do you have tips for working on a car when you have adhd?
Purchase a tear-down manual for your car. For older cars these are books you can buy at auto parts stores. For newer cars these are subscriptions that you have to get and the primary producers are Chilton's and Haynes. If you end up getting a subscription, you are going to download and print out the manual. The entire manual. And you are going to put it in a three ring binder and then put that binder in a waterproof bag. And then you are going to cancel your subscription. Digital access to your car manual is not enough; someday you will be away from cell signal or with a dead phone battery and will need to fix your car. Someday you will need to fix your car and your hands will be either greasy or in gloves and you won't be able to scroll on a screen. You need a physical manual for your car.
No matter where you keep your tools, the tear-down manual lives in the car.
Have an organization system for your tools. It needs to be a system that works for you.
My system is a very organized toolbox where I put everything back as soon as the project is done. Wrenches are kept on carabiners, sockets are kept in dedicated boxes, the car tools stay in the car or in the car maintenance cupboard.
Large Bastard's system is three five-gallon buckets full of wrenches and breaker bars and an ammo can full of sockets.
Our systems are mutually exclusive. He is not allowed to use my tools. If he uses my wrenches they end up in the bucket and then the 14mm is missing from my set and the 14mm is the one I need for everything on this car and I have to go buy another fucking wrench no, absolutely not, stop taking my wrenches.
So the deal is that you need to know what system works for you and how to navigate it; Large Bastard has many duplicates of things because he uses tools for a ton of things and has a really huge volume of tools. It's more effective for him to have ten places to search for a tool and will be likely to find one, and it's more effective for me to know exactly where the tool lives. Which brings me to my second tip:
Keep an eye out for tools at yard sales and secondhand stores. Tools are expensive. If you are a frequent tool-loser, don't invest in expensive tools. It's okay if Large Bastard steals and loses my SAE wrench set in a bucket because that was seven dollars at Harbor Freight.
No matter what your system is, have a designated general area where "car maintenance stuff" goes. This may be a box in a truck bed or a cabinet in a garage or a bag in your trunk, but you're going to end up buying brake pads that you mean to install but then it's raining for three days so you set them down somewhere and now you can't find the pads. You're not going to use the whole bottle of coolant every time you top off your coolant, so you need a space (that is INACCESSIBLE TO CHILDREN AND PETS) to store the half-bottle of coolant.
Okay. So now you've got your tool system and your car-based junk-drawer. Before you start any car project, make sure you've got all the tools that the project calls for. That means BEFORE you start working on the project, you look through your tear-down manual and watch a youtube video or two and make sure you know what tools are required, because if you get halfway through a repair and realize that you need some vacuum hose you are going to stop doing the repair to go buy hose and it's a total crapshoot whether you're going to get back to the task. I'll repeat again: IF YOU ARE DOING CAR MAINTENANCE WITH ADHD, DO NOT START A PROJECT OR REPAIR UNTIL YOU ARE CERTAIN YOU HAVE ALL THE TOOLS, PARTS, AND CONSUMABLES THAT YOU WILL NEED TO COMPLETE THE JOB.
You are going to mis-en-place this thing. Get a tool caddy or a plastic bin or something, read or watch the instructions for the repair all the way through and put each required tool or part in the bin. If you need to order parts or if a tool is lost, write that down as you're adding things to the bin. Then set the bin aside and acquire those things before you pop the hood. Once you have acquired those things, put them in the bin too, and then check the instructions again to verify that you have all the necessary equipment to do your repair.
As a corollary, before you make any car maintenance purchase, check and make sure you didn't already buy it and forget. Do you need oil for this oil change? Or did you buy five quarts three months ago when there was a sale and forget it? This is why you have your car-related storage area. Go through the instructions for the repair when you are able to look in the car-stuff-pit and see if you already have the car stuff.
Okay. You have your repair in mind. You have all the tools you need. You have all the parts purchased. You have your tear-down manual. Now you need to:
Make sure that you have an open space to work and that you are following good car maintenance safety procedures
- Never work on a car that is up on a jack, use jack stands
- If you have a wheel off, put the wheel under the frame
- Disconnect the battery if necessary (the manual will tell you what repairs to do this for)
Check the weather and make sure you will be able to accomplish the repairs safely
- If you need to get under a car, don't repair that car in the rain
- If it is hot, make sure that you have some shade for your workspace; an easy-up is an oft-neglected car maintenance tool
- If it is very, very cold, make sure you are protecting your hands from frostbite (you are going to be getting your hands wet and messy and then touching cold metal; you may not realize it if your fingers turn blue or lose feeling)
Make sure that this is the correct time to start a repair project
- Will you have enough light to get the project done in the daylight or do you need artificial lighting?
- Do you have obligations that will cause problems if this repair runs long?
- Are you hungry or exhausted? Wait to start until you have eaten or rested. You don't want to be too tired to think when you're working on a car.
Part two: Project (these are the answers you were probably looking for)
Every repair is going to be different, but all repairs are going to have some things in common. They're going to require some kind of equipment or tools, they're going to take some amount of time, they're going to require some amount of focus. Here are the things you can do to guard against your ADHD sabotaging you in regard to those things.
Use your phone to take a photo of what the repair area looked like before you started - make sure the photo(s) demonstrates where pins, screws, nuts, bolts, hoses and clamps were when you started.
Use a tool caddy or a plastic bin to keep your tools, parts, and consumables together as you are preparing for the repair.
Get a work blanket or a tarp to set your tools on top of as you're working if you're working under the car, or a bin to set tools in if you're working in the engine compartment; this prevents you from having to chase down that wrench that you set on top of the airbox and that promptly became invisible.
Have a container handy for screws, nuts, bolts, etc. Paper bowls are good for this purpose, as are old prescription bottles and peanut butter jars. Don't use a glass jar or a ceramic mug or anything that can shatter. Sometimes something that's relatively flat that you can lay parts out in is best for this purpose (for example a paper plate or a shoebox lid) and sometimes the best thing is something with a lid so you won't lose nuts if you knock it down (plastic jars or pill bottles). When you are finished taking apart whatever it is that you're taking apart, count the number of nuts and screws and pins you've removed and make sure that's how many you put back.
How long a repair will take is difficult to predict; maybe it's super easy to get at a part you thought would be harder, maybe some dipshit decided to JB Weld a nut in place. Have some idea (from your manual or instructional video) of how long the task *should* take and assess whether you have the focus for a task of that length on that day. If you take meds, consider timing them to best facilitate the repair.
You know you better than I do; know if you will need a break. If you know you will need a break, prep your break ahead of time so that you won't have to stop for an hour to make lunch. Have a sandwich ready, have water nearby, have a comfortable place to sit set up close to your workspace so that you don't go inside, wash your hands, and suddenly remember that you needed to clean the grout in the kitchen and get distracted into a different task.
Obviously the last point is related to focus as well, but minimize potential distractions. Tell people you aren't available, set your phone to do not disturb, don't turn on the game on a TV in the garage. I find that I do well listening to stuff when I'm working on cars, but I don't do well with anything that I could watch or with having people around to talk to. I like music and podcasts when I'm working on cars.
Limit your scope. Maybe you're replacing rotted-out hoses and you remember that you were feeling some squishiness in the brakes. The brakes are a problem for later you. You are not working on the brakes now. You do not have your tools gathered for brake repair. You are working on the hoses now. (Aside from preventing you from losing tools, this is another reason to collect the tools you will need for each project instead of bringing your entire tool set out to work on the job - you can't work on the brakes, you only have the tools out for working on hoses right now)
Limit reasons to walk away from the repair. Go to the bathroom before you start. Have extra sets of gloves and shop towels handy. Climate control the area and yourself as much as possible (do you need a sweater? do you need a hat? do you need sunscreen? get that squared away before you start so you don't have to walk away in the middle and risk getting distracted)
When you're getting the thing buttoned up, make sure you use all of the parts that you took out. Compare against the photo you took at the start and count the screws.
Read back through the instructions step by step and make sure you did each step. Do this twice.
Manually check tightness of every part you worked on and visually check fluid levels (shoutout to the sketchy mechanic offering $15 oil changes who was surprised as fuck when I came back ten minutes after my oil change because I'd checked and the oil pan plug was only finger tight; turns out he was running a scam)
Clean up your workspace, both to get things tidy and to make sure you didn't overlook any parts.
Take the vehicle for a test drive. Make sure things are running well. If they are not running well, go back to your workspace and go through the troubleshooting steps in the manual to see if you can identify the problem (shoutout to the saturn dealership for the time they got water in my plug wires on my station wagon, shoutout to me for the time i got the order wrong on my saturn coupe plug wires)
If your car is working fine and you don't find yourself with seven extra hoses and a mystery solenoid, good job, you're done, put your tools away and pat yourself on the back.
Get a teardown manual for your car
Keep your tools organized in a system that makes sense for you
Don't invest in expensive tools if you lose tools frequently
Before you start a project, make sure you've got all the necessary tools, parts, and fluids; before you buy tools, parts, or fluids check and see if you already have it.
Use a tool caddy or bin to keep the parts, tools, and fluids in one place while you're getting ready to start
Make sure that you have the space, time, and physical safety to start a project
Take a photo of the repair before you start to mark the position of bolts, pins, etc.
Have a designated space like a bin or a tarp to set down tools while you're working so that you don't set them down and lose them
Have a container to old fasteners and small parts so you don't lose them; count the parts you take out and make sure you put that many back in
Figure out how long the repair might take and realistically assess whether or not you have time to start
Plan breaks that will minimize your need to walk away from the project
Work on one thing at a time, making sure each thing is complete and tested before you start another repair.
Limit reasons to walk away (see my write-up of Success Traps for more details)
Make sure you put back all the fasteners you took out
Mentally walk through the instructions at the end of the project to make sure you did each step
Verify that everything you worked on is properly tightened and filled
Clean up your workspace and make sure you didn't overlook any parts
Test drive the car to make sure it's working well and troubleshoot any problems that come up
Put your tools away so you can find them next time
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