This man took so much longer to crack than I would have what a PROFESSIONAL
Plotting, scheming, etc.
This was filmed at the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, which rescues, rehabilitates, and releases orphaned elephants in Kenya (among other conservation efforts). Charity Navigator has given it a 4/4 star rating, and you can make donations here or “adopt” a baby elephant here.
THANK YOU FOR THIS IMPORTANT ADDITION.
I have enjoyed this video so much and am very happy to share ways to help the babies!!
That man held it in until he knew for a fact that they’d need another take anyway, and not a moment less.
Listen, if you interrupt me with a new task while I’m midway through another, you aren’t allowed to be mad when I switch to the new task immediately. You clearly thought the new task was important enough to interrupt me with it!
I am just a little pikmin! You’re the one with the whistle!!
‘You need to learn to prioritise’ no YOU do! You’re the one dishing out tasks!! All I need to do is take things back to the onion!
Also, I have the ADHD! If you stop me while I’m doing X and ask me to do Y, I will immediately switch to doing Y because THAT IS THE ONLY WAY IT IS GETTING DONE. I do not have the option of finishing X and then getting around to Y, I will 100% forget and I know this about myself from years and years of experience of living in my brain.
You ask an ADHD person to do something, you’re getting it RIGHT NOW or NEVER. Those are the only two times.
Welcome to time blindness, enjoy your visit, I live here.
Okay this is so true and SAME but queue managers and alarms are a godsend.
Them: Hey can you Y?
Me: Sure. *sticks Y in my queue manager, keeps on working X*
(some time passes)
Alarm: *goes off*
Me: Huh, time to check the Quest Journal. Well I’m done with X and I was fiddling around with A, but apparently next up is Y.
Me: *starts working Y*
Yes there are absolutely people who don’t understand that they can generate 20 requests for everyone one I can fulfill. Yes there are times that X does need to be stopped and Y started even though that’s gonna be horribly inefficient bc it’s better for me to finish X than to start Y until X is finished. Yes when the alarm goes off I also need to sometimes take some time to shuffle the order of the things in the queue.
But having a queue manager and something that reminds me to use it are how I went from ADD “cannot focus, tests well but doesn’t complete homework, easily distracted” to responsible adult who gets things done.
For some of us our internal software is just shit for certain tasks so we need to delegate those tasks to external software.
Does anyone have recommendations for queue manager apps? I want something that would be easy for my students to use and financially reasonable (hopefully free–they’re students). I may also be asking for me - task management has never been my forte.
Okay so wow this is getting notes and asks and messages (thank you all! I’m glad you are curious and hopeful!) so I’ll share what I’ve learned.
I started with Wunderlist bc it was beautiful and simple and the phone app synched with the web app synched with the desktop app.
Microsoft bought Wunderlist and turned it into Microsoft To Do. They made it ugly and awkward and buggy.
I still use MS To Do. The phone app (mostly) synchs with the tablet app and web app and desktop app oh wait the desktop app is giving me login problems. I use it because it’s familiar. I don’t love it at all. But you don’t need to love it it just needs to work for you. I am in the process of migrating from MS ToDo to a rather complicated project management system. More on that later.
If I had to start over again I might use Notion. Or Zenkit. Both are a bit of overkill. But both worked well enough when I tried them.
ToDoIst was also nice. As was AnyList. As was Remember The Milk. At the time I tried them, their prices (more than free) were too high.
If you wish to avoid MS ToDo, here’s what I recommend your queue manager have:
Mobile app or highly usable fast mobile website. You need it with you as much as your phone is with you.
Ease of entry. This is job one. You need to be able to whip it open, jot down “frim the jib jab” and forget it. If there are login screens, Click To Add An Item Now Enter The Title Now Enter A Description Do You Want To Save YN Are You Sure then forget it. You won’t use it.
Ease of reading the whole list at once. See #2.
If you do any work at at a computer, you’ll want some kind of desktop access. Web app, desktop app. Synching needs to happen automagically and RELIABLY. If you feel you cannot trust your queue manager, you won’t use it.
Blindingly easy manual sorting. Drag and drop please. No “click to move up one.” Just be able to grab an item and move it up, down, between.
Automatic Sorting as an option. Ideally saved as a preference. Sort completed at the bottom, new at the top, or whatever works for you. I personally ADD at the bottom, and when I “star” an item it moves to the top.
Minimal metadata per item. A Note is good. Subtasks are iffy. They can be nice to help you make a checklist and to break down a large thing into smaller things. But they also just add complexity and then you’re managing your queue manager, and it’s not managing your queue. Worse, the subtasks are buried under another layer — you can’t see them at a glance when you look ar your queue.
Nice to have: Multiple lists, with blindingly easy moving of an item from one list to another.
How I use my queue manager:
Multiple lists: I have 3: “Now, Next, Someday.” I use Now for “right now, hopefully today but we’ll see.” I use Next for “at the top of my mind, maybe this week” and Someday for “yeah that’s a dream, I sure hope I get to it someday.” When a timer goes off on Fridays I peek thru all of them and try to make them match reality.
Limits on “now.” I try to keep the Now list less than 8 items and the Next list to less than 20. If that means moving some items to Next because they’re not gonna get done today, or moving some away from Next into Someday then that’s what I do. There’s nothing demotivating like a queue that you “should do” that keeps growing and growing. Thats what the Someday list is for. Keep your “now” small….. if it runs empty you can always pull some in from the “next” list!
Add at bottom, star to top, move around otherwise. I default new items to go to the bottom of the queue. That means I’m more likely to actually work it as a queue. If something comes in that truly needs to jump to the top, I have MS Todo set so that when I press the “star” on the right of the item, it just jumps to the top.
Timers. I have three each day (morning noon evening) to remind me to check the queue. I have one on Fridays to remind me to do some Queue Gardening. That’s when I’ll move things between the different lists, look at how many I got done this week, and try to be honest with myself about what I really think I can get done next week.
Compassionate Review. See the above on my Friday timer. When you look back WITHOUT JUDGMENT at what you got done and adjust your plans for the next day/week accordingly, you actually get better at estimating what’s realistic.
Allow your methods to evolve. When I started doing this I had items on my queue like “med 1,” “med 2,” “med 3,” “shower,” “breakfast,” “email 15m max.” Over time, making and checking off those things has collapsed the morning into a single “start the day” item with a checklist in the item notes. I’m currently experimenting with a whole separate list for new “big” items, which I ignore until Fridays when I then assign them to one of my “now, next, someday” lists. We’ll see how it works out.
Keep. It. Simple. Many softwares will add features they claim will help you be more productive. Due dates. Reminders. Sharing. Approvals (!) Integration with email, twitter, your water faucet. Sub-lists and sub-sub-lists and sub-sub-sub-lists. No. You just want to manage the queue. You just want to be able to quickly look at the queue and have an answer to “what’s next” or “Ive just watched 2 hours of TOTK videos what was I supposed to be working on again?”
Hope this helps some o’ y’all. Peace.
great recommendations!
a simple way to do this is to make calendar items for everything - this is how I manage holding down a demanding full-time job, running a nonprofit, keeping up a writing and editing career, and maintaining relationships with people who don’t understand time-blindness
I just use Google calendar, which is free on android devices, but I’m sure there’s a ton more like it
make calendar items repeat for stuff you do daily (“brush teeth,” “eat breakfast,” etc if you need that granular level of reminders), weekly (like “buy groceries”), monthly (“pay bills” is a biggie), annually (every important date), and so on
set reminders not only for when things are due, but also a second one enough in advance to be able to get stuff done if you’ve forgotten (assume that’ll always happen, so know how much time you’ll need to Do The Things before deadline, like buying presents for anniversaries). I sometimes even use a third or fourth reminder if The Thing needs several stages of prep
it can be handy to use colors to differentiate work vs family etc, or put them into different email calendars and then have those all show up in a central calendar you can see all at once
it’s not only helped me stay on top of stuff, it’s been vital for maintaining my sanity
^^ Yes this! I do the same @mckitterick — I have two gcals for actual appointments and a different one for all the Regular Life Chores that NT people seem to be able to… just remember to do all the time.
I would stress: START SMALL. Do NOT spend hours putting everything into your calendar that you wish you could do. Learn from my mistake of over-designing my timer/queue manager. I made this beautiful system that then I ignored bc it was too many notifications and I quickly developed notification tolerance. 🥴
+1 to setting reminders not just for Thing Due but also Start Working On Thing. As an added bonus, seeing this shit visually on the calendar (by day, by week, even *woah* by month) is almost like a vision aid for time blindness.
But yeah start with a few critical things and try to make it work for those things. Make changes to your system as you need to to keep it relevant and make it work for YOU. As you become more comfy with it, then you can start adding more things. Don’t overdesign/overplan: Fuck Around with it and Find Out what works.
seeing this visually on the calendar is like a vision aid for time-blindness
omfg i forgot that i never showed tumblr my greatest achievement. my pride and joy, my pi-ass de résistance
you’re welcome
if you reblog this i am kissing you on the mouth. no that is not negotiable. we are in love now. we are dating. we are planning the wedding. i will be with you on your wedding night
resulting in an amazing symphony of calls and melodies by the competing males. But the bird ladies also get to enjoy impressive, dramatic and sometimes hilarious visual displays, like here from Redwinged Blackbird and Grackle.
so funny to me that my cat, who has been exposed to minimal other cats in her 13+ years of life, can still see another cat and instantly recognize it as an enemy to her territory, even when it’s outside minding it’s own business
