Do This

or don't...whatever. :)

I’m a nuts and bolts guy.

My experience on this planet has shown me that many of us have hardcore struggles related to our skull spaghetti. There’s so many ways to deal with ADHD. Everybody has a framework. I have methods. They have methods. Whether it’s your dopamine, or your polyvagal, or your planner type, or your diet, or your medicine, or your neuropeptozappies, everybody seems determined to have a methodology and it’s exhausting listening to the shit talking about the other side. Everything works. If you do it.

I’ll try to be different today. Not sure if it’ll work, because I’m in a depressive episode, but I’m tired of the ADHD space today. Oh boy, I can feel myself getting shit talkie…I’ll try to stop.

This is how I choose to be of help today. Try it or throw it in the garbage. Your call.

I enjoy the productivity space. It lights me up and I like to philosophize about it. I like talking about what it takes to do a thing…even though. I like thinking about the life cycle of a task, from it’s birth in our skull spaghetti to it’s fruition and ultimately being “done”. This is fun for me.

There is such a nuance to how people experience their ADHD, but for getting shit done and managing time, I see 5 areas that pop up enough that they warrant discussion. These are where I happen to see adults with ADHD tending to fall off the tracks. Answer these questions and you might just have some success with managing your ADHD.

How do you capture ideas?

Most of us either keep shit swirling in our heads, or we do the good thing by getting it out of our head, but it’s on random papers that we can’t find later. Find one place to capture your ideas. One notebook to rule them all. One app. Try that. See how it feels.

How do you decide what you will do with your time?

This is the prioritization question. Do you use an Eisenhower Matrix? Doesn’t work for me, but some people swear by it. Or do you use some other methodology of prioritizing what you will do? You have to know what you are going to get done on Tuesday, you have to have made the choice. Most of us go with our whims in the moment, we go with what feels right, we rely on our memory, which means most of us end the day with the guilt and the shame of the “Couda, woulda, shoulda”s.

Pro tip: decide your one or two main things the day before. Fuck today. Today is already too late. (This is how I deal with my own depression, when I’m trying to still move my needle forward) The day before is usually when we have the energy and brain power to make these kind of thoughtful decisions. Tomorrow doesn’t have the impossible weight of today. In the moment is usually where paralysis lives.

What do you use for a calendar?

I strongly believe every adult needs one, regardless of your diagnosis. How do you remember that you have a doctor appointment, lunch with a friend, etc…ADHDers forget. That’s who we are. How do we give ourselves permission to forget? A Calendar.

How do you handle out of sight/out of mind?

Speaking of forgetting. If it’s not in front of your eyeballs, it doesn’t exist. What strategies are you using to keep things where you will see them? Who cares what it looks like to the normies in your life. What do YOU need?

When the time comes to do the thing, how are you going to do it when everything inside of you screams “NO!”

We have ADHD. You can plan like a champion and still not do a thing. If you schedule the thing for today at 1:00pm, at 1:00pm you can rely on your brain to look for any loophole out. Just because we are in a good mood, just because we scheduled it, just because our polyvagal is vagaled to the maximum amount of poly, we still aren’t going to want to do the thing if it’s a shitty task. What can you do so that you do the thing…even though? This requires a tool, a trick, a hack, a method, a thingy-ma-bob. I personally use the power of ‘other people.’

This is the stuff we work on in our membership community. If you want to experience body doubling, daily accountability, and other methods of stacking the deck so that in the face of the moment, you are more likely to do the thing, you’re invited to join me.

ADHD doesn’t get cured (or at least mine doesn’t seem to)…do whatever works. Everybody’s method works if you do it. Try them all. Build your own unique arsenal, and throw the rest in the trash. This is what works for me.