A Trick: Batch Processing VS Exec Dysfunction

Post Reply New Topic

Hey Girls and Guys. I am very scatterbrained, I work well when a task takes hours but
If it takes a few minutes I forget about it and I hate popping out of what I'm doing. Why
fight it.
Lately i've started batching that tasks I can. I'm cooking most of my meals on Sunday afternoons
when I can Shop, organise and settle into the task, freezing my meals for the week. I
even have french toast and pancakes for breakfast now when I might have just grabbed coffee.

I'm sorting and organising my clothes so entire outfits are together and coveniet so its as easy
to grab coordinated fresh clothes as yesterdays lying on the floor.

Anyone else have any ideas.

I try to batch tasks as much as possible too. It seems to help ensure I get everything I need to accomplish done. Everything I need for the week seems a good target interval for me as well. Prep food for the week, do laundry for the week, clean my place once a week etc. I take about a 4-5 hour block of time to get as many of these tasks done as possible, and whatever I fail to finish before my resolve dwindles usually doesn't get done until the following week.

Not sure quite what you mean by batch processing. I've always done shopping on Saturday because the day job made it practically impossible to shop any other time.....there were often too many demands on me for me to be able to go into town, and the local shops charge more and don't have the range. I'm still not used to Sunday trading but am gradually starting to do 2 shopping trips a week, because carrying it all back in one load is getting too heavy for me.

I suppose it makes sense for an Aspie with exectutive disfunction to process things in large runs. There would be fewer executive decisions required. I used to have an ideal of bulk-buying food with optimum stock levels being the amount I would consume by the expiry date, though I would also take into account the price breaks for quantity, the lost interest on the invested capital, and the risk of damage or losing my liking for a particular food when I've still got 10 crates of it. I saw it as an efficiency thing rather than a coping strategy for AS. I would go around the shops and make big decisions on 2 or 3 lines rather than picking things up in dribs and drabs. And if I lost my job and DSS wanted to force me into a skivvy role by denying me welfare payments, well they'd be in for a long wait before they could starve out a guy who had a house full of food.

I do keep catching myself writing detailed, idiot-proof instructions to myself about how to do this or that, when it's at all complicated and I'm going to stop that particular activity for a while. It's almost as if I feel I'm going gradually senile and might not be smart enough to fathom the task without the idiot guide next time. Thing is, I've had experiences where I've done a clever thing really well but have later been shocked at how crap I am at the same task when I try it again after a long-ish break. But I'm not so good at putting myself into my future-self's shoes and writing my instructions for him, and the protocols I create tend to be full of unnecessary detail which is very distracting.

I definitely tend to rationalise a lot of housework and clothing work. I've tried making more than one meal at a time......it worked quite well when I made 2 sandwiches per session, but the technique fell into disuse because eventually I couldn't be bothered to do both sandwiches, though that ready-made sarnie waiting for me on arrival home was great while it lasted. They're very standardised sandwiches. The only change I've made to the formula in the past 20 years was to switch from mayonnaise to hummus. I suppose the standardisation itself is quite a batchy thing to do.....most people seem to want a huge variety of ever-changing food, and they seem to see standard meals as prison food, which they aren't - they're just predictable.

With clothes, I've considered a scheme to have 2 or 3 set outfits instead of choosing stuff de novo every time I get changed. Ideally I'd wash one whole outfit at a time, but that would conflict with the need to keep dark and light fabrics separate.

With housework, I have no conscious routine for it, and mostly seem to just do chores as they occur to me, if and when I can be arsed. I like the idea of living with others and having responsibility for a share of the chores, but alone and without that pressure, I haven't done more than the bare minimum. I've been toying with the idea of designating an hour a week for "additional chores," when I would just spend that one extra hour doing a bit of general cleaning and tidying. My main problem is stopping it from becoming a special interest.....I've tried to analyse housework before, and have concluded that it's futile to try to create a unified field theory of tidying up, and that it's far wiser to just do a bit of housework at random. It's interesting that I'm only just becoming aware of how the nature of the contents of a room have a huge bearing on how easy it is to tidy. Cover half the floor with delicate, home-made electronic gizmos, and the place is rendered uncleanable. Not long ago I would have just failed to clean up, and felt bad about myself for it, without ever noticing that the task itself was pretty unrealistic, and that my best move would be to put some of those circuits into boxes and render the floor such that a vacuum cleaner can be used on it.

Ultimately I don't think there's any substitute for occasionally looking at the big picture.