I have a confession to make. I almost never arrive where I intended to go by the route I planned.
Sometimes that’s literal. I’ll walk upstairs to get my glasses, notice the washing basket, remember I need to email someone, spot a book I’ve been meaning to read, feed Milo because I’m standing in the kitchen anyway, and eventually find myself back downstairs wondering why I went up in the first place.
Other times it’s how I work. I’ll sit down intending to write a paper and find myself redesigning a framework because I spotted a gap that suddenly feels impossible to ignore. I’ll be halfway through one project when another idea quietly taps me on the shoulder and whispers, ‘Just have a quick look at this first.’ It’s not that I’ve forgotten what I was supposed to be doing. I haven’t. My brain has simply decided that something else looks more interesting for a little while.
The funny thing is, those detours are often incredibly productive. Some of the best ideas I’ve ever had weren’t the thing I sat down to think about. They appeared while I was exploring something that, on the surface, seemed completely unrelated. That’s one of the joys of an associative brain. Creativity doesn’t always arrive when you ask for it. Sometimes it sneaks in through the side door while you’re busy doing something else entirely.
The trouble is that side quests have a habit of breeding. One interesting article leads to another. That reminds me of a conversation. The conversation sparks an idea for a workshop. The workshop needs an infographic. While I’m sketching that out, I realise another project could use the same framework. Before I know it, two hours have disappeared and I’ve been astonishingly productive… just not on the thing I originally opened my laptop to do.
Meet the Side Quest Monster
That’s where today’s monster lives.
The Side Quest Monster is endlessly curious. She isn’t trying to derail me. Quite the opposite. She’s convinced that every shiny new path might lead to something brilliant and, to be fair, she’s often right. The problem is that she has absolutely no sense of proportion. Every idea feels equally exciting. Every diversion feels equally important. She never stops to ask whether today is actually the right day for that particular adventure.
Barry watches her with an expression that says he’s seen this all before. ‘The problem isn’t the side quest,’ he tells me. ‘The problem is forgetting which journey you were on.’
That one sentence explains so much of my adult life. I’ve stopped trying to eliminate side quests because they’re part of how I think. Many of them have led to training programmes, research papers, new ideas and conversations that simply wouldn’t have happened if I’d marched in a straight line. Instead, I’ve learnt to give them somewhere to live until I’m ready for them. I have electronic notepads full of ideas, whiteboards covered in half-formed connections, mind maps branching in every direction, project folders that started life as a single thought and files upon files of notes that would probably look like organised chaos to anyone else. To me, they’re not clutter; they’re a parking space for ideas. They give me somewhere to put the thought so I might come back to it without abandoning the journey I was already on.
It doesn’t always work.
Sometimes the Side Quest Monster wins. I’ll look up an hour later having redesigned something that wasn’t broken, built half a framework for an entirely different project or disappeared down a rabbit hole that seemed like an excellent idea at the time. But I’ve learnt that writing myself one simple sentence improves my odds: Good idea. Not today.
Three short words. Good idea. Not today.
They don’t stop the side quests altogether, but they do give my brain permission to let go of the idea for now. Sometimes that’s all it takes. Sometimes it isn’t. Barry usually smiles either way because he knows that, if the idea really matters, it will still be there tomorrow.
Side A and Barry’s B-side
The Side Quest Monster gets Side A with ‘Road to Nowhere’ by Talking Heads. Not because the journey is pointless, but because, from the outside, it can look as though I’ve wandered off in a completely random direction. The reality is that I’m usually discovering something useful along the way, even if nobody else can quite see where I’m headed.
Barry’s B-side is ‘You Get What You Give’ by New Radicals. He likes to remind me that curiosity is one of my greatest strengths. The aim isn’t to stop exploring. It’s to choose when to explore. A side quest followed deliberately can become innovation. A side quest followed automatically can quietly steal an afternoon.
If you work with someone who has ADHD, you might occasionally wonder how they’ve managed to spend three hours working incredibly hard without completing the task you asked them to do. It isn’t usually because they weren’t trying. More often, their attention attached itself to the most interesting problem in the room instead of the most urgent one. That’s one of the reasons external priorities, gentle check-ins and clear agreements about what ‘finished’ looks like can be so helpful.
These days, when I catch myself halfway through reorganising a folder I didn’t intend to open or researching something that has absolutely nothing to do with the report I was writing, I smile. The Side Quest Monster has appeared again. Barry quietly points back towards the thread I was following. ‘Finish this one first,’ he says. ‘The next adventure isn’t going anywhere.’ Most of the time, he’s right. Although, knowing the Side Quest Monster, she’s probably already found another one for tomorrow.