Setting realistic goals with ADHD
If you, like the majority of my clients, have ADHD you will probably experience some degree of time blindness.
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.
So how can we set reasonable expectations?
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?
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.
Practice ‘Pull Productivity’ - Instead of having a to-do list with everything on it, have a pool of options.
Make it easier to succeed - Continually get rid of things that make the important stuff harder.
Time your tasks - 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. 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!
