The Impossible Task

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This morning, I spent 15 minutes processing an email task. That sounds routine, except that the email and the task had been sitting around for literally months. A truly ridiculous and embarrassing amount of time for a trivial task. There was nothing particularly terrible about this email. It was just impossible. 

The impossible task is something I struggle with a lot. I am not going to talk in this post about how I get myself to do impossible tasks. As demonstrated above, I don't have a great solution. If I did, they wouldn't be impossible anymore. I can talk in the future about how I try to deal with them, but the truth is, I often fail. Sometimes for months, like with the stupid email.

What I am going to talk about is how I try to have failing to do the impossible task not spill over to be a problem in the rest of my life. The biggest issue with impossible tasks is that sometimes the fact that I can't do that, means I also can't do anything else, because that's the thing that ABSOLUTELY must get done. Sometimes that's true, sometimes it's just my brain, but same basic effect either way.

1. Just do something else. This isn't as easy as it sounds, and it basically requires having a whole system set up to encourage this. I always have a to-do list with lots of possible tasks, organized by both importance and urgency. I don't try to force myself to do particular ones unless they are both important and absolutely must get done today. I just look at my list and pick one. I try to pick ones that are important or urgent more often than ones that aren't, but I don't fret about it too much. Since there is no one task that I should be doing now, I can put off the impossible task and not feel bad about it. This does sometimes result in taking months to respond to an email, but at least the rest gets done.

2. Workarounds. I am way more likely to experience trivial impossible tasks when I'm tired. One of my most common impossible tasks is putting dinner away. It's late, I'm exhausted, but I can't go to bed, because I haven't put dinner away. This can result in me staying up much later than I want to, or just letting dinner spoil and throwing it away in the morning, because otherwise I won't go to bed at all. At some point, I collected a bunch of silicon lids that can go over anything. It turns out that, for me, dumping the leftovers into a storage container is an impossible task, but putting a lid on the pot and sticking the whole damn thing in the fridge usually isn't. It means more clean up later, but it also means that I can go to bed. If you are reading this and thinking "then why don't you just put dinner away right after you eat, so it's not a problem at the end of the night?" then you don't have ADHD. This sort of workaround lets me do the thing that actually needs to be done, while avoiding the impossible task.

3. Ask for help. It turns out that a 15 minute task that is impossible for you probably isn't impossible for your friend, partner, or co-worker. I also have thalassemia intermedia. Sometimes I get thalassemia crashes, and my legs literally don't work. I'm not embarrassed to ask my spouse to take off my shoes or get me a glass of water when thalassemia means my legs don't work. Why should I be embarassed to ask them to move the laundry off the bed when ADHD means my brain won't work? I'm not perfect at this, but I try. 

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