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Planning With ADHD: What I Love and Cannot Stand
Updated: Aug 18
Want to know what I LOVE?
Making a plan.
It’s deliciously full of ALL the excitement that could be and all of my dreams begin to come alive.
Want to know what I cannot stand?
Making a plan. I have to get really serious about what I actually want and begin to understand the reality of what time is and how it shows up in my life. It’s annoying.
When every other structure ran my life
In the past, I let every other source of structure dictate my whims. At work, I lived by my email as a to do list, volunteered for all the additional projects, and seemingly took on 3 more roles on top of my leadership duties. I genuinely wanted to be doing all the things.
ON the flip side, I would wait until the last minute to do the regular requirements I had for the job and sometimes stay at the computer until 11 pm just fitting everything in.
It worked until it didn’t. I remember my boss telling me he couldn’t understand why I didn’t just complete my “routines” on a weekly basis. He would make recommendations that I let some stuff go, and patiently wait for the forfeiture of roles that I never delivered to him. To everyone else, I was a well-organized machine of success and accomplishments but he saw right through me.
It was around this time that my therapist had told me that other people’s brains don’t work like mine. UGH, I thought everyone procrastinated and waited until the last minute to do everything! Aside from the ridiculousness, I kept going, and even sometimes thrived at work. At home, that was a different story. I survived. I hoped for the best. And it was constant chaos.
I really didn’t know another way. No one was talking about the chaos, but I was surrounded by Instagram moms making perfect meals and showing off their perfect homes. I just assumed I was less than.
When time blindness finally made sense
It’s now looking back at this chaos that I see how time blindness really got in my way.
I never understood that if I do this for 12 hours, then the 8 things I wanted to do over here will not get done. The shame was so real. After starting my own business and having to get real about creating a structure and a rhythm myself, I started to see the art of the impossible. And it was annoying.
My second year in business, I went to a yearly planning event where we talked about our dreams for the year. So fun!
Then we broke it down by the month. Still Exciting.
Then, we broke it down by the day and it started to get super uncomfortable. Well no wonder I was not getting stuff done. yikes.
When I started to understand the time I was working with, I started to practice baking in some of the time I really wanted. But this took practice. Sometimes something that I thought would take me 15 minutes took me 2 hours and sometimes something that I thought would take me 2 hours took 5 minutes. Silly brain.
This practice (that I was awful at, at first), allowed me to learn. It allowed me to collect data. And it allowed me to reflect on the way I was showing up each day. Which was wildly different depending on the day of the week and the time of the month.
And guess what, I’m not always consistent, I am however, incredibly persistent.
As I navigated and practiced understanding my own life, I started to play around with how I could make this teachable for other ADHD brains.
I do not mean my brain externalized for you to try to adopt a really complicated system that will ultimately fail because it was not created for your brain but one that was so simple that it could ebb and flow with you.
Plan your Fall, before it plans you: Planning anyway with ADHD
On August 30th, I’m hosting Plan Your Fall, Before It Plans You so you can really see how no matter what schedules already dictate your life, you’re actually still allowed to have a say. There is no amount of living that needs to be done before you get a chance to breathe. I hosted my summer event back in May, and the glowing feedback was how people felt capable of looking ahead in a way they have never done before.
Come join me as an ADHDer who gets it and get an idea of what fall could be like with some forethought.
Listen To The Season Three Finale Episode
of The Organizing An ADHD Brain Podcast
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