When the university decided to move everything over to Outlook. This broke a lot of my workflow and I had to keep track of multiple calendars that unfortunately don’t know how to share. Then, I heard about Sunsama on the ADHD YouTube channel (how to ADHD).
A funny but also true ADHDino comic that captures my struggle with todo lists.
Email is also an absolutely terrible way to keep track of what I need to do. I have many different hats to wear in my job as professor. And frankly inbox 0 doesn’t quite cut it.
Enter Sunsama. I can see both calendars and what is on them. I have a backlog of items I need to do, I can add to this list from any of my devices. Whenever I have a “oh I need to do this” moment, I can add.
Every day I start with the things planned for the day in the various calendars, add items from the backlog and see if I can get through as much as I can.
I don’t pull individual emails into the Sunsama anymore. I have a 30min Burn Time scheduled where I get through as much admin crap as possible. Much less task switching as I go from teaching to grant application to science and scheduling and back.
And my todo list lives in Sunsama. Nowhere else. It has freed up so much executive function it’s unreal. I’m not super burned out after this semester and it was a doozy. Complete superpower. Love it.
This has lowered my reactiveness and stress levels (for work, a lot of other stuff stresses me out still).
It’s not panacea but it works fantastic as part of a larger system. Where I get my time and focus back to do things I want to do. I have enough focus to carefully say no to things. So if I say yes. It’s backed with mental bandwidth.
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