Do you set reasonable expectations for yourself when planning your day?

Expectations play a huge role in how we see and interpret the world around us. They are so important that they are the focus of the entire first section of my book. 

The way we talk to ourselves about what we can (and ‘should’) do influences what we expect, and when we fall short of these expectations it has a knock on effect on our self-esteem and self-trust. Then, we need to prove ourselves tomorrow with increasingly impossible standards - kicking off a cycle that leaves us doubting our abilities at best, and completely burning out at worst.

If you, like the majority of my clients, have ADHD you will probably experience some degree of time blindness. That can cause problems with sensing time passing, estimating how long tasks will take, and even contributes to wait mode (that feeling that you can’t do anything else because you’re waiting for another event later in the day).

If you spend your evening planning for an impossibly productive tomorrow, with perfect focus and attention and you incorrectly estimate how long tasks will take you will always fall short, even when you have been on the ball and made great progress towards your goals.

That’s because you’ve set your expectations for tomorrow impossibly high. You are expecting yourself to work like a machine (not a human) and do everything in record time all day. If you do this for long enough, you need the next day to be even better to shore up the gap. And even better. And even better still. Even on days you work well, you feel the pressure.

No matter how hard you work, you can’t meet your expectations. All of the effort in the world is still not enough.

This isn’t a reflection on you - it’s because you’ve habitually set unreasonable standards for yourself. You are the expert in what you do, and if you can’t get it done nobody could. You would not expect your friends or colleagues to work perfectly every day through an unreasonable to do list. You wouldn’t expect younger you to try harder than you know you already were just to meet unreachable sky high targets.

So how can we set reasonable expectations?

Instead of keeping going the way you are right now, it’s time for some meta-work (that’s work on improving how we work, it’s exciting stuff). How you approach this is going to depend on what you need and how you work, so pick one of the following options to try. If it doesn’t work, or you want to go deeper, come back and pick a second!

• Imagine giving tomorrow’s to-do list to someone else - would that feel like a reasonable ask? If not, edit your to-do list until it does.

• Add in transition time - Do you need time to ‘get in the zone’, transition between tasks or clients, or at the beginning and end of each day? I will not usually start ‘working properly’ until I’ve been at my desk and sifting through thoughts for about 20-30 minutes. This transition time is even more important when I’m working from home, and scheduling it in helps me plan the rest of my day more effectively.

• Half it - Keep halving the number of tasks on your to-do list until it is impossible for you not to complete the tasks on your list on a bad day. You can always do more, but definitely take time to celebrate once you’ve completed your initial list!

• Practice ‘Pull Productivity’ - Instead of having a to-do list with everything on it, have a pool of options. Only pull in a task from these options when your current to-do list is empty and you are ready to decide on your next task or set of tasks.

• Make it easier to succeed - Continually get rid of things that make the important stuff harder. Get rid of optional tasks and noise. Add more rewards. Let yourself be flawed and distracted and human. Celebrate everything you do as a success, no matter how small.

• Time your tasks - Sunsama is my recommendation of choice, but a small colourful countdown clock works just as well. By making time visible and collecting data on how long each task takes, you will improve your time estimates and ability to put together a reasonable plan for the day.

• Let yourself go with the flow and see what happens - for a week, just let yourself work the way you feel like working. See what works well, see what doesn’t. See what flows, see what doesn’t. Use this to reset your expectations to something more fair and practical.

Life is much easier when every day doesn’t need to be an exceptional day of productivity to stand out.

Remember, Each Day is Just 0.2% of Your Year

Our productivity varies wildly day to day and week to week. We exist in seconds, but our results accumulate in months and years. Take the pressure of your days and trust yourself to do what you need to - you have made it this far, and you will continue to do great things even without perfect days.