With Adult ADHD, when we are in a hurry, we blunder in glorious ways. If only there was a way to prevent that.
I have a quickie tip for you today as I’m blazing around my life like some earthbound comet.
Last month, I was quickly packaging up an item I had sold on eBay. The item was secure. The box was sealed. All it needed was a shipping label.
I don’t sell a lot on eBay, but I’ve got a system I’ve developed over the years. After I pay for the postage online, I both print the label AND save it as a PDF. Redundancy is good for these sorts of things. When I went to fetch the printed label, I discovered that the UPC code was all smeared. Back to the Mac I went, but since I had closed the tab, I opened up the PDF and printed from there, this time at a higher DPI and clarity.
The second printout looked great, so I clipped the shipping label out and prepared to tape it to my package. That’s when I stopped myself.
”Which PDF did I print?”
You see, I had shipped another package out the day before. There were two shipping label PDFs on my Mac. I double-checked and just as I suspected, I had printed out the previous customer’s address!
Trust yourself, but don’t trust your ADHD
Although I have never mailed a package out to the wrong person, it is precisely because I am prone to careless mistakes like this that I double-check myself.
We all can get careless when in a hurry whether we have ADHD or not. However, I’ve noticed that when I am hurried, I tend to make careless mistakes of such magnitude that outside viewers boggle at their wonder. It would be just like me to mislabel a package, just as it’s just like me to hurry off to the post office without my wallet—or worse—without my package.
Always Double Check
By building double-checking into my shipping habits, I catch most of my mistakes before they head out the door. In fact, I’m surprised I don’t double-check everything in my life.
But then again, if I was always careful, what would I write about here?
