
My Organization System and the Difficulties I Have When I Get Off Track
I have an organizational system based on time blocks in Google Calendar and a task list in ColorNote. The task list is organized by days of the week and divided into different periods of the day.
The problem is that on days when I have low regulation and little energy or motivation, I completely lose clarity about what I need to do.
For example, I might get out of bed right when I had scheduled a work block. At that point, I look at the morning tasks that I wasn't able to complete earlier and end up doing those first. However, depending on my energy level, how dysregulated I am, and even how many work tasks I have available that day, I eventually become unable to figure out what I should do next or how to decide what comes next.
This also happens with studying. I have a study task on my list that is supposed to be done at night, and I also have a specific study block scheduled in Google Calendar for that time. However, on a day when I am more lost, I might realize that I have more free time in the morning and could get ahead on my studies. Even so, because they are scheduled for the evening, I freeze and can no longer figure out how to reorganize the rest of my day.
My task list also has a section at the bottom with non-mandatory goals that I can work on at any point during the day. However, I also struggle to know when and how to fit them in, especially when my functioning is different from what I had originally planned.
What makes this even harder is that when I am dysregulated and behind schedule, I have to choose between several possibilities: follow the current calendar block, do a task from the list that belongs to the period of the day I am currently in, work ahead on an important task that was planned for later, or complete a one-off task that simply needs to be finished before the end of the day.
In other words, I constantly need criteria to decide what to do. And precisely when everything goes off plan, I lose the ability to figure out which criteria I should use.
Dysregulation contributes to my executive dysfunction, which is also related to ADHD, as well as cognitive rigidity. This affects me to the point where I can't even follow my own plan. Suddenly, a system that is normally supposed to guide me seems completely ineffective, because I don't know how to adapt it to what is happening in the moment.
Because of this, I keep wondering: How do other people organize themselves in situations like this? Are there methods that are more flexible and can still work when someone is dysregulated, behind schedule, or has less energy?
I really want to be able to add other studies to my routine, but I feel like I can't even handle the basics because I freeze whenever I have to decide what to do.
Where am I going wrong?
(The screenshots are in portuguese because I'm brazillian)