Using AI to help with productivity and multitasking is not for the faint of heart when you've got ADHD or a wandering mind. We may feel as though we are being more productive while bouncing from one open thread to the next. But we almost always end up with an overwhelming feeling of exhaustion.
In today’s episode, we discuss the quiet cost our brains pay for all that switching. But if we stop to recognize it, we can also lean in to the small pause the machine hands back to us, the one we’re so quick to fill.
Resources Mentioned in Episode:
Interview with chess prodigy Bobby Fischer
Rhythms of Focus Episode 39: Aligning Emotion and Intention with the 8 Gears of Focus
#ADHD #FindingFlowWithADHD #WavesOfFocus #ADHDadults #WanderingMind #ADHDfocus #FlowState #executivefunction #AI #Productivity
Transcript
There are eight or nine of these in a row lined up left side of the screen, some pinned, some not, every one of them are waiting on me, teasing me. These threads of Claude, my AI of choice at the moment, I have to decide among all these different threads, much like I would decide about all these different projects, the tabs across my, my browser.
I have to remember where I was last. I have to spin the drive in my own head to start doing anything. So I choose one, start going. Now it has to think. And in the time that it's thinking, maybe I start thinking, I could be more efficient by picking up some other thread.
And so I do, and then I say my piece there, and then I glance back at that left-hand panel, and I see the first one was working, and then I move on to the third. And after enough of this, I'm bouncing. Waiting for one to start up, watching one turn blue, one turn gray, so it needs me again, and I'm juggling. I'm productive. I'm exhausted.
Recently I've found myself bouncing around between eight or nine different open threads with my AI, choosing one of them, then starting another while it was thinking, and then reaching for a third, and I'm juggling, feeling like, "Am I being productive? Maybe." But I'm also feeling pretty worn out.
Those with ADHD and wandering minds, I think, know the sense that bouncing between several things at once, whatever it happens to be, it doesn't have to be AI, can be this thrill and exhaustion, like I'm being used up in the process, something like a workout. But what are we working out?
Decision, Consideration, and the Drain
I've talked before about the foundational channels of decision, consideration.
When we're deciding, we are choosing our intention. What is the thing that's in front of us? Where do we want our mind to be?
And here, that boundary of what's holding where we want our mind to be is already porous. For a wandering mind, it's trouble.
It takes some type of energy to hold that boundary, to keep ourselves in line. And once it's broken, it's easier to injure it again, like the sprained ankle.
We can call it creativity, the realization of this vision and the act of making something. The channel of beginning — really this channel of beginning again and again, this iteration unifies with where we are envisioning things with that consideration
The decision tends to hold better when we're drawing that border of whatever it is that we're making. We can always update where we want our mind to be, but there's effort in doing that. There's energy.
It draws us out each time as we re-exercise that agency to realign what we want to be doing with how we feel.
When we're considering something, we are picturing it in mind, we're envisioning. And we fill the border that decision established, we're there with it. We see what comes to mind, where things are, where they could be, and then have to realign ourselves every time that we switch. More energy gets drained.
Twenty Games at Once
I once heard this interview with Bobby Fischer, this chess prodigy. He said that he could play 20 games at once, moving from one to the next, cycling through.
But he also said to the interviewer that it was for show, and he didn't like doing it. He described how the ideas could work themselves out, maybe in this unconscious world as he moved from one table to the next.
This parallel process that I think we have within ourselves. We engage in a thing, and then we walk away as our unconscious mind can bubble around it.
But do enough of this, this, you know, extended sort of rhythm between multiple things, and I think there's this exhaustion that comes with it.
Holding things in mind has its gifts, of course. We can better traverse those maps of whatever it is we're doing. But when those intentions, those things we want to do, don't align as we run several things at once, we're, we're switch tasking, and there's a cost to it.
When Threads Relate, and When They Don't
Alright, so what's the solution? Well, I'm not sure there's a clean rule. Uh, for a moment, for a single thread, for, you know, this is one moment for several, it's not clear.
It's not always obvious when things relate, but when they relate, it seems like it can be a good idea to bring several ideas together. It's like a tennis stroke that all aligns at once as we practice this part and that part and the other part, and we kind of bring them together.
But sometimes they don't, like making dinner while learning how to play the piano and creating a mess.
The Pause the Machine Hands Us
I will say this, though, when I'm at Claude or any AI really, and I stay with a single thread, and I pause to watch the AI think, not filling every moment with something else, I'm giving my own thoughts a certain space to come to mind.
I can rest in that more fundamental state of being. And when I do that, that reformulating of decision, of vision, of all the rest of those channels of engagement, things become simpler.
That pause let me restore myself in that place of being. I can reflect on meaning, where energy is flowing from, from something within me, from beyond me.
It's no longer me working against the grain of multiple waves, this sea of emotion and interest that's become this complex mess. Instead, I'm more in tune with what's already there.
I define motivation as the degree to which our emotions align with our intention, something I explored in episode 39.
So much of the work is the skill of sailing these seas of emotion with the intentions that we carry. When we can pause in that state of being, we're so much more in tune with that sea. Sometimes we find the intention we had can be set down or reformed, or it arrives, and we can sail it more readily too.
Maybe I'm being a broken record here. I talk about pausing so much. Somehow it's still the hardest thing to do and the most important.
But it's in this particular day and age when I can notice that there are times, like when I'm waiting for the machine to think, that I can pause to think. In a sense, the machine handed me the pause. My only move is not to fill it.
Music — Waves on a Nights Shore
Today's piece I won't say too much about. I think it's just a piece to listen to. It's called Waves on Night's Shore, and I hope you enjoy it.
Mentioned in this episode:
Waves of Focus YouTube Series
Look out for new episodes of the new Waves of Focus YouTube series here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJpQS5q6yvRw
