Getting stuck on a task

Hello!

I repeatedly struggle with getting stuck on certain tasks. The most obvious example would be during an exam. I recently had a chemistry exam and came to a task where I got stuck. In this case it was actually because of it being unsolvable (some of the materials were missing). Due to it being unsolvable it was especially fatal for my time management and I ended up not finishing the rest of the exam. This happens a lot during exams, although I mostly struggle a bit less with the time than in this case since I actually do solve the challenging problem at one point, but it is still super annoying. 
This phenomenon is also not limited to exams. It occurs in multiple aspects of my life and can be extremely debilitating. Whenever I’m not able to finish something or I don’t understand something fully, it gets stuck in my head for hours or even days, keeping me from focusing on other things.

Does anybody have advice on how to deal with that? Are there any strategies to avoid these loops? What are your experiences with that?

  • Thank you very much, I’ll try to practice that.

  • Are there any strategies to avoid these loops?

    I used to experience this sort of tasks in my job (I worked as IT support for decades and there are always problems that are so elusive you can spend days on then if you do not implement something called a stop loss.

    Effectively you need to allocate time to a task and if the task takes longer then you have to stop, flag it for attention later and move on to the next task which will hopefully be faster to fix or more deserving of your time.

    In your case I would use a stopwatch on each question and if you take longer than it would expect then stop and move on, coming back to it at the end IF you have time.

    You need to practice this to condition yourself to use it effectively as out obsessive ways of thinking can make us think "just 5 more minutes".

    The system does work very well and trusting it over your tendencies to obsess will keep you on track.

    That is how I learned to do it and have trained dozens of techies over the years with success (not all were autistic mind you).