How do I 'shift gears'?

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This isn't the first time this has happened. I have an assignment (not unreasonably difficult), and I have little time to start it or even complete it.

I've had a week to do this, though. The problem? I cannot hold the thought in my head for even a moment. I am thinking about, ironically, Asperger's Syndrome and ADHD. I've spent the last five days studying them intensively, having to learn everything about them, and completely unable to think about anything else.

Life doesn't care. I had to turn in an assignment yesterday (which I was finally able to do because it was kind of mechanical), and I have to turn in something else today. I tell myself I just need more discipline, so I force myself to do it. Does it get done? No. I end up panicking, feeling very sick and losing control of my emotions. It just finally hit me how pathetic it is that I'm forcing myself to do something that renders me temporarily insane, but what am I supposed to tell the teacher? "Sorry, I didn't do it because I was busy doing my own thing".

How do you deal with it? One thing that sometimes works is making the assigment relevant to my obsession, but today I'm supposed to write a philosophical paper (structural/thematic analysis of The Matrix), and I can't think of any real connections. Can any of you shift gears on command?

I play music, mostly Electronica. It blocks out outside noise, and listening to it somehow helps concentrate and focus my mind's processing power on what I am supposed to be working on. If you wanna try, I recomment Cosmic Gate and Tangerine Dream, don't really know any others. I have a Zune, so I download all the Electronica podcasts I can find and listen to them.

My probem was that I didn't. I still managed to graduate college though, but I didn't fare nearly as well as I could have.

The advice that is given by others in this topic will be just as helpful to me as it will be to you. I hope you find a solution, because procrastination sucks...

I can relate to what you're saying. On some days I can't hold a thought in my head, or can't organize them well enough to form a logical sequence. What I want to say hardly ever comes out the way I say it.

What I usually do is just write down everything that comes to mind and organize the paragraphs later. The problem with this is that any distraction will get you thinking and/or writing about something wholly different and when you realise you've spent hours on a tangent. I've wasted many hours this way. The tendency to procrastinate doesn't help either.

Do you also feel on some days your thoughts are going too fast and on others they're going too slow? This might have to do with the medication I'm taking...not sure.

I don't really have anything to say that would help you, and also hoping somebody will post something that will, 'cause I suffer from the same problem.

parallels between living with Asperger's and the Matrix: themes of disillusionment, themes of being a victim of mass cultural hypnosis, themes of paranoia, themes of self-empowerment, the repercussions of perceptual anomalies, the struggle of one-against-the-many, the ultimate choice of assimilating into "the matrix" or accepting one's individual gifts/curses

can any of these ideas help?

Well, I tell my teachers that. They actually like it. I even go in and ask them for help on whatever it is I am studying at the time, whether it is what the class is studying or not. The key thing for them is that I'm learning. The mere fact that I have a drive to learn (even if it isn't exactly what the class is studying at the time) is far more impressive to them then going home and playing video games all day instead.

But I still understand your frustration. You cannot dedicate your resources entirely towards your own research, because you will fail. You cannot dedicate all of your resources to school because then you won't focus on your research. It puts you in a stalled situation, and you feel frustrated because you are not accomplishing anything. And the irony of it all is that you have a huge drive to learn, while your classmates may not even care about really "learning" at all. They're too focused on "good grades." While those two are not mutually exclusive, they do not go hand in hand either.

My recommendation is that you listen to whatever type of music makes you emotional. For me, it's love songs. Go figure. But it works. It helps me to feel more fluid rather than solid, more able to flow into doing homework than something else.

I had a next to impossible time focusing on what tasks needed to be completed if I wasn’t interested in the subject. I excelled in French, art and music, as those were subjects that interested me. In subjects that I wasn’t interesting in, I would do enough work to get by with a passing grade.

In college I dropped out after the first semester due to the fact that most of my courses that were required were boring as hell. I already knew all that stuff and I hated sitting in class listening to my professor repeat the same thing almost everyday for the students who couldn't grasp what he was teaching.

I tried that once with my parents, it didn't go over too well.

Hold an extraneous conversation while you're working on it. It's that simple. Find someone to talk to about whatever is on your mind, get yourself relaxed, and let your fingers do their thing. I move ten times as fast this way as when I'm actually focusing properly on an assignment. Well, I would think so, getting comments like, "Sir, I am trying to work out in my mind how it's possible for your fingers to move that quickly." And my mouth is motoring away the whole while. For some reason, the mindless chatter seems to kickstart me somehow.

When I was studying (and still do when I need something done). I am clearing my study from all non-essential objects and putting them in the cupboard. I take a clock and study for 90 minutes straight. Then I can watch television and do something else for 30 minutes. Than I study for 90 minutes again. That way I force myself into studying, but also take the necessary time off. And removing the items is to avoid too many stimulants around me. Another place like that was the library for me, we had a really strict library policy about silence, to talk was to be kicked out.

Another experience was that studying after 22.00 was not going to help anyway. Sleep enough!
(the time can be a personal thing, but sleeping is always important)

I wish that sort of thing would work for me. I always have teachers who think their class is the only thing in the world that matters. If I walk in and tell them, "Sorry, I didn't do the homework because I was busy reading Wikipedia articles about phonology and mammalian dentition," any teacher I have is going to give me a stupid look and suggest that if I have time to read about those things, then I must have plenty of time to do the homework.

It's not that I decide to do those things instead. I'm just procrastinating when my mind just wanders and I get off track. I would do the work if I stopped what I was doing at a reasonable time and remembered it before the next morning came around and I had to hurry to bed. But I still haven't figured out how to make that work.