By: Thomas Cheeseman
Why a 5-minute task can feel impossible
I recently had the privilege of attending a workshop on supporting parents of children with ADHD, run by the fantastic Dr Maddi Derrick MAPS. It brought together many concepts and ideas about supporting children and their families that I have been building knowledge on for a long time, and translated them into clear and practical language. Interestingly, I have found many of these ideas applying well beyond ADHD and parenting contexts.
The concepts of executive functioning having a “capacity” and tasks having both visible and invisible “demands” seem foundational, yet they are incredibly important as we consider our own limitations and the judgements we often make about ourselves and others. These ideas can help us proactively set ourselves—and those around us—up for success, while moving away from simply attributing difficulties to “a lack of effort or ability”.
Capacity
What do I mean by capacity? Let’s start with this idea, no matter how much we might want our concentration, emotion regulation and energy to be limitless, they are not. We are finite beings with finite resources. In this context, capacity refers to our self-regulatory ability to function in prompting motivation, maintaining concentration, problem solving, regulating our emotions, and other executive functioning roles.
Importantly, capacity is not fixed. It fluctuates from day to day and even hour to hour. Poor sleep, illness, stress, grief, anxiety, sensory overload, parenting demands, relationship difficulties and major life transitions can all reduce the resources we have available.
This is often where people become frustrated with themselves. We compare today’s performance to a day when we had greater resources available and conclude that we are lazy, unmotivated or failing. In reality, we may simply be attempting to meet the same demands with significantly less available capacity.
Supporting Capacity
While we cannot create unlimited capacity, there are many ways we can support and protect the capacity we do have. Some examples include:
- Prioritising adequate sleep and rest.
- Taking regular breaks before reaching exhaustion.
- Building routines that reduce decision fatigue.
- Managing stress through movement, mindfulness or social connection.
- Using reminders, calendars, other people and systems to reduce the amount we need to hold in our minds.
- Recognising when our resources are running low and adjusting expectations accordingly.
Rather than asking, “Why can’t I do this?”, it can sometimes be more helpful to ask, “What is my capacity like right now?”
Task(s) Demand
The demands of a task are perhaps more obvious. They include all the requirements and components that draw upon our capacity. However, this also includes the thinking, emotional responses, associations and other internal processes that accompany a task.
For example, if I were asked to build a table, some of the demands would be reading the manual, gathering the tools and physically assembling the pieces. But there are also less visible demands: remembering where the tools are, estimating how long the task will take, tolerating frustration when something does not fit together and trying not to think about my less-than-stellar track record in woodwork at school!
The same principle applies to everyday tasks. Sending an email may involve deciding what to say, remembering previous conversations, worrying about how it will be received and overcoming the urge to continue your current, more interesting task. The visible task is often only part of the story. In reality, when we start to compare our capacity to the demands that we need to undertake, it is usually to a number, collection or lists of different tasks with different demands across a period of class; afternoon of work or whole day.
Demand Awareness
A helpful skill we can develop is learning to identify the hidden demands attached to a task.
When people say, “I know it’s only a five-minute job, so why can’t I do it?”, there is often an assumption that the visible task is the entire task. Once we unpack it, we frequently discover multiple additional demands competing for the same limited resources.
For example, booking a medical appointment might involve:
- Stopping your favourite relaxing task
- Finding the phone number
- Calling during business hours
- Managing anxiety about making the call
- Remembering relevant information
- Rearranging work or family commitments
What appears simple from the outside may actually draw upon a range of executive functioning skills. [It makes more sense now why I put off seeing the Dentist!]
Developing awareness of these hidden demands can be surprisingly powerful. It helps explain why some tasks feel disproportionately difficult and can reduce our tendency to understand these as personal failings.
Reducing Demands
If capacity and demands interact, there are generally two ways to improve the likelihood of success: support capacity or reduce demands.
Reducing demands is not “taking the easy way out”- It can be a more sustainable and effective form of moving towards our goals.
Some general examples of this could look like:
- Breaking large tasks into smaller, more manageable steps.
- Preparing materials ahead of time.
- Using visual reminders, checklists or templates.
- Completing challenging tasks during times of higher energy.
- Delegating or sharing parts of a task where possible.
- Reducing distractions in the environment.
- Allowing “good enough” rather than striving for perfection.
It’s not just completing one task that can benefit from this type of thinking, but also maintaining capacity for other demands in the day.
Bringing it Together
Many of us have been taught to explain success or failure primarily by effort. Sometimes the solution is not to try harder. Sometimes it is making adjustments that better match the resources we have available.
Whether we are supporting a child, partner, colleague or ourselves, it can be helpful to ask two simple questions:
- What is the current available capacity?
- What are the visible and invisible demands of this task?
These questions often lead us away from judgement and towards understanding. More importantly, they help us identify practical changes that can make success more likely.
Article supplied with thanks to The Centre for Effective Living.
Feature image: Canva
