“Have you tried using a planner?” This question must be one of the top pet peeves of the ADHDer. As if the real problem is that we just haven’t tried the most obvious solutions in the world. Many ADHDers have collections of unused planners sitting neglected on a shelf, bearing silent testimony to the wild hope and optimism that sometimes spring up in the neurodivergent brain, when we think that maybe THIS time, we’ll really make it work. Before failing once again.
And yet. The organization and task initiation difficulties of executive dysfunction need to be managed. One of the main ways to do this is to create reminders for the basic tasks that neurotypicals seem to do subconsciously. We need to make reminders visible, and preferably, tangible. One way to do this is to…use a planner. Ugh. Fine.
I’ve had an on-again, off-again relationship with planners over the years, dating back to the days before the internet and the now-ubiquitous Google calendar. After a phase of many planner-less years, I got the urge to try it again. I’m now on my 4th year of consistent use of paper planners. I found a way to use them that works for my particular craggy brain. My planner is a cornerstone of my daily routine now, part of the self-accommodation of my post-ADHD diagnosis life that works for me.
Here are the simple aspects of using a day planner that worked for me:
The right planner is conducive to doing less, not more
One of the fundamental mindset shifts that made all the difference to me was to flip my thinking around purpose of the planner. Instead of buying one in the hope that it would make me more productive, I thought about using it to simplify my life. I wanted tools to help me let go of anything I didn’t want to treat as a priority. That was the idea behind my hunt for the perfect planner.
Here were the features I wanted:
- A weekly planner. I wanted to see multiple days at a glance. I wanted to be able to connect each day to past and present. Time blindness and memory problems keep me from feeling this connection. While monthly calendars are better for seeing an overview, they don’t have the space to actually plan each day, so weekly views are a good compromise.
- A planner that had the same amount of space for all 7 days of the week. This is a tricky one, since most weekly planners devote most of the space to weekdays and cut the size of the weekend entries in half.
- The amount of space available to plan tasks in each day should be strictly limited. This is the most important part. Daily planners have too many lines for each day. My very literal brain would want to put a task on each line, and 20-30 lines in a day is way too much. I wanted the pages to keep my daily plans realistic by severely limiting the number of tasks I plan to do each day.
After a long search, I found the right planner. It’s a weekly planner with 6 lines for each day, and a week occupies each two-page spread. Bonus nerd-features include; a monthly spread at the beginning of each month, a month thumbnail view printed on the left-hand page of each week (a good visual cue for the time-blind), notes pages at the beginning and end of the book, and an indispensable folder pocket inside the back cover for a few extra pages.
Each daily plan is almost the same
Six tasks per day is actually a lot. I don’t use my planner to try to cram in all the things I “should” do. I use it to remind myself of my priorities. By the time I went planner-hunting, I realized that my overarching priority was simply to take care of myself. Each day, I write down those priorities, even though they don’t change. Every morning, I journal and meditate. That’s the first two lines of my allotted six. On workdays, work occupies one line. (For actual work appointments, I use Google calendar with alarms and notifications.) Finally, I add “play” and/or “rest” to each day. That means that I have exactly one line left to plan anything I consider “icky”, meaning chores, errands, or anything that could be considered admin-type tasks.
A typical day might look like this:
- Journal
- Meditate
- Work 5 hours
- Laundry [icky task]
- Play
- Rest
Last but not least: never close the planner!
Out of sight, out of mind. The deceptively simple hack of leaving my planner open at all times is the key to making my daily planner habit stick.
Writing down the same mundane tasks every day might seem like a silly waste of time to most people. But for me, that’s what my brain craves. Daily routines are always a challenge. Having the basic structure down in writing is the scaffolding that I build my life on. These pages keep my mind from wandering away from reality and trying to reinvent the universe every day. Outsourcing my daily routine to the pages of this book has allowed me to stick to a few other habits that are key to keeping my cranky little brain on track.