printable highlight 🌟 the ED-Aid
my first free printable, y’all!!! i already released it via IG last week, but i’m extra af tumblr’s a whole other platform, so i took the time to write about it instead of just posting a couple screenshots and leaving it at that. (link will be at the end of the post.)
—disclaimer: ED in this case stands for Executive Dysfunction, not Eating Disorder. it won’t be discussed in too much detail here, so i highly encourage you to look it up yourself. you can start with this article as well as posts about it here on tumblr. however, a deep understanding of the concept won’t be necessary for you to be able to use the printable.
—cw: mentions of mental illness and recovery
i. some context
last week, my sister opened up about feeling paralyzed from the pressure of all the things she needs and wants to do, and how s/hitty she felt about herself because she couldn’t bring herself to do any of it no matter how hard she tried. it sounded a lot like something i went through often before i got help for my Bipolar, i.e. executive dysfunction. i had more than the usual amount of trouble dealing with concentration, planning, decision-making, and doing what my brain tells me to do.
it was a horrible time, but i’m a stubborn person, so i found a way to cope with it, among other things, in order to still function as a student in uni who had a lot of coursework to do. i did my research and tried out a dozen tips and tricks from people and articles suggesting strictly sticking to a routine, improving your discipline, etc., but none of them worked for me personally. finally, i just set up my own system, which takes unexpected depressive and hypomanic episodes, unstable energy levels, a wrecked body clock, and general impulsiveness into account. this printable is one of the tools i used—and still use—as part of that system. behold, the ED-Aid: (tap on the photo for better quality.)
ii. how it works
it did not look like this back then, but the idea behind it is the same: remove some of the responsibility from yourself. this is important because i frequently caught myself overthinking the amount of time it would take to do a certain task and how important or urgent it was compared to all the other tasks i had lined up, but all of them were important and urgent and would take up time i could be using to do everything else—it was a mess, and at the center of that mess was the decision: “where do i start?” “what do i do first?” if you have a heirarchy of values, it would be easy to answer, but for people like me, it’s pretty rattling.
to solve the issue of choosing a task to prioritize and crumbling under the weight of the possible consequences of not prioritizing something else before i even actually do anything, i just sorted my tasks into categories to narrow them down. then, i put them in list form or in boxes as shown above, so i can see a physical representation, and i let chance decide.
to do so, you just close your eyes, let your finger or a pen or a nail file, a wand, the foot of a plushie, whatever glide over the page randomly, and wherever it lands when you stop will dictate which category you’ll focus on first so you have significantly less tasks to choose from. and if anything should go wrong, you can blame the chart. or blame fate. it was off your hands, so..
iii. the product
here are a few samples of the printable itself, including blank versions for people who want to put their own personal categories or prefer choosing from a pre-determined set of tasks instead of categories:
these are just 3 of 8 color varieties, including warmer tones of brown. the full-page size is A4, but there are also postcard-sized versions as well as ones that can easily fit in your journal or planner.
this printable is completely FREE OF CHARGE. you don’t even have to be following me to use it; just please don’t be a jerk and pass it off as your own or re-post it with “ctto” and nothing else. if you’re feeling generous tho, you can send me tips via ko-fi!
i hope y’all enjoy the printable if you decide to try it out, and that it helps you out in some way. don’t forget to tag me if you post about it so i can see!! with all that said, simply CLICK HERE TO SEE AND DOWNLOAD THE PDFs.
—Rein
