I'm here today to talk about ADHDers and AuDHDers and the Beautiful Schedule, which will hereafter be referred to as the BS.
You might say, I need a plan. I need a plan, and I need it to look gorgeous.
Do you though? I mean, some plans are great, used wisely in ways that suit our brains, but the BS is rarely good for our brains.
Don't get me wrong, I like colour too, and making something visually appealing is a brilliant way to get a hit of dopamine.
I'm not saying you can't use colour. I love stickers, I love ink, I love gel pens. Oh, but there's a time and a place for colour coding, and I'll explain when that is.
You know what? It is not before you even start.
There's a time and a place for colour-coding.
It is not at the start of a project.
Planning for neurodivergent writers
First of all, who showed you how to plan? I'm willing to bet that your planning skills were cobbled together our of fevered necessity, if you're like most of us, and probably come from neurotypical sources, aka the great myths including “Why Don’t You Just Make A List?” and “Maybe This New Notebook Will Help”.
We often make start with a rough approximation of what worked in the past, and often that is just an overwhelming sense of relief that the project got finished, no matter how you got there, and it probably involved caffeine and all nighters at best. Stimulants and mid-level panic.
This isn’t sustainable, or kind to your brain.
What's wrong with making pretty plans?
For ADHDers, we can be prone to all or nothing thinking.
So when obstacles crop up, and we inevitably have to skip a day in our beautifully planned schedule, the BS, then it can feel like the sky is falling in and we'll never get it done. We'll NEVER get to the end, and more often than not, that causes us to give up completely. All the drama.
Colour-coded plans are fixed things, and we can fixate on them. If you've spent lots of time making something beautiful and colour-coded and purty, it can be really hard to diverge from it.
Then there’s the time blindness.
ADHD and scheduling
We can often underestimate how long it will take us to finish a task - that's assuming we managed to even get to the desk and start it - but being unable to estimate how long it'll take us absolutely derails on our ability to enact a rigid plan. When things go pear-shaped, how likely are we to dust ourselves off and jump back in? Lol. More likely to self-flagellate, while procrastinating, until the deadline panic sets in…
A three-step approach to "planning" with ADHD
Instead, what I suggest is a gentle three-step approach which is based on taking action. Highlighting can come afterwards.
- Identify a list of actions that take you closer to your goal (if you get stuck here, try goblin tools)
- Schedule the first three actions
- When each one is complete, tick them off the list and review how they went, and go back to the list for the next three actions. Repeat this process.
Task PLUS timeslot is key. Otherwise it’s just a laundry list of things that will bug you even more.
Paper or Digital?
If you’re a die-hard paper person – I get it, I love my Traveler’s Company and Circle Planner - then write the next couple of tasks on small sticky notes, and put those into your planner in available time slots, so that you have the ability to move it quickly if needed. Because sometimes those little boxes will need to get shunted along and rehoming a Post-It feels far more actionable to me than erasing a penned-in plan.
I use a mix of Google Calendar and paper, which is easy to edit. and I really think that digital planning is a godsend here.
What's important is that you're actioning your goal, even if the steps are small.
Big, looming deadline?
In that case, I'd say it's even more important to stop faffing with highlighters and take actions instead. Do your list, and crack on.
The Ta-Dah List
We’re often hard on ourselves. Every time we have to amend ordiscard the BS, it can be another piece of evidence that we didn’t get things right.
Instead, and this is where I think color comes in beautifully, and you can go wild with the highlighters and any other form of media you like, make a running TA-DAH list.
A TA DAH list is somewhere you keep a record of your achievements, of things that you have successfully completed. I like having a planner on the wall that I can stick stickers on and, yes, colour-code it beautifully as the days goes on.
My memory can be awful, and as part of RSD I often find it hard to remember my achievements. A Ta-Dah list is a visual reminder of everything I've managed to tick off, I can look back and say, yeah, even during this time, when we were super busy with school and holidays and family and life, I made this progress on the project that's important to me.
In summary, colour is great, save it to congratulate yourself after every completed small action, each achievements in themselves.
As always with our beautifully different brains, YMMV so take what's useful and leave the rest.
If you think I can help you to make progress towards your creative and writing goals, book a Book Doubling or clarity session with me here on this site.