of the deliverables put me in such a state of clarity. In a failure state (which happens a lot in science!), I can go down a list of viable alternative options and quickly evaluate them. Now that I'm getting a PhD, the pace and stakes of things are just so much slower in a way that feels like torture to me. Hopefully one day I can find that flow state again, but until then it's a grind.
5:15 Apart from laziness and procrastination, the lack of ability to see reality (in whatever context), is the single biggest thing that holds people back from success. Applies to every professional and artistic skill.
The challenge is to see the flaws and weaknesses and go forward anyway, trusting the process and that’ll you’ll get better over time, even if you keep seeing flaws (which you will).
There is definitely a hand-brain connection with lists when it comes to creativity and problem-solving. Sure, I like making check-off or to-do lists on my phone. But when it comes to brainstorming, conceptualizing, synthesizing knowledge, etc., doing it on paper or whiteboard sparks connections in my brain that just don't happen with screens. Being in the IT world, my way of doing things is often viewed as an anachronism and I'm often forced to adapt to accommodate others. But it's what works best for me, so I will still grab a notepad behind the scenes.
The "Eat the frog" (do the worst thing first) approach assumes you work in an environment where you kind of *have* to work... where there are immediate consequences for not working. For a lot of self employed people (WITH ADHD), that's not how it works. Getting stared on a project can be much harder if you think "start with the boring difficult bit". Starting with something small and achievable may be a better way to "get into the zone" where you are engaged and able to continue.
But every ADHD person is different. It's difficult to imagine Adam being bored and unmotivated, and his endless enthusiasm and perfectly aligned career path and interests have helped him be highly successful. For a lot of people with ADHD, the need to carry out boring and repetitive tasks is an unavoidable need, but also a soul-crushingly difficult thing to achieve. Worse still, things that were passions lose their attractions and become chores. In those cases "pick the bit you like first" may be the way to go.
Frogs are delicious. At least their legs are. A little greasy I suppose.
@@1pcfred I've never heard the expression before, but I think the idea is that you're eating a frog that's still alive and squirming in your mouth.
@@einootspork oh no. You have to fry them.
I have the opposite problem (as a person on the autism spectrum) - generally the difficult bit *is* the thing that interests me. If I start with that, then I often find I lose the motivation to actually finish the project - so even if the easy part would only take 10 minutes to do, the project will sit unfinished for months or years because I've done the part that interested me in the first place. This is especially true if the completing the challenging bit gets the project to the point of being functional but unpolished. As an example - I pulled ethernet through my house during the summer. It's all working but there's a single spot just has a wire coming out of the wall and isn't in a proper box and jack. It would take less than a half hour to finish it properly, but since it's all functioning properly I haven't had the motivation to actually take that half hour to fix it.
With that said, I definitely agree that starting with the boring stuff makes actually getting started a lot more challenging, so it's a difficult balancing act.
@@masaufuku1735 Absolutely. The best advice may be "find the thing that works for you", but finding it can take a lifetime.
Imposter syndrome is such a common thing, and nearly no one wants to talk about it. Being vulnerable, open to criticism, and looking for help is scary. I think we're trained that you have to be great at something from the start. I'd love to have someone who asks questions and learns rather than hides.
Be open, be unafraid, be bold.
Honestly havent watched the vid yet. But from the titlw this has happened to me multiple times. Moving as kid from small to big town, kid to highschool, highschool to college and a few times in my career. Stay humble and open minded.
Something I have found with myself on artistic project is that I focus on the hard part, and that prevents me from getting started for days at a time. Meanwhile, if I pick off an easier part, it gets me moving and then I come up for air four hours later having done a bunch of hard parts. This obviously works better for projects that will takes blocks that are hours long over a few sessions, but even for very large projects it can still be worthwhile to keep some warm-up sub-projects on tap to get you moving.
Having to say that starting with the easiest thing to the hardest feels objectively better at some cases, where warming up is beneficial, or where doing an easy task would give you insights on doing the hard one. Most straightforward example is beating a videogame.
Another reason to choose hard versus easy part is if you are at all tired. Do the hard part when you are fresh, even if it means doing the easy part first and tackling the hard part tomorrow. Lacking any such factor though, do the hard part first, since if you make a mistake that forces you to start over, you have less time invested.
I spent 40+ years as co-owner of a costume shop, and my main job was pattern making and cutting. A hard lesson learned over the years was to take the time to cut ONE and make a sample to make sure it fits / works THEN cut the rest - what ever number that may be. I've had cases where there was not an issue with the size or pattern, but with what some manufactuering processes can do to fabric... like applying steam when pressing that shrinks the fabric. For ex: I once had that happen where I cut out dozens of Civil War uniforms from a wool that was never treated, and as soon as we started pressing seams open the fabric was shrinking.... like REALLY shrinking. We had to scrap what was cut and had to order some other fabric and recut. Of course we were then behind the 8-ball with time. BTW... over time we ended putting the shrinking jackets together and washing them. What were like a mens size 48 were now a large boys size. 🙂
You were just going for historical accuracy with respect to people's sizes!
I’ve recently revisited a writing project that has been sitting on my hard drive for over a decade. When I reread the piece I found certain parts VERY cringeworthy. I realized afterwards this was a snapshot of where I was at the time and a point on the path to where I am now. Reworking the piece will make it different than I originally envisioned but a much better final outcome for the characters involved.
Default is hard part first, although; easy part first is a good tool for when I am struggling with motivation and truly just need to get started.
The hardest part is accepting that the hard or monotonous parts still need to be done for the job to be complete, I often say "finish the job you are on" in my head.
Your answer about doing the easy/hard part first is absolutely surprising to me... especially when you cited production concerns.
In my mind - because production schedules and needs do change... you want to out off the hard thing for as long as possible because the hard part may no longer be necessary after some change in need and you don't want to have been stuck with time wasted on an unnecessary bit
As a dev, when I've estimated work, uncertainty and risk elevates the priority of work. If an approach is not going to work, or it is gonna take longer, better to tell the client 5 days in, than 5 days before the deadline.
Adam says: "lists ... get something out of my brain and on paper which ... means that it's no longer going to get lost".
Corollary: getting it out of your brain frees up space *in* your brain for the next thing. Instead of going, probably subconsciously, "I have to remember W, X, Y, and Z -- so many things! Gaaaah!", you can let those go for the moment, breathe a small sigh of relief, and start thinking about Q.
The other thing I find is that the act of making the list forces me to think about things in more detail. I'm taking my bike on a trip; add it to the list. What other bike things do I need? Helmet, spare inner tube, tire levers ... you get the idea. Taking the time to add them to the list right then and there is what keeps me from getting overwhelmed (see previous paragraph).
That was such an ADHD answer to an ADHD question. I bet the person who asked it got some insight they liked. I wonder if they got what they needed in order to improve, which... making lists while doing a job can't be the only thing that would help them close their skill gaps.
I suspect there's got to be some amount of awareness plus practice. In other words, being acutely aware and honest about what really ought to be better (and you'll probably find that you have to adjust or refine that understanding), and then purposefully planning projects that require those skills to be strained and exercised. In my opinion, setting up the conditions for learning is a better technique than trying to disrupt your flow in the middle of working. Of course, if you hit break points where the flow is naturally broken, using that opportunity to take a step back, evaluate, and possibly dive into something that is worth improving, could be a good habit (depending on whether ADHD makes it a disaster of tangents on tangents).
As someone who was diagnosed with asd, adhd, ocd... I super appreciate this advice! 🙏🤣