Time Shielding, the Values Calendar, and the Schedule Saboteur
We're eager to please, but at what cost? For people with ADHD, saying yes to requests from others often means sabotaging our own priorities. Urgency provides a dopamine hit; the instructions are clear. Best of all, we aren't fully responsible for the outcome. But every time we dodge our obligations to take on extra, we chip away at our future.
Before automatically agreeing to favors, pause and examine your motives. Are you truly available or just procrastinating? Will you have to sacrifice critical deadlines to accommodate? Respect your time. Invest in your goals, not just other's. Your needs matter too. Stop self-sabotage disguised as service. Prioritize a future fueled by purpose, not avoidance.
We talk about some key principles this week including time shielding for protecting our time from distraction, the values calendar to help align time to our values, and margin for interruption in our schedules.
Links & Notes
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Pete Wright:
Hello everybody and welcome to Taking Control, the ADHD podcast on True Story FM. I'm Pete Wright and I'm here with Nikki Kinzer.
Nikki Kinzer:
Hello everyone.
Pete Wright:
Well, that was so gentle.
Nikki Kinzer:
I know right after I was just laughing.
Pete Wright:
I came at you with Morning Zoo energy and you're like, oh my Little Pony. Hi. Hello everyone.
Nikki Kinzer:
Hello. Namaste.
Pete Wright:
It's very gentle.
Namaste. Yes, very peaceful. We're at the retreat, getting ready for our ayahuasca trip.
Kidding. That was audio theater.
Nikki Kinzer:
Now I don't know what you're talking about. He didn't know what I was talking about before we hit record and now I'm like...
Pete Wright:
There's a lot.
Nikki Kinzer:
What? You're going to Alaska. What are you are you doing?
Pete Wright:
We are, we're talking about sabotage today. Are you sabotaging your own schedule? And this comes on the heels of our, everything's on fire everywhere all at once last week episode, which was...
Nikki Kinzer:
Funny.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. And so now we're going to talk about...
Nikki Kinzer:
I mean, not funny. Cause it's not funny. I just thought it was...
Pete Wright:
I hope some of it was funny.
Nikki Kinzer:
We were firefighters all of a sudden.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. Boy, we leaned in hard on that. So what we're talking about today is figuring out how you got there, right? What part? Because humans are all a part of our complex organizational systems. What is your part, human, in your sabotage of your own schedule? And I think that's the interesting thing we need to talk about today. What do you think?
Nikki Kinzer:
I like it.
Pete Wright:
Oh hey, me too. So we're going to do that. But first, head over to takecontroladhd.com to get to know us a little bit better. You can listen to the show right there on the website or subscribe to the mailing list and we will send you an email each time a new episode is released. You can connect with us on Facebook or Instagram or Pinterest at Take Control ADHD. But to really connect with us, join us in the ADHD discord community. It is super easy to jump into the general community chat channel. Just visit takecontroladhd.com/discord and you'll be whisk over to that general invitation page to log in.
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Nikki Kinzer, we are talking about sabotage. Oh my goodness. And I want to start with where it comes from because I think there are constituent elements that lead us ADHD'ers to sabotaging our own relationship with time.
Nikki Kinzer:
You think?
Pete Wright:
Where do you stand on this?
Nikki Kinzer:
No, I think the relationship with ADHD and time is so smooth.
Pete Wright:
It's militaristic you might say, it is military time...
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah, yeah.
Pete Wright:
To the second.
Nikki Kinzer:
Some kind of time. Yeah, that's really a lot of the core of the issues is time, honestly, right? If we think about it. Because time is everything. Time is, what time do we have to get up in the morning? What time do we have to be at work? What time do we have to be at the doctor's appointment? What time do we have to pick up the kids? What time do we have dinner? What time do we have to go to the party? I mean, everything's time driven. You can't get away from it.
Pete Wright:
You are much busier than I am first of all. That's a lot. You have a lot going on.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah. I don't do any of those things. No, but everything is time driven.
Pete Wright:
Yes.
Nikki Kinzer:
So if you have a hard time perceiving time, understanding time, making sense of time, it's really hard to get through the day in any kind of sensible, logical, calm, namaste feeling, right? Because it's just...
Pete Wright:
Namaste.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. I think there's an element for me that I've been thinking a lot about and that is related to my personal relationship with time. And I think the challenge that I have with it is, in addition to all of the blocks that we put on our calendar and all of our relationships with specific events that we're trying to get better at estimating time and all that. The problem that I have fundamentally is that not every hour on my schedule is the same duration.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right.
Pete Wright:
Let me explain because of fractured attention sometimes an hour that for me is 15 minutes for somebody else or an hour for me is six hours for somebody else. And I don't know going into the top of each hour...
Nikki Kinzer:
What that's going to look like.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, what that's going to look like, what it's going to feel like, and most importantly what I'm going to be able to get done.
And so in so many ways you add that, or I should say that provides the foundation to this self-sabotage discussion, which on top of it is piled my need to please other people, to say yes to sort of rehabilitate my reputation for having screwed things up in the past. My... Just desire to get a lot done and feel productive. To satisfy my parents when I was 10. I don't know. There are just so many issues buried into that discussion of sabotaging. For me, it all starts with the fact that my hour is not equal to other hours.
Nikki Kinzer:
That's so true. Well, and I have to give you some credit. So you and I have been working on a big project and last night or yesterday I should say, we had checked in the morning and you said, "I have blocked off the morning for finance and then I'm going to spend the afternoon with the book." And I just want to give you a lot of credit because you're really good at sticking with that. You are very good around your boundaries. Now I know that the afternoon went crazy, just like you're saying...
Pete Wright:
I did.
Nikki Kinzer:
It didn't go the same. And we can talk about that, but I think it's important for people to hear that these things that we talk about, they don't necessarily turn out the exact way that you think they're going to, but when you do have the intention to follow through with them and you say, "This is what I'm doing," and you did not need to say, "Oh, I'm going to put the book first and then do finance in the afternoon."
You're like, "No, I made this decision. This is what I need to do." You've already made the decisions, so you didn't need to say anything to me about why or what you were doing or why... You stood by your boundary. And I just think that's really great and I applaud you for that because it would've been so easy to say, "Oh, we are on this deadline. I need to get to this. Nikki needs me. I'm going to do this." And I just really think it's great that you're... Well, first of all, I didn't, if I really needed you, you'd be there in a heartbeat.
Pete Wright:
Oh, you... Let's not forget when you started deleting chapters of the book yesterday that I think we had a little emergency. But the point is I really accept that and I thank you for that. And this is a great example of both things that I'm talking about.
One, intentional planning works and sometimes it also lives in service of other maladaptive behaviors that come with my ADHD. One, I blocked off the morning until noon to do finance. That took me until like 2:30 and after 2:30, all the crises that had come up during the day, during the morning that required my attention from other people ended up taking from 2:30 until five. And by then I was like, you know what? I need to just take a shower and do some work.
But the intention was still there. I had to get through this deadline on the thing. So I also did some other maladaptive behaviors. I skipped dinner, Nikki, I did. I left the house to go work on this other project and finish that when they closed the doors at nine o'clock.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
So I think that, and that's not every day for me. That's not every day, but I think it is an example of best intentions, intentional planning meeting best intentions, which are two different things and dealing with a little bit of that time pressure because my hours ended up stretching longer than other people's hours.
Nikki Kinzer:
Well, and I have to say from the perspective of somebody who doesn't have ADHD, my time goes by really fast. And so I can imagine with all of the perceptions of time, like you're saying, with every hour looking different, how that just sort of adds onto that time really does go by fast anyway, period. It just goes by and it just keeps ticking and I don't know why it doesn't stop sometimes. It is just so strange. So it is, I mean love your, I just like what you're saying. It's like every hour is a little bit different. It feels different, it's not always the same and it always goes fast. So we've got a lot of complications here going on.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. Right. Well, and it adds up with the stuff of needing to be a pleaser. And so I think that gets to... Now we understand that time is wonky for everyone. Time is wonky and we are overloading our schedules and that has...
Nikki Kinzer:
And expectations.
Pete Wright:
And expectations and that has an impact in two areas that I want to make sure we bring up over the course of this conversation. If it wasn't already in your plan, I want to talk about time blocking and I want to talk about...
Nikki Kinzer:
I have no plan.
Pete Wright:
Excellent. Now you do.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
I want to talk about time blocking and I want to talk about margin, because...
Nikki Kinzer:
Ugh, love that.
Pete Wright:
Those two things really, for me, get to the sort of challenges that come into play with managing our schedule.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right.
Pete Wright:
So starting with time blocking, this is another thing I feel like I've been thinking about a lot recently, which is in, what is the purpose of time blocking? And the reason I think we're thinking a lot about it, a number of reasons, but it's that we've been challenged by so many people who say, time blocking just doesn't work for me. And then they explain all the reasons why time blocking doesn't work for them and none of those things are time blocking. That's the...
Nikki Kinzer:
Oh, that's very true.
Pete Wright:
Right? It's the misunderstanding of what we are actually saying time blocking is. And the pivot that I want to put on it for this conversation, because we've talked about time blocking before, but the pivot I want to talk about this conversation is not really time blocking, but time shielding. Time protecting. Which is you have things that are important to do. You have things that are important to you to do and you've said they align with your values and you've said they align with your schedule and you're blocking time on your schedule to do those things.
So what you're really doing is not saying it's going to take me a half hour to write this email. I'm going to block out a half hour titled email. What you're saying is I've got an hour that I'm going to block to do this bucket of things. I don't need to know how long they're going to take, nor do I need to know, do I need to commit to finishing those things over that hour. I'm just talking about visiting them long enough to move them down the field a little bit.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right.
Pete Wright:
And so I like this concept of time shielding, right? It's just protecting your calendar from other invaders. And I didn't do that very well at the end of the day yesterday, but I did it great at the beginning so I can accept a round of applause and pat myself on the back for getting the thing that I said I was going to get done, done even if it took me longer. But what I should have been able to do is adapt in the afternoon and protect that time for the big project that ended up taking me into the evening to do and I just was tired and weak.
Nikki Kinzer:
I see. Have to say though, I want to push back a little bit. Cause I heard a should and I think that just because things take longer and it didn't stop at noon, you stop, you had to go until two and you needed to take a little bit of a break before you went into the next thing. I don't see that as being any kind of failure. I don't see that as being any kind of breakdown in your planning at all. I think that what happened is a day, a regular normal day, things take longer than what we expect. You needed to get that done. And so it wasn't an option for you to stop at noon and come back to it later. You needed to finish it. And so when you need to finish something, it goes into the time.
What you did is adjust. And that's flexible planning. It's shielding, but it's also being flexible and knowing that it's not always going to... In fact, I would say that you almost need to expect it's not going to go the way you think it's going to go.
Pete Wright:
For sure. For sure. And yesterday was a bit of an anomaly because I had these two big buckets of things I had to do, right?
Nikki Kinzer:
Right. It's not every day.
Pete Wright:
It was a day that was going to take 13 hours of activity.
Nikki Kinzer:
You just hit a really good point. I think that probably a lot of people listening think that that's their day every day.
Pete Wright:
Yes. That's a great point.
Nikki Kinzer:
And so I think we also have to take into the expectation that we have on ourselves of what we think we can do in a day because that's where I see a huge gap is that these expectations are so high. It's almost like you're pretending that you don't have ADHD.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer:
And so you're not accounting for distractions and things taking long. So you're not accounting or supporting any of your ADHD. You're going into the day with really high expectations. Then you feel like this... I need to overcompensate. I need to do more than what everybody else is doing. And so now I've doubled everything and I feel like what Pete just explained every single day.
But in reality, if we were to actually pick those projects or actually evaluate them one by one, not from yours yesterday, but just in this every day, they don't really have the sense of urgency that we're putting on them.
Pete Wright:
You know, it also gets into another sort of dives into another area that I'm sort of noodling on, which is around this idea that, it was easy to stick around and work on the big project you and I are working on because it's ours/yours and it's so much easier for me to invest in your time. I don't know that I would've had the stamina to work on my stuff that late. You know what I mean?
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
Because now we're getting into these issues where for me, working on that other stuff at this stage is easier than working on my own stuff. It's easy because we have a very clear deadline. It's easy because we know it exactly what the future holds of it right now like in the next 72 hours. These are the things that I feel like I have a greater sense of agency and contribution and with all of the other things that I'm working on on the other side of the house... Yesterday was end of month finance day, getting things in order so I can get invoicing ready to go today and that kind of thing.
Nikki Kinzer:
Congratulations too, because I just want to say that's another big win for Pete Wright.
Pete Wright:
That's new, right? That's new. We've been working together a long time and this is all very new.
Nikki Kinzer:
And congratulations because I usually get the invoice in about the middle of the month.
Pete Wright:
15th or 20th for the last month. That's not great. It's not a great way to run a business.
Nikki Kinzer:
But it's great for, yeah, I'm proud of you for... You're doing something different.
Pete Wright:
Thank you. Thank you very much. I think I've been trucking six, eight months on this new cycle and it feels pretty good. Pretty good. Anyhow.
Nikki Kinzer:
But we don't need to tell every, I mean, well, we're going to tell everybody, I haven't paid you yet for last month... Because I've been a little busy.
Pete Wright:
Yes, totally.
Nikki Kinzer:
But you are going to get paid Pete, right?
Pete Wright:
Yes.
Nikki Kinzer:
I promise.
Pete Wright:
Hey, I feel like that's the point, right? I've done my part for all these projects. It's like feeling good about doing my part and having the stamina to go until sleepy time is... And having a day that's quite that long is exhausting, but out of the ordinary, that doesn't have to be a normal day.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right.
Pete Wright:
If you can wrap your head around letting go of the RSD, like the rejection that comes from the story you tell yourself about letting other people down, right? Those expectations aren't real. You're telling yourself that you're letting somebody down.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right.
Pete Wright:
And that you have control over your time and you can protect your time for functions. And that's what we call time blocking. But for me, this time shielding approach is really resonant because I'm not blocking time for a specific task. I'm protecting time from other tasks invading it. That's intentional planning right?
Nikki Kinzer:
It's intentional planning.
Pete Wright:
That's a constituent element of contextual planning.
Nikki Kinzer:
And it's not just for work tasks, right? When we first started talking about this a long, long, long time ago, we referenced it as gating time. Remember that?
Pete Wright:
Yes. Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer:
And I think that I'm probably not going to get this exactly right, but your example of gating time in the morning, you had a very specific guardrail of what you were doing in the mornings with your family. Your kids must have been probably smaller. Or younger, young.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer:
But I remember that.
Pete Wright:
Both. I mean younger and smaller, they were both.
Nikki Kinzer:
They were both. Right. But I just remember you talking about this is time I'm protecting in the morning for my family. And I think that's an important thing to look at too, is that there's this negative association when people hear time blocking and I think they think, "Oh, I have to do this terrible task at this time. And I don't want to do this terrible task and I really don't want to do it because I've told myself I need to do it or have to do it." A little bit of resistance there. But I like going back to that idea of it's shielding time, but personal time too. It's shielding what you want out of your life. If you want to work on a hobby shield that time to work on that hobby, in whatever way it looks like.
Pete Wright:
Yes.
Nikki Kinzer:
And protect that. If you want to be home more, then protect that time in the evening or the morning or whenever that is.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. Well, and there are a couple of concepts baked into the shielding time, and we should just touch on them a little bit because when we started talking about this, this was a 10, more than 10 years ago when I created the ideal calendar and we did a whole episode on building the ideal calendar. And this was back when the calendar app on the Mac was still called iCal, and it had no syncing or anything else to it. It was just that. So I created a yellow calendar called My Ideal Calendar, and I blocked every minute in major chunks, sleep, family time, work time. And I built in sprints for work and lunch and eating. And when I was driving carpool. Every day of every week was ideal. It was built into that calendar.
And that wasn't a hyper scheduled calendar. It wasn't so that I could mark my time to the minute and then I had to stop. And when I got to the end of the block and throw everything up in the air because I was changing context, that's not what it was for. What it was for was so that occasionally I could activate that calendar as an overlay on top of my actual calendar because that ideal calendar was the calendar of my values. It demonstrated the things I wanted to do with my time. So when I activated as an overlay on top of my actual calendar, I got to see, am I living? Am I using my time according to my values? And that is such an extraordinarily useful exercise, but I do not leave that calendar open all the time.
Nikki Kinzer:
Oh gosh, no.
Pete Wright:
That would be horrible.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
That would be just horrible. But if I want to write more, if I want to make sure I have time to write more, then I go into that ideal calendar and I move blocks around and create the time on that calendar where I get to push into writing mode. And when I activate the calendar against my actual calendar, I get to see, do I actually have time there to write? And if I don't, what can I move around to make sure that I do? So that's the ideal calendar.
And it is really, I mean probably ideal is not the right word. Maybe it should be just the values calendar.
Nikki Kinzer:
I like that.
Pete Wright:
It illustrates are we living and using our time according to our values? So look at that. We've got the values calendar and time shielding. Those are two brand new things.
Nikki Kinzer:
Write those down. Cause I'm going to forget. Melissa, write those down please. Write those down and send me an email and say, these are the things you told me not to forget.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, no. It's going to be the title of the episode. Who are we kidding?
Nikki Kinzer:
Okay, good.
Pete Wright:
This is the other thing that I think it lets you do, right? Once you know the values calendar, when someone calls you and says, "Hey, I have an urgent thing right now." We get to check the urgent thing against our values. I get it's an urgent thing, but you're calling me at 9:00 PM and my, as I love to say, your stress is not my stress right now.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right, right.
Pete Wright:
So I get to levy that against my values calendar and see, is this a thing that is a big enough, high enough value to me to push into my family time right now and to ask for forgiveness from them in order to make this other thing right? And that's a thing that you actually are really good at. Just yesterday, you discorded me and then you texted me with one word, emergency, right? And that was a thing that I know because I trust you and I know when you say emergency, that's a thing we need to address right now.
Nikki Kinzer:
For sure. Cause I thought I had deleted a whole chapter of the book.
Pete Wright:
That would suck. So I guess that's where it's going. And this is something that we've talked about before, and you should talk about this, the act of introducing friction. But sometimes that friction is just breathing and pausing. When somebody asks you to do something new, what do you do when your instinct says, I want to say yes, my ADHD value is say yes to everything.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right.
Pete Wright:
Let's talk about challenging that.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah. It's the power of the pause. And this is something that I learned in my coach training, and it's very specific to ADHD because of the impulse of responses or especially if you're excited about something and somebody's like, "Hey, do you want to come..." Like for me if somebody said, "Hey, on Saturday, do you want to go to the park and help adopt these dogs and play with them and interact with them?" That to me would be, what a great way to spend a Saturday. Right? I would love to do that. And so there might be this instinct to say, yes, absolutely. But then when I look at my calendar on Saturday, I see, wait a minute, I've got this obligation and now I've overbooked and now I have to disappoint someone. And it could be myself that I'm disappointing or it could be somebody else that I had plans with.
So it's that pause, even when you're excited about it, don't say yes to anything. And that's kind of the guideline. Just don't say yes until you have some time to process what's being asked and is it something that you really want to do or do you feel obligated to do it? And then look at your calendar and really decide, do you have time to do this? And if you really want to do it and you don't have the time, can you make the time? If you can't make the time, then you still have to say no. But if you can make the time, then maybe you make that decision to disappoint somebody else. There is no right or wrong way of doing it. Any solution is yours because it's your time. You get to decide what you want to do. But the point is that you're giving yourself a few moments to at least process it and make that decision before you disappoint anybody upfront.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, yeah. Right. Before you disappoint anybody, period. I guess.
Nikki Kinzer:
It goes back to Casey Dixon. Always going to love that episode. It's okay to disappoint other people. It is okay to say no to someone to protect your own wellbeing. And that's what it is, just really learning to pause. Don't say yes for a little bit of time.
Pete Wright:
Well, and we have the questions, right? The questions are first, why do I want to say yes to this? Well, because my ADHD is sitting on my shoulder and it wants to please everybody.
Nikki Kinzer:
Of course.
Pete Wright:
But you ask the question and then you realize how silly that sounds. Two, is there something else that I should be doing with the time that I'm giving up? That's the opportunity cost question. It all comes back to economics of time, right? Everything's about economics. Is there something else I should be doing with this time?
Nikki Kinzer:
And can I just say something about that really quick? It's okay. I'm giving everybody permission here to say on Saturday, I would really like to just not do anything and just rest.
Pete Wright:
Yes.
Nikki Kinzer:
And I'm going to make that choice and not feel guilty about all of the other things that I could be doing or should be doing.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. Well, and you know what? We probably should change that, right? Is there something else that I intentionally planned to do during this time that I'm giving up, right?
Nikki Kinzer:
Right.
Pete Wright:
Because that's, like there's a should built into that question.
Nikki Kinzer:
Totally.
Pete Wright:
We need to excise the should, because there's no should.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right.
Pete Wright:
It's just, I had planned to do this other thing, and am I willing to accept the constraint that comes with pushing that thing out in order to do this other thing? Have I been avoiding the thing that I had intentionally planned to do, which makes it much easier to say yes to new things?
Nikki Kinzer:
Of course.
Pete Wright:
It's horrible. And finally, is there a deadline that would impact people, money, time by taking on this new thing and not doing the thing that I had planned to do or would be impacted on this new thing if I choose to do it now or not? So addressing the deadline. So I mean, those are just some questions that are really important to do. And it's a muscle, right? It's a muscle. You have to get used to doing these things, to asking these questions when you are poked with new activities that you just really want to say yes to.
Nikki Kinzer:
Especially if you are feeling overscheduled.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer:
If you feel like you have too much to do and there's not enough time, and then there's all this stuff I want to do and I still don't have enough time, this is so important.
Pete Wright:
Because this is margin.
Nikki Kinzer:
This is margin. Let's talk about margin. We haven't talked about this in a long time.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. Margin, I love this whole concept of margin. And it goes back to Sean Blanc, and forgive me, I'm not going to be able to give you an episode, but I will link to his work, Sean Blanc, in the show notes. That is where I learned this concept some years back, and it has provided such a grounding in my life. And that is that if you imagine a box and it's just a blank box, empty box, and inside that box is all the stuff that you have to do, and some of its triangle shaped and some circle shaped and some is square shaped inside the other box. And the difference between the top of the box and the level at which all the stuff in the box rises, that empty space is the margin. And if all the stuff you have to do creeps up at the top of that margin you're overscheduled.
Really ideally the stuff you have to do hits about 80% of the box. I'm saying that. That's kind of my lived experience. If I'm working at 80% of my total capacity, I have 20% of margin in my time, in my attention. However, you budget your time to activity, you have 20% left to react to emergencies, to desires, to invitations, whatever it is. Margin is the thing that allows you to live, right? It's the thing that allows you to leave at two o'clock on a Friday to have a long weekend and not work until six on a Friday afternoon.
That's margin, and building margin into your schedule and getting comfortable with saying no or yes, and I won't be able to do that until is the thing that will actually buy you margin in the long time. In the long run, it'll allow you to budget your time ahead so that not this week maybe, but next week you've pushed things out to the week after. You've made commitments that are stretched far enough that you can start to revalue the margin as it grows over the course of your day. You're accruing margin every day by pushing another request out a little bit further. And that is super important.
One of these days we're going to do a podcast on the new metaphoric, economically metaphorical concept that is, I love so much, which is the zero based budget of attention. And get ready cause I am very excited about it.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes.
Pete Wright:
There will be a lot of enthusiasm on that show, but this is all about, the zero based budget of attention is all about finding a way to build margin back into your life.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah. I love it.
Pete Wright:
That's margin.
Nikki Kinzer:
I love it.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer:
Great concept.
Pete Wright:
I think it's all of these things really stack up, right? We're talking about time blocking, time shielding. We're talking about the values calendar, we're talking about people pleasing and we're talking about being able to introduce friction, the friction of breath to actually stop and say no to things, to buy you margin in your life.
And that will allow you back to the whole thing. If you're sabotaging your own schedule, this will help you rein it in. These five concepts will help you rein in your own self-sabotage, right? It is a huge, huge thing. I cannot understate it. And if you're sitting there saying, "Oh, it's too overwhelming. I mean there are too many demands, my boss rides me too hard. I just... There just... There just... I just... I just..." Listen to the episode again, write these things down, figure out how to do one thing today, how to say no, I'm going to push this one thing out to next week or the week after and just bask in how that feels. How much control you feel like you have. You have ultimate power.
Nikki Kinzer:
And the more you do that, the easier it's going to be and the more you'll do it.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. And this goes back to if you start replying to emails on Saturday, people will expect you to be working on Saturday.
Nikki Kinzer:
That's true.
Pete Wright:
If you tell people, I'm pushing this thing out, people will expect you to have a more rational schedule. They will demand less of you, which is what you want. I'm so sick of the hustle culture, which is I have to work all day to get, get, get. That's not the, that's not healthy living. If you value healthy living, saying no is great. It is an inoculation from hustle culture. You can have a great reputation for doing great work and not be overworked at the same time. I promise it's possible. I promise.
Nikki Kinzer:
We need to end on that. That's great.
Pete Wright:
All right.
Nikki Kinzer:
I love that.
Pete Wright:
You shutting me up now, that's it.
Nikki Kinzer:
Say that again. Say that again. No, it's that important.
Pete Wright:
You can have a great reputation built on creating, doing great work and not be overworked at the same time. And then I said, I promise, really dramatically.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah. I love it.
Pete Wright:
Swell the dramatic music.
Nikki Kinzer:
Whoa.
Pete Wright:
That's it. A super fun show you guys. Thanks for letting us rant a little bit. Thank you as always to Melissa for the architecture and idea and letting us riff on so many of these concepts you've been keeping your notes on for so long. We so, so appreciate that. And thank you everybody for downloading listening to the show. Thanks for your time and attention. Don't forget if you have something to contribute to the conversation, we're heading over to the show talk channel in our discord server, and you could join us right there by becoming a supporting member at the deluxe level or better. On behalf of Nikki Kinzer, I'm Pete Wright and we'll see you right back here next week on Taking Control the ADHD podcast.
