Inertia Surfing

ADHD in motion will stay in motion, unless it gets stuck on something and turns into a barnacle.

Inertia Surfing means riding a wave of action or productivity - you started by rinsing the coffee pot and then you decided the dishes needed to be done and while you were in the kitchen there wasn't a good reason not to sweep and as you put the broom away you took the vacuum out and did the floor in your bedroom, which got you to put away your floor pile of clothes so you also got together a pile of donations and took them over to the thrift store while you returned your library book and went grocery shopping on the way home, then put the groceries away, grabbed a drink out of the fridge, and sat down on your couch wondering when the spirit of helpful elves decided to possess you.

Inertia Surfing can be involuntary - perhaps you are cleaning your entire house at midnight because you're hiding from an email - but it is also a state that can be induced and maintained in the right conditions.

Getting Started

First, note that it is not always possible to inertia surf. If you are burned out or you have looming deadlines you are probably not in a state for sustained, varied activity so much as either lethargy or panicked unidirectional action. That said, anxiety and depression can be emotional motivators for inertia surfing, and inertia surfing can help to relieve anxiety and depression. You don't precisely have to be feeling well to inertia surf, but you have to be feeling right.

But, if you're in the right state to get started (you're not exhausted, you're not avoiding an imminent deadline, you don't have any looming obligations and it's cool if you fall headfirst into action for a few hours), the way to get started is by finding the one thing in your environment or situation that is currently most annoying to you. Perhaps you've been meaning to bake for a day or two but the sink needs to be emptied first. Perhaps you want to mow the lawn but first you need to move your car. Perhaps you've got a powerpoint you need to finish at work but you need to read someone's email before you can update a slide. In these examples, it's not the baking, powerpoint, or lawn that are the barriers, it's the sink, email, and car in the driveway. If you've figured out what the barrier is, write it down or otherwise fix it in your mind (I'm going to write it down. I'm going to forget if I don't write it down.)

Once you've identified the annoying little lever, think about things that are in proximity to the project. If you empty the sink do you also need to empty the refrigerator and wash tupperware containers? If you're going to move your car anyway do you need to go anywhere with it first? If you finish the powerpoint do you have other emails you could read after? Think about the thing you want to do and the surrounding things that touch on it, if you empty the containers in the fridge does that give you space to clean the shelves? Think along that path for a little while - making a list as you go if lists are helpful to you - and think if there's anything that could stop you as you're following that path. Do you need to eat breakfast? Do you need to go to the bathroom? Is it five AM and you've got work at eight AM and should sleep for a couple hours? Before you start the ball rolling, make sure that you're going to be in a condition to lock in for at least a couple of hours. Eat something, fill your water bottle, take your meds, write your list.

You want to avoid Speedbumps that might slow you down, so plan some entertainment or Background Noise to help keep your focus and prevent you from seeking out distractions.

Now that you're prepped and you've got the vague outlines of a plan, focus back on the barrier/annoyance/lever. Think about the first step you have to take to move that lever. Walk to the kitchen. Grab your car key. Open your email client.

Okay now do it.

I know that's easier said than done, and if you aren't able to motivate yourself to take that first small action without some other motivation, consider these as possible motivations:

• Future you will be much less stressed if you do this now than if you put it off
• Once you are done with this thing you do not have to do other things and can fuck around as a reward
• Doing the thing will mean that you have accomplished the thing and you may be given a crumb of dopamine by your brain as a reward
• You get to cross the thing off your list
• Nobody can yell at you for not having done the thing if you do the thing
• Nobody will be waiting on you to do the thing if you do the thing
• Doing the thing will prevent the thing from looming at a later date
• Doing the thing is productive enough to be a good excuse to procrastinate on another, less appealing thing that you could be doing.

If none of those work, try 5-4-3-2-1-Go. If that doesn't work, try to Do the Smallest Amount Possible or see if you can Start a Timer as motivation. If those - or other initiation tricks - don't help to get you moving, you may simply not be in the right mindset today, and can always try again later. Sometimes the surf is too high and you can't get up on your board. No biggie.

If you ARE able to get started, your next goal is to keep riding the wave.

Keep Going

It is much easier to keep going than it is to start, so from here all that you have to do is bounce from task to task. This is part of why you visualized related tasks earlier and made sure that you were fed and watered and suitably entertained before you got down to the task at hand.

The trick here is to keep yourself from stopping. You are using the inertia to keep you going. You are a monkey in the jungle swinging from vine to vine - if you pause too long between swings you're going to lose your grip on the next vine. What this means is that you have to be willing to step away from a task that is slowing down the inertia. Ten mostly-done tasks is a better day's work than two completely done tasks with the rest not even started.

This means that it's important to figure out when you've hit the peak of what you can accomplish with one task. Maybe your dishwasher is full but there are still dishes in the sink - are you going to be more effective if you hand-wash the rest or if you bounce to another task while the dishwasher runs? Maybe you know that if you run errands when you move your car there's no chance you'll have the energy to mow the lawn.

If you find yourself getting to the end of a task and hesitating, or getting into the tiny details of an unimportant task, take a moment to look around you and figure out if there's some task that could be done quickly and with little effort while you're right where you are. If there is, great, do that - maybe you realized it was time to swap out the hand towels in the kitchen and suddenly you're sorting laundry, maybe you shook out the mower bag and realized the driveway needed sweeping - if there isn't, think about the list of tasks you visualized at the beginning of this wave and consider if there's another one that you can hop to.

I find that I do best maintaining my inertia when I'm doing tasks that are relatively similar - if I get started cleaning I'm probably going to have a good day of cleaning but I probably won't be able to dye my hair because that's too jarring of a switch. If I'm doing a powerpoint I may be able to write emails and create invoices, but I'll probably lose momentum if I have to make phone calls because that's reliant on another person matching my inertia.

If you're not sure how to move from one task to another before the inertia peters out, here are some possible ways to keep things going even if there is a pause between tasks:

• Group similar tasks while you are planning your day, write them on a list, refer to the list as soon as you feel yourself slowing down, and go to the next item on the list.
• Identify whether a task is a route into a lateral group of tasks - maybe you can go from cleaning the kitchen to taking out the trash to pruning the hedges even if you couldn't go directly from cleaning the kitchen to pruning the hedges.
• Look around and grab the nearest thing that needs doing (with the right amount of ADHD there's always something that needs doing) even if it ISN'T similar to what you were just doing. Sometimes simple physical proximity is enough.

How does it end?

The end of your inertia surf is going to depend on you and your tasks and your environment. Maybe it's a good day and you get through your whole list and you don't feel a need to add more so you stop. Maybe you don't want to stop because you don't know when you'll have this time and energy again so you keep going until you're exhausted. Maybe you get through half a task and then get a nuclear distraction. Maybe you get tired way earlier than you thought and don't get much of your list done at all.

No matter how the inertia surfing ends, it's important to check in with yourself after. Make sure you're not hungry or in pain, make sure you're hydrated and you've got time to get to sleep before work. Make sure you've taken any meds you might need to.

And it's important to be nice to yourself. It's hard to get things done and even if you didn't finish what you set out to do, you made the effort. Don't beat yourself up if you didn't accomplish everything you wanted to do, because you Don't Punish Good Behavior. You made the effort. You did a good job. Congratulate yourself and get some rest. Not only because you deserve it, but also because it will mean that you're in better shape to do more next time if you don't kick your own ass for not doing enough.