Falling Back Into Your Systems
We’re having so much fun talking about planning that we’re sticking with it another week! And this time, it’s all about what happens when we fall off the wagon.
How do you stand up with courage and strength and admit you’ve strayed from your system? How do you face the flood of email when you get back from a well-earned vacation? We’re digging into the tools and practices that will help you get back in the saddle and shake the shame of the struggle along the way!
Links & Notes
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Pete Wright:
Hello everybody and welcome to Taking Control; The ADHD Podcast on TruStory FM. I'm Pete Wright and I'm here with Nikki Kinzer.
Nikki Kinzer :
Hello everyone. Hello, Pete Wright.
Pete Wright:
Nikki, you are fresh back from the ADHD Conference.
Nikki Kinzer :
Yes, I am.
Pete Wright:
Oh my gosh, was it so good besides being hot?
Nikki Kinzer :
It was good. It was really good. Yeah, I was hot. I had hot flashes the very first day I was there, I was about to die. Then I spilled coffee all over myself and yeah, the first day didn't go over so well. But no, it was really good, really good. Some really great keynote speakers, specifically one in particular. Do you know who the gal is from HDTV that did the hot... I think it was called Hot Mess. Let me just look here. HDTV, she does the Clutterbugs, Cassandra Aarssen, and she was on a show called Hot Mess House, and she has this organization method where she puts people into four different kind of categories and they're all these little different bugs. You're either a bee, a butterfly, a ladybug, or some other kind of bug. I don't remember. But what was so interesting about her message, it didn't have really much to do with organizing, but actually her life and story as somebody who lives with ADHD and was not diagnosed actually until four years ago.
So she got famous and did all this stuff before she was diagnosed, but she is this cute, petite, blonde girl on the stage and you think, "Okay, what is she going to talk about?" And she blew us away with her story, and it just really makes you realize you should never judge a book by its cover. And she ran away or didn't run away. She left home at like 15, was basically homeless between 15 and 18, got into drugs, got into illegal activity. She said in the keynote, she said, "Have you ever watched the movie Catch Me If you Can?" And everybody's like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah." "Well, I was that person, but I got caught."
She actually did time and said that when she was done and got out of prison, she was like, "I'm never going to go back, so I need to figure out what do I need to do with my life so that I never have to go back." And so then it kind of goes into how she is, where she got where she is now, but it just blew me away. I would've never thought that this was a high school dropout, a felon.
I mean, it was just so interesting to hear her story. And it got really emotional too at one point because she was like, "After I got the ADHD diagnosis, some of this stuff really started obviously to make sense." We hear that a lot. And there was a point where she said, "I finally understood this was not my fault." And everybody just was like, "Oh," it was just a really powerful moment. So she was great, really great. And I got to meet some of our wonderful guests that we've had on the show, and it's always so nice to see them and give them a hug and just really appreciate their company in person.
Pete Wright:
That's awesome.
Nikki Kinzer :
Yeah, it was really good. Really good stuff.
Pete Wright:
And then you gave your presentation yesterday?
Nikki Kinzer :
I gave my presentation yesterday on planning, and actually there was a question that came up that I'm going to talk about on the show today.
Pete Wright:
Oh, good. Well, we should keep that in our back pocket then. I won't probe anymore.
Nikki Kinzer :
No.
Pete Wright:
All right, well, sounds like a great year. Next year it's in...
Nikki Kinzer :
Oh, I forgot.
Pete Wright:
Oh, there's more.
Nikki Kinzer :
I got to see Melissa.
Pete Wright:
Oh, the big news.
Nikki Kinzer :
Well, that was the biggest news.
Pete Wright:
There is news that is bittersweet around that because you got to see Melissa, which now you and I are caught up. We both have had the blessing of being able to spend time with Melissa.
Nikki Kinzer :
Yes.
Pete Wright:
And was it fantastic?
Nikki Kinzer :
Yes. It was so lovely to see her and to have dinner with her.
Pete Wright:
Did she have a sign? I think she said she was going to have a sign of some sort.
Nikki Kinzer :
Well, she had her bag that said, "Take Control ADHD," on it.
Pete Wright:
I love that.
Nikki Kinzer :
Yeah. So I didn't get to see her until the very last day of the conference, so that was a bummer. But I did get to see her on Saturday and that was fantastic.
Pete Wright:
And then sadly our other teammate, Brian...
Nikki Kinzer :
Got sick.
Pete Wright:
He got sick and was not able to make it to the conference.
Nikki Kinzer :
No.
Pete Wright:
Oh, Brian.
Nikki Kinzer :
That was sad.
Pete Wright:
We hardly knew you. I mean, you're fine now. You're getting better. But it was very sad. I'm sorry you weren't able to make it down there. Okay, so next year it's in, where is it? LA?
Nikki Kinzer :
In California, Anaheim.
Pete Wright:
Anaheim. And you're going, there might be an extended Disney trip that needs to happen.
Nikki Kinzer :
I know.
Pete Wright:
In Anaheim. Okay. Got to start planning and saving.
Nikki Kinzer :
You got to be thinking about that.
Pete Wright:
All right. All right, well, all right, let's do a show. Here we go. Before we get into our planning extravaganza today, head over to Take Control ADHD to get to know us a little bit better. You can listen to the show right there on the website or subscribe to that mailing list, and we will send you an email with the latest episode each week. Connect with us on Facebook or Instagram or Pinterest at Take Control ADHD and check out our Discord server takecontroladhd.com/discord that will jump you right into all of the public channels that we have available and you can talk about things like books and business and creativity and music and off-topic stuff and funny stuff and technology. There's just a lot of conversation going on in the free channels. But if you want to get to know us a little bit more, head over to Patreon.
Patreon is listener supported podcasting with a few dollars a month you help guarantee that we continue to grow this show, add new features, and invest more heavily in our community and once you connect your Discord account to your Patreon account, the veil is lifted and you get to see all of the channels that are hidden for patrons. And we sure appreciate your support. So patreon.com/theadhdpodcast, you can learn more and sign up today. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
It's my favorite time of the show. You know that time is here. This week's episode is brought to you by TextExpander, one of the best invisible tools in my tech tool chest. Here's how it works. If there's a piece of text that I type more than once, that's a signal that I need to add it to TextExpander. I can keep my most used emails and phrases and text messages and URLs and more write in my TextExpander library. Now, a snippet can include text links, images, code, account numbers, phone numbers, addresses, whatever you want. The trick is for each one of those snippets in my library, I assign a unique abbreviation, then I expand it. I can deploy the content I need with just a few keystrokes on any device across any apps I use. Just type the abbreviation for the snippet I'm looking for and boom, text expanded. You can even get your whole team or family access to all the content they need to use every day, organize it by department and group and make sure that all your snippets are used consistently whenever and wherever they're needed.
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Nikki Kinzer :
Coming back to him.
Pete Wright:
So this is sort of the icing on the cake. This is also our last episode of the season. We go into the holidays, so this is the end of our planning series, and we are going to talk about what happens when you've fallen off the wagon and suddenly you come to the realization that it's time to get back on it.
Nikki Kinzer :
Yes.
Pete Wright:
Where would you like to start?
Nikki Kinzer :
Just to put things in context in what we're talking about here. For whatever reason, you may have not looked at your task management system lately, so it could be a digital, so it could be your to-do list or for us, our tick, tick, whatever it is, it's not updated. There's lots of past due notifications. We know that that's just waiting for us. If you are a paper person, it just means you haven't been filling it out, right? You're looking at blank pages, not updated, just a lot of blank stuff.
It could be that you're going on vacation and you're coming back after a week and this is what you're coming back to or that you forgot to use it, or you just got overwhelmed and decided that going back to some of your old habits seemed like a good solution at the time. So there's a lot of different reasons why we leave our systems. We also did a podcast recently that's really important and that is the one around why systems fail. And yesterday when I was doing my presentation for the conference, there was a comment that came through in the chat that said, "Systems work really well until they don't, and then you have to find a new one."
And so I wrote back, because I can write them, the presentation was recorded, so I got to see the chat and actually interact. And so I was like, "Oh, but maybe you don't need to find a new one." That may not be what you need to do. But that is such a common response that we think that if we haven't gone to it for whatever reason, that's not the right one for us.
Pete Wright:
Right, right. Well, yeah, I mean when at what point do you want the airing of grievances at that comment? We're going to talk about that in more detail later, I presume.
Nikki Kinzer :
We can talk about it whenever you want.
Pete Wright:
Oh dear. Well, I just think it's really important to reflect on why we have that feeling in the first place. Why is that our gut reaction when a system fails?
Nikki Kinzer :
Yeah, well what do you think? Why do you think that's the gut reaction?
Pete Wright:
ADHD is so beautifully all or nothing. It's binary. It's baby meet bath water. If the system failed, then the gut reaction before critically processing it is clearly the system is totally broken and so there must be something wrong, completely wrong with the system and we've got to try a whole new thing when the truth is, it is such a complicated amalgam of reason that a system might have broken for us at that particular time and place. But the ADHD brain has a difficulty, my ADHD brain has a difficulty seeing through that amalgam and it's so much easier to bunch it as one giant thing that I can say yes or no to rather than pulling it apart and seeing what part of it broke. Right?
Nikki Kinzer :
Exactly.
Pete Wright:
Maybe I just went on vacation and I came back and was overwhelmed and suddenly I need a new system. I can kind of get there even if the only thing that broke about the system was that I was away.
Nikki Kinzer :
There wasn't anything wrong. We're on the beach.
Pete Wright:
I was on a beach.
Nikki Kinzer :
Having a good time. Yeah, exactly. No, and I think that's a great explanation. I think that is why it's such a common response. It's that all or nothing kind of thing. And so referring back to this question in the Q&A at the presentation, it's really asking our listeners to just pause for a moment before you go and get that new system and review our show about why systems fail. Because most likely, I mean this is the reality, will take you less time to update your current system and dig a little deeper in figuring out what's not working than it will be for you to do research on a new system, which we know can take a while because you can get into so many rabbit holes and then set it up and have the same thing happen to you in a few months because that's the trend. That's the pattern.
So it's really taking a step to pause, figure out what's going on, and then make a choice on what to do next and hopefully curve that impulsivity of wanting to move on to the next thing right away. So I thought that was an interesting update that came through. I work with a lot of people around planning because of the GPS membership and it's a lot of the work I do individually with clients and some of the emotions that come up. I think the most common ones is there's this fear of what am I going to find when I open this up and what if I forgot something that was important? This is what's interesting. So at the conference, I had a wonderful conversation with one of my favorite people, Dr. Roberto Oliveria.
Pete Wright:
Oh, we like him.
Nikki Kinzer :
Oh, he was wonderful. If you haven't listened to the show where he and I and my daughter talk about eating disorders and ADHD, I highly recommend it. He's just a wonderful person and human being. And he was talking to me about OCD and ADHD and I had some questions about OCD and one of the things that he talked about with his treatment is there was a gal who was afraid of driving and had her own reasons. And part of the treatment was him driving with her and she would say out loud, well, "What if I hit this person? What's going to happen?" And part of his treatment is, "I don't know. I don't know if that's going to happen."
And I thought it was really interesting because he's not validating that it could happen and he's not saying that it won't happen. He's like, "I don't know what will happen if you hit that person." And then she was saying something about, "Well, if I hit that person and we do a hit-and-run, you're going to be in trouble because you're my therapist and you're in the car with me and you let me do that." And he's like, "Well, maybe. I don't know." And so why I bring this up is that when we have this fear of we're not sure what we're going to find, you're right, you're not sure what you're going to find until you look.
Pete Wright:
It's one of the things we talked about I think years ago now, this whole idea of Schrodinger system, like the fact that there's Schrodinger's cat, there's a cat in the box, you don't know if it's alive or dead until you open the box. That's the whole idea of Schrodinger's cat. And so to me, this whole idea it's really important because the third thing that could be in the box is a mirror. And that gets to assessing what part of the system broke down and everything you're talking about that example of Dr. Oliveria, the piece that broke down is your feeling about the system. It's your interpretation of how well the system works or how well it doesn't, not the system itself. The system, and let's just say this aloud together, the system doesn't care about you. The system doesn't feel things.
Nikki Kinzer :
Doesn't feel anything.
Pete Wright:
It does not care. And so if you feel strongly about the system, that is an unrequited relationship, there's nothing coming back. It's only as good as what you do with it. And so it's not going to care if you tear it up into a new system or if you look at it and say, "Maybe this is me." Maybe it's my turn to reflect in Schrodinger's mirror and see what I see when I open the box and realize I am sad and I'm afraid and I feel judged by the unseen judger in the sky, I feel like I've let down my family and my partner and before the eyes of my system and God alone, I am the worst of the worst. And the truth is maybe you just need to check a few boxes and change some dates.
Nikki Kinzer :
That's right. I mean, I think it is really because in our minds we make it so big and that is definitely a very good point. And the shame and the judgment that we feel from these task managers, it's so interesting you said that it doesn't care, but man, when you open it up and you see all the red tasks that sure feels like it's judging you. Right?
Pete Wright:
It sure does. Red is just a color.
Nikki Kinzer :
You feel like it's just yelling at you.
Pete Wright:
It feels so mad.
Nikki Kinzer :
Yeah, it's mad. But it's interesting, I was talking to somebody else about this and they switched their task managers because they did not seeing the past due tasks. It really made them feel so bad that they didn't want to do it anymore. They wanted to have something that didn't have a past due date on it. And so that can be a very strong emotion, of course when you're identifying what's coming up for you when you're resisting this piece of looking into the task manager after you've been gone for a while. And then of course there's that disappointment and frustration because here you are again in the same place where you feel behind and then you've got that temptation of, "I'm just going to dump it and get a new one. So it's interesting because a lot of what the theme of the conference was this year were around emotions and how strong they are and how we identify them with ADHD.
And so I was thinking about, well, how do you flip the script when you've got these strong... And I'm going to use these three examples, the fear of what you're going to find, shame, disappointment and frustration. These are the things that are coming up for you. So how do we flip the script so that we can explore our options? Because one option is that we keep avoiding the system and we stay in the place of overwhelm and confusion. We stay here, that doesn't feel good or we reframe what's really going on. And I think it's Sharon Saleen that said, visit the task that you're avoiding.
Pete Wright:
[inaudible 00:22:46].
Nikki Kinzer :
Is that who said that?
Pete Wright:
I just heard he was on the Focus podcast and he was talking about his visitation approach.
Nikki Kinzer :
Then it is him. It's him, yes. Okay, so thank you because we're going to give the right credit to the right person, but what a lovely thought, right? I'm going to visit the task manager. So let's just go into that. We're going to replace our negative emotions and focus or focus more on the positive. So instead of shame, what if you feel confident that whatever you find, you're going to be able to handle it,
Pete Wright:
Right.
Nikki Kinzer :
Because if you forgot to do something, you forgot to do something. But I can also feel confident that if I did forget to do something, I'm going to be able to make up for that. I can send an email, I can call, apologize, this is late, whatever it is, but confident that you can deal with what is in front of you instead of disappointment, recognizing the courage that it takes you to not avoid this. This is a success in the making. So at the end of the day when you say, or you think, and maybe you don't do this, but just have my voice in your little head saying, "What's your success for the day?"
You can say, "I had the courage to not avoid this, and I actually am going to dig a little deeper to see how can I make this work." And it probably really is as simple as he put it, check in a few boxes and changing some dates. And then instead of frustration with ourselves, can we be patient and really talk to ourselves the same way that we would talk to a friend, a colleague who also maybe didn't look at their systems for a while, coming with a little bit more of a positive affirmation and keep practicing it because these systems are good, they can work. And consistency is not always a thing for ADHD, so let's embrace it. It's okay that you haven't looked at this for a while, but you can get back into it.
Pete Wright:
That's not to say that coming back to a system and having desire to do some level of blowing it up can be cathartic, right?
Nikki Kinzer :
Well, you can just delete a bunch of stuff.
Pete Wright:
You could delete a bunch of stuff. It gives you the opportunity to evaluate what about the system isn't working. There is a chance if it's a system you've been using for a long time, maybe you've overcomplicated it.
Nikki Kinzer :
Oh wait, say that again.
Pete Wright:
If there's a system you've been using a long time, there's a chance. I'm just saying that you might-
Nikki Kinzer :
Just a chance.
Pete Wright:
Just a chance out there. I'm not saying I know from experience what this is, there's a chance you have overcomplicated it in your efforts to have a system and maybe you don't need all of the system in your system, maybe you just need some dates and titles.
Nikki Kinzer :
Just some things there to remind you that it's important.
Pete Wright:
Exactly. And so I think that's something that is what I'm looking for is the middle ground. The middle ground between feeling like I need a totally new system and feeling like I need to resuscitate an existing system and feeling bad on both sides, right? Feeling like it's a moral loss and moral shame and my identity is somehow sullied because I was unable to take care of my own adulting. You know what I mean?
Nikki Kinzer :
Yeah, for sure.
Pete Wright:
And so it's possible that just evaluating your process and the existing system will allow you to tweak it to make it work better for you, more fluidly for you. And if you're spending a lot of time at least ask yourself, "What part of the system am I spending a lot of time doing?" Because doing of the system isn't necessarily or explicitly the doing of the work and getting the things that you need to get done done.
Nikki Kinzer :
And one thing I want to add to that is a lot of times in GPS what we're doing is we're dating things for future evaluation and I think that there's a lot of guilt sometimes when things keep getting moved because there's this judgment that we hold that, "Well, we should have done this, that it keeps getting moved." But I think that that's also something to reframe. And I know we've talked about this before, but it's okay to move things. It's okay to change your priorities. It's okay to just have them come in front of you and move them. It doesn't mean that you failed in any way. It doesn't mean that all it really means is that's not important right now that there's other things that are more important. And so keeping it simple and not over thinking to what this means when they come back to us.
So this is something I wanted to add to what you had to say, I do have some kind of specific things I wanted to talk about going back to that visiting piece because I really do love that. If you're coming back from vacation, really your systems, if you've been using them on a pretty consistent basis, it's not going to be that bad. What's going to be overwhelming though is the amount of emails that you probably have accumulated and if you didn't turn off your reoccurring tasks, sometimes I forget to do, that's going to be a little overwhelming. There's going to be a lot of clutter in there that you're going to have to clean up.
I find that when you're coming back from a vacation, the first thing to really focus on is not everything but just what you need to do today. What do I need to do today? What appointments are coming up and how do I need to prepare for those? And then you can move the rest of the things as you need to. But I think just really not looking at the whole forest, but just, "What is the tree that I need to climb today?" And focus on that. Does that make sense?
Pete Wright:
Yeah. I think it does. And I think that gets back to when you look at your system to simplify it. It's the thing that keeps coming around, if you look at your day and you have 15 things on it that you said to yourself, "I want to get those done," you are probably 12 things too heavy on your day.
Nikki Kinzer :
Exactly.
Pete Wright:
That is really disappointing to think about. But the truth is you really reasonably might get one to three things, significant things of note done, and you have to rewire yourself to be okay with that. That is the new definition of success. And if you can do those things, that allows you to be more judicious in the things you say yes to, even getting into your system, you may have to say, "Eight of the things that are on that list of 15 I shouldn't have said yes to in the first place because they're never going to get done." And maybe that's part of your reevaluating. It gets you over the time blindness part that, it's like I have a sense that I can do everything because I don't know how time works. That just happens day to day differently. I have a different relationship with time depending on what room in the house I'm in.
Nikki Kinzer :
Right, exactly. Yeah, good point. So if it's been only a couple weeks since you visited your task manager, go into it with this visit mentality. Absolutely love it. You're going to visit it without any expectations and then when you're visiting and you're looking around, decide on what your first action might be when you want to do it. You can do it now or you can do it later. I would intentionally plan though of when you're going to work to clean it up because we do want the intention behind it. We don't want to be too far away from it that it starts to get even worse.
But you decide what that first action is, you plan for it and then you just check those things off as completed and update and move along as you need. And you brought up time blindness, which I think is a huge factor and something to keep in mind when you are thinking about going back to your task manager and you haven't been there in a long time, I can't promise this because I know this is not true for everyone. I can just share with you some experiences that I've had with clients where they have had this fear of going in and I will say, "Okay, we're going to do it together. Share your screen." So they share their screen and we go in it together and it takes less than 10 minutes to get it updated. Not going to say it's going to happen every time, but I will say it happens more often than not.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. Check the box, change some dates.
Nikki Kinzer :
Yeah. Yeah. It's usually not as bad.
Pete Wright:
We're over-amplifying the weight of what it takes to reassess the system. It's just what we do. It's how we are.
Nikki Kinzer :
It's how, exactly. But that's okay. That's all right.
Pete Wright:
Okay, so now what if we have been away for a little bit longer? What about my sabbatical in Mexico that I'm going to take some day for a month?
Nikki Kinzer :
I was going to say, are you going to really do that? Because that's awesome.
Pete Wright:
I am, actually. We're actually planning a language trip to Mexico. I'm so excited about it.
Nikki Kinzer :
That's great. That's great. Okay. So again, I think that visiting without any kind of expectations and making an assessment on just what needs to be done. Because if it's been six months, if it's been a year, we need to know is this the system that you want to keep? Because at this point it's been long enough that you might want to think about is this what you want to keep or is it time for you to move on? So we need to make that assessment, we need to see where we are. And then setting that intentional time to clean it up if you're going to stay with the system, because it won't take you as long when you first set it up. You don't have to think about project names or necessarily your workflow, but it will take you time to clean it up.
If it's been months since you've looked at it, there's going to be a lot of checking off boxes and deleting. That's going to have to be done. So know that going in, identify when you're going to work on it. And then if you're going to keep the system, identify what kept you from visiting the system in the first place and what are you going to do differently this time around because they are meant to be used and they need to be used on a daily basis or pretty consistently and we talked about this before Pete last week when we were talking about kind of what planning means. It's not a static thing. So we want our lists to be open and we want to be working in them every day. So if you're not doing that, great that we're cleaning it up, but we also have to redefine how you're using the system.
Pete Wright:
Do you remember Tamagotchi?
Nikki Kinzer :
Mm-mm.
Pete Wright:
I'm sure you do and you just don't know it because it seems like... At the time Tamagotchi was the little keychain pet that you kept in your pocket. It was a little Japanese device and it had a little pet on it and you'd have to do things to the pet every day to keep it alive and fed and it just was pushing the button to make your little Tamagotchi pet work.
Nikki Kinzer :
The only thing that's coming to my mind.
Pete Wright:
The look at your face indicates that you do not know what I'm talking about.
Nikki Kinzer :
The only thing that's coming to my mind is those little keychains that were little naked gnomes and then they had the long hair and you could go like this with the gnome and then you'd shake it and the gnome hair would go everywhere.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, no, this is a different thing than that because it's digital. It's like the keychain, but on the keychain's, a little screen and it has your little Tamagotchi and he'll need to eat and go to the bathroom and do it and you have to clean his little cage. But it's like a pet, but it's like... Yeah. So that's your system.
Nikki Kinzer :
I was going to say that's your system. I like it.
Pete Wright:
It needs care and feeding. It needs care and feeding every day. And that doesn't mean it can't go a couple of days without, if you pile its food on, it'll go a couple of days, but occasionally you're going to have to get back to it and feed it and walk it get it fresh water and clean its box.
Nikki Kinzer :
That's right.
Pete Wright:
Tamagotchi is your system.
Nikki Kinzer :
There you go.
Pete Wright:
You need know that it was going to be that simple of a metaphor.
Nikki Kinzer :
No, but I like it.
Pete Wright:
But it turns out that was it.
Nikki Kinzer :
It works. It works.
Pete Wright:
There's just too much poop in your system's cage.
Nikki Kinzer :
And then all kinds of things go wrong when that happens. All right, so last note. Consistency obviously is important. We want to keep our systems alive and working and kicking and all of that. I know it's not always the case. The best thing to do if you've fallen off or it's been a little while, don't beat yourself up over it. Do a review of where the resistance is coming from. Tweak the process as you go. And if you're not using a task manager, if you have actually moved away from it, I'd be really curious to know what are you using to keep track of your tasks and is it working or is it not working? Because we can do these things very simple. I mean it doesn't have to be complicated, so maybe the systems are too complicated and you need to simplify it.
What is your reason for using this system? What's the purpose? What is it doing for you? How's it helping your ADHD? And really kind of figuring these things out so that you can find something that's good enough and this is funny because I must have been the very last sentence when I did this outline was remember the growth mindset? You can do hard things. Think I was channeling my daughter when she would say things like that to me like, "Mom, you can do hard things." So I'm telling you all listeners, you can do hard things.
Pete Wright:
You really can. And I think that's the consistency is important part. As I'm sitting here listening to this, the first thing I say, "Yeah, but consistency is the thing I struggle with." Consistency is the hard thing. And I was working on a script this morning for a different show coming up and it hit me that just as a teaser, we have to choose the thing that is most important about our systems to us. And that thing doesn't have to be the same thing that other people would choose that is most important, but it has to be the thing that we put 80% of our attention to. And if being consistent with a system, if you work, if somehow found yourself into a role that has a lot of deadlines and has a lot of complicated task dependencies and things that you have to do and people are counting on you, then consistency might be your thing.
That should be the thing that you set all your alarms and all of your rules and all of your alerts to complement right? To support. Go in every day and do the consistency work, make sure the tasks are up-to-date. If you just show up, build that momentum, build that habit. But for other people, maybe consistency isn't the thing. Maybe it's a creative job that you're in and you just need to find time to write or draw or make music, whatever. Maybe it's figure out how the flow of your day, but whatever it is, you get to pick the thing that best supports your career, your day, your family, whatever. And that's the thing you put 80% of the wood behind that particular arrow, you get to do that. And I just think that's a thing sometimes we forget, especially when we talk about systems, because systems are sort of rote, right? Systems are, "Here's a system. If it's a system, it must work the same way for everybody." But that doesn't have to. Right?
Nikki Kinzer :
And it doesn't have to work the same way for you every day. In the same way, the systems can change and they can look different with different things. A lot of more flexibility there and choice than what we sometimes think there is.
Pete Wright:
So anyway, systems are fun.
Nikki Kinzer :
They are. All right.
Pete Wright:
Hey, well it's been a good season.
Nikki Kinzer :
Yeah, it's been great.
Pete Wright:
Sort of the end just sort of snuck up on me here.
Nikki Kinzer :
Oh, this is life. It's just going by so fast.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. Right. So fast, fast.
Nikki Kinzer :
Got to take it in. Yeah.
Pete Wright:
Seriously. We're going to be back, our first episode back after this wee break is going to be just after the new year on January 4th for those in the public channel. We will be as usual recording our episodes a little bit early for members in the live stream. So you can come in and watch the show live as we record it and you just need to hang out with us in Patreon. Patreon.com/theadhdpodcast if you want to keep rolling with the show over the holidays, get access to those live streams and all the secret Discord channels. And we really appreciate you supporting the show and allowing us to keep investing more time and attention to it. We appreciate you downloading and listening to the show. Thank you for your time and attention. And head over to the show talk channel in the Discord server. Just need to be a deluxe member or better to see it. On behalf of Nikki Kinzer, I'm Pete Wright and we will be back here next year on Taking Control; The ADHD Podcast.
