Happy Tax Day! (And How I Cope With That)

We got our taxes done a few weeks ago, which is good news. Taxes are another horrible-for-ADHD thing I hear a lot about. I’ve mostly gotten past that myself, so I’ll take a couple of minutes to describe how I’ve managed:

1. Electronic everything. The advent of electronic banking was a godsend to me once I started having enough money to not be able to do my entire budget in my head. It's then easy to get a spreadsheet of what your money is doing (electronic purchases are automatically logged). Like regular Agile, Agile4ADHD recommends outsourcing tedious work to computers whenever possible.
   I’d even go so far as to say you should never be doing data entry by hand if you can possibly avoid it. That creates a “single point of failure”, which essentially means “if you mess it up, you’re screwed”. Humans are in general unreliable for tasks that are tedious, particular, and numerous; ADHD-rs even more so. Many ND folk have a lot of shame around this, so you might have to “clean up” some bad feelings about your inability to record minutia as reliably as a computer. But you’re not a computer, you’re a human being, and there is no sense in feeling bad about your humanity.

2. Granular bookkeeping processes If you have a task that you really hate doing, that aversion increases what’s called your “initiation threshold” for a certain task. It helps to think of this as a sort of barrier between you and what you are trying to do. When the barrier is low, it’s very easy to step over it. When the barrier is high, it can feel like scaling a tall fence (with pointy things on top). And of course, it’s challenging for us to keep doing something that’s so uncomfortable.
   One way around both of those problems is to make the unpleasant task as small as possible. I can frequently get bookkeeping done when I’m in the process of procrastinating another task that I hate more –another favorite trick.

3. Hire help It never occurred to me to do this before I had partners who did. Growing up, taxes were something that one did oneself, mainly because of the expense. But (thanks to information technology) tax preparation is (proportionately) no longer that expensive. We paid roughly as much as it costs for a "splurge restaurant" or one night in a fancy hotel for our tax preparation. And we get a LOT more "quality of life" value than we would from either of those treats. So I highly recommend this if you can afford it. As long as you have lots of automated electronic logging (see #1), number-crunching is relatively simple.

Anyway, hope that helps and (if you are still pulling out your hair because you’ve left this till the last moment), just file an extension. Which is the way I used to handle this problem.