mooretrees wrote: ↑Tue Apr 01, 2025 12:11 pm
Wow, what a juicy update! Whenever you are ready to delve into the details I’d like to read about it. Sounds like a lot is going on and it’s an exciting/challenging time.
@moretrees - here's the low effort, non-concise version. Starting with the house:
Our home is a two story townhouse. 1600 square feet, full basement, 2 car garage, close to nature, but virtually zero walk score and low bike score. We're approaching 20 years here and live less than 10 miles from where we grew up. Most family does as well.
My optimal is probably a 2 bedroom sub-1000 square foot single story condo. Walking distance to groceries and the gym. The rare ride share, instead of owning a car.
I fill space like a goldfish. I'm very good at imagining uses for things, so they are always "still good". I'm also prone to both scattered attention and hyper fixation. So I'll get into something, buy the things, then wander off. Topping that, once I put something behind a closed door, it's "gone forvever". My free recall memory is terrible.
We anchor in the house since it's close to my wife's optimal. Staying close to family, coupled with a high value on both nature and privacy, highly constrains our options. Most nature is surrounded by half a million dollar plus McMansions.
So with the house, I've doubled down on simulating my optimal. It's two prongs:
1. Shamelessly outsource work demanded by the bigger space. Either we can afford it, or not. Carrying the DIY overhead is not on me. We can, btw. While downsizing would be cheaper, it's not a money issue. This isn't entirely new. I've never decorated, or even contributed positively to selecting our furniture. I simply don't care. Only now we don't even pretend I care.
2. Act as if I live in the smaller space. Other than the home gym, I took all personal affects out of the basement. On the first floor, I'm using two shelves and a couple coat hooks. In the kitchen, we dedicated about 1/3 of the cabinet space as "not me".
The effect was to massively consolidate space for my possessions, which then forced me to process them. The reality is I owned very few things I value. The bulk of it was empty boxes, hobbies left behind, idealized selves I never pursued, etc.
Now my life could easily fit into that optimal space, probably even less. A few hundred square feet. For the way my brain works, that's a huge relief. I have to organize as though running out of necessities is a victory.
The change also makes my wife's ownership over the remainder much more intentional. Instead of me stowing trash in the ktichen, she has a tall cabinet dedicated to her stuff. She owns whatever is in the foyer bench or hall closet. I don't know or care. She doesn't have to fight my ADHD.
Moving on to my digital life and our time... I did the exact same things. While I use a digital organizer, over the years it'd grown to reflect the pattern above. I stripped it down, consolidating with a very similar strategy. There's now one set of lists:
Stuff I do daily (habits)
Stuff I do regularly
Stuff I'd like to do
Media
I'm working on closing out that media list. Each bullet is a specific task, instead of nested trees of lists. I'm working to prune the list regularly and limit work in progress.
Where this intersects with my wife, is in maintaining a shared household calendar. We've checked in weekly for a long time, but it's been relatively ad hoc. Now we've added a monthly check-in, with longer term planning. I took on the effort of building a joint Google Calendar as well. With much cajoling, she's adopted it. We are visualizing our time.
We're proactively planning things, looking at conflicts, reconsidering "must-do" obligations, etc. This surfaces a lot of underlying assumptions and stress points around energy allocation. IE - see bullet 1 above about me not owning the bigger space. It's very similar to when we started managing money together, upon my retirement.
It's further complicated by 2 factors:
1. One aspect of my demand avoidance, is wanting to jump on a problem and solve it ASAP. Not because I care, but to make it go away, so there's no demand. I do that to my wife's life, even when it is not asked for, or even worse, NOT wanted.
2. My mental health work has been effective. My energy and intensity have never been higher. I have much better control over my anxiety and focus. Some of that's the miracle of an ADHD brain plus stimulant. Some of it is the broad toolset I've learned. But, my wife didn't magically recover from her health condition. And I have a really hard time imagining anyone can feel anything differently than I do. So I accidentally overwhelm her energy, drain it to zero, then rush off for my next thing.
As you might imagine, those two combine in some very disruptive ways. We're working through it. The crux is looking like a discussion around energy slots in her day. Let's say she gets a high and a low, or two mediums. That's only 14 in a week. We need to be judicious in allocating and protecting those.
Once our household executive function is better sorted, I expect my energy will need another outlet. My suspicion is I'll favor very constrained targets. Go all in on X, opposed to letting my attention wander everywhere. The latter is my default. I think I can benefit from acting opposite.
Anyway, that's the essence of what I haven't made time to consolidate. It unfolded in several steps over the last few months, and my brain is already distracted by the next one.