Organisation...

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Does anyone else here have problems with organising themselves unless they have set routines in place?

I find that when it comes to organising any collections I have that relate to my hobbies I am happy to spend hours organising them but when it comes to thinks like arranging appointments or doing the house work my organisational abilities are awful unless I have a set day, time and order of doing them each week. In fact if I don't have a set routine etc it won't get done because I am too busy organising my collections or indulging my hobby instead, and even when I do have set routines they are organised in such a way to allow as much hobby time as possible. It's all about hobby time.

Am I alone?

No. No you're not.

You aren't the only one; though I'll go into phases where I organize everything in sight on occasion (my mother loves those because it's the only time the kitchen cupboards get cleaned and neatened up ).

Close - for me, the main iszsue is that outside pressures block organization and often disrupt even the most basic routines.

Next week - Tuesday - I am due to attend a meeting in another city. This tuime I do not have to prepare for it - so it will only take me a week to get back on track - if nothing gets in the way.

Oh... I can very much relate to everything said in this thread...

My hobbies are always infinitely more interesting than doing what I'm supposed to be doing.

If I have a day off and plenty of time to get things done, I get virtually nothing done. If I don't have a set routine I get lost. This happened yesterday and I spent the day feeling like I was in a fog. It was actually hard to form sentences in my own head.

You are not the only one. I am either super organized or a complete mess. There is nothing in between. Exactly like you, I can spend hours organizing something that I am interested in. If something does not interest me, though, even a minute feels like a year.

I have severe problems with organization. I have an upper limit beyond which it seems to take geometrically larger amounts of an energy to maintain organization, and I am pretty close to that upper limit right now.

I also find that when I have to do things outside my routines, it can disrupt my day or my week, depending. I mean things like filling out forms, or making phone calls, going to an appointment, going to the store, helping someone else with something. At the very minimum I generally have to decompress for a period of time before I can do anything else, which often includes being able to get back to my routine.

Nothing spoils my day like having a task that MUST be done. While I have a strong routine, its aim is not seeing to it that must-dos are done, rather it's to tie up my time with easy and familiar tasks so the must-do must be put off until tomorrow. And, predictably, tomorrow there will be no time either. The only way around this is to make a bargain with myself to spend a brief time, say 10 minutes, on the must-do, after which I can return to the routine. Sometimes I find the must-do isn't so bad and I will work on it until it is finished, or substantially so. But just as often, there will be a week or month or decade of 10-minute sessions; eventually they may even become part of the routine.

Massive, massive problems without routines--don't handle change to routines well either. Change=collapse.

I have to have my routines but when it comes to objects I am seriously organizationally challenged.

The catch 22 when you have ADD-inattentive is that you need structure and routine but find it very difficult to establish it. When they do brain scans on people with ADD-PI while performing a difficult mental task, they find that prefrontal cortex activity actually decreases.