While working on the new book, Living Daily With Adult ADD. I noticed that I was procrastinating on finishing the fifth draft, when I only had a few more tips to edit.
I asked myself, “Why would you be procrastinating on finishing the fifth draft?”
Turns out, I wasn’t. I had two duplicate tips about money, and needed to fix that, but I wasn’t sure what to substitute for the second one. So I was procrastinating on fixing the duplicate, not procrastinating on the draft, and I couldn’t finish the draft until I fixed the duplicate– that’s the links in the chain.
What I needed was a new tip to put in place of the duplicate on money.
This is it.
I spoke to a guy who couldn’t paint his shelves until the moved the boxes that were blocking them, but he couldn’t move them till he cleaned out the shed to put them in, but he couldn’t clean out the shed until he found somewhere to put the stuff that was in it, —
oh, my
So chaining is when you can’t do C until you’ve done B, but you can’t do B until you’ve done A, and so on – so don’t we sometimes wind up not doing anything?
The main strategy is to really figure out why you’re really not doing it.
doug
bonus tip o the day Bonnie Mincu on procrastinating
bonus bonus – classes on sale
The sculptor got it done.
ADDadultstrategies 
That’s exactly right – you have to analyze the situation and figure out what the REAL problem is. I’m a big fan of analyzing and do it all the time for just about everything.
I hadn’t heard the term chaining either but it’s perfect. And it happens a lot. I’ve been struggling with my financial record keeping because I haven’t decided on a new planner. I keep my finances in my planner so until I decide which one I want to use, I can’t update my finances.
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Robin – chaining is a tough one. it partly is just in our mind and partly in reality.
in my example i gave, I figured out where my thinking was wrong and then fixed it.
strategies 1. figure out what the whole chain is and see if you’re misperceiving or if there is weak link you can jump on
2. run it by someone else who may be able to see it differently
3. if nothing else works, say to heck with it and just jump in somewhere,anywhere – this is hard.
thank you for commenting
doug
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Thanks for talking and writing about chaining. I’ve never heard that term before. I do the same thing and it drives me nuts. Did you learn how to overcome the chaining?
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