What If Play Was the Most Productive Thing You Could Do?
- Megs Crawford
- 1 day ago
- 5 min read
There are two painted hopscotch boards outside my kids' school.
The first time I walked past them, I almost kept walking. My knees had been hurting. I'm 40. I haven't done hopscotch in, I don't know, thirty years?
And also: I'm an adult. Adults don't do hopscotch outside the kindergarten window.
(And then I thought: who made that rule? And why did I agree to it?)
So I did the hopscotch. I kept walking.
And the next time I passed, I did it again. Now the kindergarten teacher yells out the window to cheer me on every time I go by.
Here's what I did NOT do: sign up for a 30-day jumping program. Research the correct form for a 40-year-old with creaky knees. Make a hopscotch schedule.
I just hopped. Badly at first. A little better each time. That's it.
It was the invitation to micro-play my ADHD brain had been asking for, not a regimen, and not pressure to be productive.
A hop for hops sake.
The belief nobody argued with
You picked up a belief somewhere, probably before you had language for it.
It might go like this: if you want to get better at something, you have to really commit.
Show up consistently. Do it right. And if you can't do that yet, you should wait until you can.
For an ADHD brain, this belief is brutal. Every new attempt burns full executive function. There's no coasting, no autopilot for things that feel new. Telling yourself to commit to a 30-day improvement plan on top of that isn't a strategy. It's a setup for the shame spiral that happens when you miss day four.
Your brain already knows how to learn. It just does it by playing around, not by trying hard to be correct.
My daughters prove this every single day. They've been doing cartwheels and handstands for months. Twenty attempts, thirty, upside down over and over because they want to nail it. No notebook. No expert tutorials. They just keep at it because they enjoy it and genuinely want to get it. And BAM, one day it clicks.
That's micro-play. It looks nothing like productivity. Which is exactly why it works.
The other thing I keep coming back to is my daughter on her bike. She's been riding without hands, getting better every time she goes out.
I watch her and I think about being a kid and deciding I just wasn't good at something after a couple of failed attempts. Accepted it as a fact about me instead of giving myself permission to be "bad" at something without making it evidence about who I was.
I've been unlearning by doing things I'm still bad at and noticing I don't actually die when they go wrong. The shame spiral I expected mostly just doesn't show up when I'm playing. When I'm hopping the hopscotch to see if I still can, I'm not evaluating my performance. I'm just hopping.
What it looks like in real life
On the last day I was 39, my daughters found a pile of dirt outside, mixed it with water, and played in mud all day. When I asked Cora why she thought adults don't play in mud, she told me it was probably because getting that low to the ground was too hard for them.
I went and got in the mud with them. Adam brought me a chair when the stone floor got uncomfortable, so technically I played in mud while sitting in a chair, which is proof that there's no wrong way to play.
Speaking of mud, I ran an event I'd been wanting to run for a while, called Plan Your Summer Before It Plans You. I was nervous about the tech. The coupon code broke on launch day. The first email had a dead link in it. I named the whole thing wrong initially. I sent a few emails from the heart, no AI, just what I genuinely wanted to say about why I love planning summers without rigidity.
People SHOWED UP anyway. And we sat there together laughing about date nights that never happen and pool days that don't make it onto the calendar and summers that just kind of happen to you if you're not paying attention. Every single one of us wanted the same thing: more time with our people.
None of that connection happens if I wait until I get the tech right. It happens when I stay playful and curious when I make a mistake.
The permission you're actually waiting for
You already have the time. What's missing is permission. From the part of you that decided joy is something you earn, that play comes after the work is done, that stopping in the middle of something to go watch your kid ride or step outside for a few minutes is somehow stealing from something more important.
That feeling is a story, not the truth. A bad song we can't get out of our heads that says keep going, you're not done, you'll play when you're done. The problem: my to-do list does not actually end. So the plan to play when I'm finished is the plan to never play. I've known this intellectually for years.
Knowing it doesn't fix the feeling. What helps, slowly, is interrupting it anyway.
Play is regulation. It's how your brain recovers its ability to try something without immediately catastrophizing about being bad at it.
It doesn't look "fully realized". It looks like my daughter doing her thirtieth cartwheel of the afternoon, nobody watching, getting incrementally better for no reason except that she wants to.
Your smallest possible next hop
If you've been waiting for a reason to let yourself play, you've been waiting too long.
Do the squats when you're already at the mirror judging yourself for not being able to make it to the gym 5 days a week. Have the conversation with your best friend, even if its just 5 minutes instead of 30. Hang the picture with a Command strip because you can take it right back down. Those are your invitations for micro-play.
They build something, quietly and in a direction that matters, and they wire your brain to be okay with being in the middle of getting better at something, which for an ADHD brain is genuinely hard to tolerate. You've been learning-by-playing your whole life. You just forgot somewhere along the way that you were allowed to do it on purpose.
Food for thought...
Want to hear the full conversation? I talked about all of this — the mud, the hopscotch, the business mess — on the latest episode of the podcast.
Want to keep practicing this with people who actually get it? The Organizing An ADHD Brain Online Community is where we figure out together what doing less on purpose looks like in real ADHD life. Come find us.
And if you want one-on-one help figuring out where play even fits when your plate is already overflowing, The Perfect Place to Start is my coaching offer built for exactly that moment.
Permission to play!
Megs
Megs is a certified ADHD coach, podcast host, and real-life organizing human behind Organizing an ADHD Brain. Through honest stories and gentle strategies, she helps people find clarity in the chaos—on their own terms.
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