The ADHD Brain-Budget
Last month, we invited Chelsea Brennan on the show to talk to us about money and ADHD. Now, she doesn’t have ADHD herself, but we thought her background, and her extraordinary community behind smartmoneymamas.com, would make for a fascinating conversation on debt and and managing finances with ADHD. She was great, of course, but in the process of being great, she introduced me to a tool that has changed not only the way I think about money, but the way I think about my time and ADHD.
The tool is YNAB — You Need A Budget — available at youneedabudget.com. I’m not going to go into great detail here as we’ve done exactly that on last month’s workshop where I walk through my finances and how I built my own business budget using YNAB. But there’s one element of it that has impacted my ADHD more than any other.
The Age of Money
In YNAB, there’s a measure of the success of your budget they call The Age of Money. For many of us, we get paid once or twice a month, and that money gets spent immediately on the current month’s bills and expenses. Getting paid today, and using that money to pay today’s rent would mean that the age of that money is one day.
But what would it be like if you were in a position to pay today’s rent with money you earned last month? What would it be like if you were paid today, and you were able to set aside that money to pay all your expenses for two, or even three months from now? By doing that, you’re aging your money, leveraging yesterday’s effort for tomorrow’s benefit. When surprise expenses come up, you’re able to adapt quickly and recover or, as YNAB puts it, “roll with the punches.”
The Age of Effort
What if you were able to apply the same budgeting methodology that YNAB applies to your money to your task list? I’ve been working hard to reprogram my behavior, considering Todoist my time budget. Every task I put into my system that includes a deadline, is time budgeted to future choices. Completing a task today — delivering a podcast scheduled for August a few weeks early for example — is directly freeing up time with which I’ll be able to make new choices later. Instead of producing that same podcast on-time in two weeks, I’m now thinking about the opportunities I’ll be able to unlock since I’ve already delivered that work. Maybe I’ll be able to take a long lunch hour and join my family for a picnic. Maybe I’ll be planning a new show. Maybe I’ll just take a nap!
This isn’t the age of money, it’s the age of effort. Every muscle I’m able to muster to action today is freedom I’m buying myself tomorrow. It’s the freedom to be creative, freedom to create, freedom to make new choices. Or maybe it’s freedom from anxiety and stress, or freedom to slow down and practice reflection and mindfulness in your work.
My ADHD Brain
I’m a person that lives for gamification — I love systems that give me points and praise when I finish something on time or ahead of schedule. Todoist offers Karma Points, which I’m thrilled to say hasn’t lost its lustre after all these years. For me, moving to this mindset of time budgeting first required the metaphorical focus on my budget itself, but then demanded that score-keeping bug like watching my Karma increase with each alarm I addressed and checkbox I completed.
My ADHD lives in my head. I rarely find myself living with physical manifestations of ADHD that would have me up and pacing in meetings and the like. For me, I call it my fireworks, a storm of neuronal activity that grabs my attention by the throat and drags it from idea to idea to idea unfettered.
Discovering a system that can capture and hold my attention and imagination long enough to make change? I feel like I’ve just turned lead to gold. As someone who’s lived with the struggles of both budgeting money and time, this idea and tool is alchemy.
Now ... let’s just see how it holds up in another week!
