Here are some of my best tips, tricks, tools and strategies for surviving in a creative field and producing art/creative ideas on a regular schedule while struggling with ADHD: a MEGATHREAD

(Caveat: everyone experiences mental illness a bit differently. YMMV)

So, first off, a bit of context: I've been working in video games for more than 10 years and I only learned that I have ADHD during this past year. All of these strategies are things that I have found have helped ME but you may personally find other coping methods more helpful

I've spent most of those past 10 years in video games working as a concept artist and a few of them as a Lead and an Art Manger. The kickass thing about having ADHD as a concept artist is that I got paid to come up with LOTS OF IDEAS REALLY QUICKLY

The really really REALLY hard thing about having ADHD as a concept artist was that I had a super hard time regularly producing those rapidfire ideas in a way that was consistently reliable and followed any kind of "regular" schedule. I had to develop some strategies to adapt

When I started out as a young artist I found that I would have long spans of time where I made nothing and then sudden bursts of ideas that I would let flow out of me until I was utterly exhausted and spent. I soon found working like this doesn't work well in school or at work

As I grew as an artist it always seemed like other artists had an easier time than I did and things were more effortless for them. I always felt like I was about to drown. These are some of the things I invented in my head to keep myself afloat:

Strategy 1: Make peace with the fact that when your ideas are flowing you will never be able to capture them all. Don't run around like a person in a wind machine desperately trying to catch dollar bills. Accept that some of your ideas will slip from your grasp and that's OK

Don't desperately try to cling to and record every thought and idea you have while wondering "IS THIS THE BIG ONE???" Don't live in fear that you will have a great big idea and then if you miss it or forget it you will be dooooomed. Accept that you will forget lots of cool ideas

The ideas will always come one day. They will never leave you forever. Treat your ideas like a river that you sometimes visit. There is too much water in the river to ever catch with your small bucket but what you are able to collect from it will sustain you

Strategy: How to draw something when you feel frozen or stuck in a loop. The problem is you want to draw but feel like you're stuck scrolling through social media or gathering reference or re-arranging your desk and OH GOD SUDDENLY THE WHOLE DAY HAS PASSED AND YOU DID NOTHING!

Here are a few things to try to help get out of the loop and actually DO THE DRAWING. Put on some music and tell yourself that your pen will hit the paper as soon as the song starts. Set a timer for how long you can reply to emails/look at social media and when it buzzes stop

Segment your day so that distracting tasks that you tend to "loop" get limited to very specific windows. ie- "I'll answer as many emails as I can from 9AM to noon but from lunch until 4PM that's my special drawing time and I can't do emails or anything else"

As a Lead Concept Artist I ended up cutting up my day exactly like that whenever possible. I found it super helpful to try to limit all meetings/feedback sessions/email replies to the mornings and then deliberately schedule the afternoon as "painting time only"

If you need this structure it's (in a healthy work place it should be) OK to be vocal about it and set boundaries with your coworkers. Explicitly say stuff like "If we can try to avoid doing meetings on Thursdays that would help me a lot. Thursday is my Painting Focus Day"

Strategy: Drop as many plates as possible. When you have ADHD you can feel really anxious that you might forget all the things you have to remember to do and holding all those thoughts in your mind can feel a little bit like you're spinning a bunch of fragile plates in the air

Maybe this drawing you're supposed to be doing right now is one plate and another plate you're spinning is "I should really email Frank back about that thing" and another fragile plate you're holding in the air is "I really need to remember to pay the mortage when I get home"

It can feel like a disaster if you drop one of the plates. (ie-"OH GOD I FORGOT TO PAY THE MORTGAGE!") The way I stop myself from existing in this fragile state where I'm precariously spinning all these plates is that I write a ton of stuff down on calendars and in notepads

If I schedule a monthly reminder that beeps and flashes on my screen and says "PAY THE MORGAGE TODAY" and if I keep a notepad near my work computer where I write down a list with things like "email Frank back" then I can set down those thoughts and focus on just the painting

It's a blessed relief to just go ahead and write down all the shit that I "should be able to remember." Writing stuff down is not admitting defeat. It's using a helpful tool so I can free free and unburden my mind enough to get lost in a painting

Strategy: Limit art tools to ONLY what you need. With ADHD I found myself spending an absurd amount of time doing things like picking the exact perfect brush from a list of hundreds of other brushes in Photoshop. To stop this I made a series of limited brush "short lists"

Now, when I paint landscapes I only load my "landscape brushes short list." When I draw humans in a pencil style I only load up my "pencil imitation brushes shortlist" etc etc. It stops me from getting lost in the overwhelming cornucopia of infinite PS brush menus

I do that as much as possible for every single tool I use. I remove all the extra menus and gadgets and toolbars from my field of view wherever I can and only take out the tools I'm using. Does CSP have a cool perspective tool? Yes. But if I'm not using it I keep it OUT OF SIGHT

Strategy: Sometimes I pretend I'm a pilot. With ADHD I tend to miss a lot of details. This can sometimes lead to me forgetting to do really obvious small repetitive tasks that I should be remembering. I'll find myself doing things like forgetting to check in files on Perforce etc

So, after listening to some pilots run through a series of checklists before takeoff on a plane I flew on once I had this weird idea: "Why don't I just make Art Flight Checklists for my art tasks and run through my Art Flight Checklists before I send out art for approval?"

So I have a few Art Flight Checklists that I made that are sitting on my desk right now. Sample Art Flight Checklist: 1)Did you add material callouts to the concept? 2)Did you draw a back view? 3)Did you submit your file to Perforce? and literally I run through and check them off

As an Art Manager I also have Art Flight Checklists that I run through when people ask me to critique their art. An example of what you might find on one of those are questions like 1)Does it follow the style guide? 3)Does it solve the problem it set out to solve?

ADHD strategy: schedule "discovery" or "play" time. One of the things I found myself struggling with due to ADHD is that I can find that I let the things I "need to do" grow and grow to fill up all my free time until I find myself without any time to have fun or play

If I'm not careful I can spend all my free time doing work tasks or cleaning my house or doing chores etc but the problem is that as a creative person I NEED to spend time playing and discovering because that discovery playtime is often when I learn and grow the most as an artist

Something I did to help me with this is that I made a special meeting just for me. For an hour every morning I made it "Kat can sketch whatever she wants hour." I was scared to do this at first because I had a LOT of work to do and felt like I couldn't spare a single second

What I found is that sacrificing this single hour didn't make me a worse employee or put me behind on my tasks. Deliberately setting this special hour aside to sketch freely led to me being more creative and more experimental and generating even better work faster

Another thing I did that helped me find time to play again is that I started making lists of cool things I wanted to do or see and then on the weekend I made it a point to always pick at least one thing from the "cool and fun things to do" list and then actually do it!

Sure, I've got my running list of chores and work I have to accomplish but I ALSO have my handy list of "cool fun things to do" that says stuff like "Watch Frozen 2" or "Play an hour of Disco Elysium" or "get tickets to a comedy show"

Now, whenever I feel totally paralyzed by that familiar ADHD feeling of "Oh shit I'm supposed to be relaxing right now but when I open this Netflix menu up I don't know what to even begin watching" I can just pull out my "cool and fun things to do" list and find a show on it

I've got the same thing going for art ideas. If I find myself sitting at my home computer thinking "oh shit I'm supposed to be sketching for fun right now but I don't know what to sketch!" I have a handy list on my phone of "leisure sketch ideas" that I add to while working

Another ADHD strategy: PHYSICAL EXERCISE. I had a big problem sitting still in meetings and sitting at my desk all day working on paintings and I found that something that helped me a ton was setting aside time to lift weights and jog. I started doing those during lunch every day

Final ADHD artist coping strategy before I end this thread: Before I leave my workdesk for the day I note down what I want to accomplish the next morning and leave that list on my keyboard at work so I don't have to waste any brainpower on it at home and I can just relax

So, anyway, those are a few of my 'surviving as an artist with ADHD' coping strategies. I have more, but I can only write so many in a single Twitter thread. I hope some of you find these useful or find yourselves inspired to explore your own individual strategies

Addendum: behold the horrifyingly sloppily scrawled paper list that I wrote up my ideas for this Twitter thread on while I was jogging during lunch today