Unapologetically ADHD: How ADHD Impacts Planning
In this episode of The ADHD Podcast, hosts Nikki and Pete dive into the complexities of planning with ADHD, launching their series based on their new book, Unapologetically ADHD: A Step-By-Step Framework For Everyday Planning On Your Terms. They explore the unique challenges ADHD presents in organizing daily life, focusing on executive functions such as organization, prioritization, and time management. These cognitive skills are crucial for planning but often become hurdles for those with ADHD, leading to high expectations, disappointment, and shame spirals.
Nikki and Pete discuss how traditional planning methods fall short for those with ADHD, emphasizing the importance of adapting strategies to fit individual needs. They highlight the need for trusted systems, like a reliable calendar or task manager, to keep tasks and projects organized. The hosts share insights into the ADHD mind's struggle with prioritization, where everything feels urgent, and time management, where perceptions of time are skewed. By understanding these challenges, listeners can begin to develop more realistic and supportive planning habits.
The episode also touches on the concept of radical acceptance, encouraging listeners to embrace their ADHD and plan their days accordingly. Nikki and Pete advocate for self-compassion and flexibility, allowing planning to guide rather than constrain. Their mission is to help listeners understand and support their ADHD, creating a resilient approach to daily life that accommodates the unpredictable nature of the condition.
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. Hello Pete Wright.
Pete Wright:
Okay, it's a big day, Nikki. It's a big day.
Nikki Kinzer:
It's a big day. We are co-authors.
Pete Wright:
We are. We've been talking about it. We've been talking about it so far. But this is the day as the public hears this episode, we are just under a week from the actual release date of our book, Unapologetically ADHD. And what we decided to do to give you a taste because we're also podcasters, is for the next five weeks we are going to be talking about some concept from the book to give you an idea of what the book is about because we would love you to buy the book. We'd love you to check it out and see if it helps you because we think it has an interesting set of perspectives and we're proud of it.
So that's what we're going to do. Today we're talking about how ADHD impacts planning because the book is fundamentally a planning book. We're going to read a little bit each week. We're just going to share. We're going to share and we hope that is interesting. Whether you want the book or not, we hope that the concepts are interesting to you and that you stick around and stick through it and ask questions just because we're excited about it, we're nerds about it right now.
Nikki Kinzer:
That's right. So true.
Pete Wright:
It's a pretty book and it's about to be in our hands. And actually maybe by next week, but probably the week after, as we record this, we will have the pre-shipped copies in our hands.
Nikki Kinzer:
Can you imagine?
Pete Wright:
That's weird. Right now we just have PDFs. So anyhow, here we are. That's what we're going to talk about. You can learn more about us at Take Control ADHD, everywhere you can find us and we would love you to do that and we will be posting some more stuff. Nikki and I, we made reels together for Instagram.
Nikki Kinzer:
We make reels, and they're awesome and they're funny. And we did a bonus show too that people need to know about that is for Patreon members. So if you're interested in learning more about the behind the scenes and how the book came together, we did a really fun show around that, too.
Pete Wright:
I'm going to skip all the other stuff. You don't need to know any of the other stuff. Let's just get right into it. We're talking about the book. Let's talk about the book. All right.
Unapologetically ADHD: A Step-by-Step Framework for Everyday Planning on Your Terms. Today, how ADHD impacts planning. Nikki, how would you like to open our five-week conversation, the Olympic Games, extended Olympic games of ADHD books?
Nikki Kinzer:
Well, you know what? We start with really the first section of the book. The next five episodes are going to be in the order of the book. And we start with how ADHD impacts planning because it's really important to have a better understanding of why planning is such a challenge for those with ADHD. And I want to do a little bit more of a deep dive definition of what we mean by planning specifically towards the book, because planning could be anything. It could be planning your day, your week, your life, your birthday party. I mean, it can be so many different things. Specifically for this book, we are talking about planning for your day and your week. And then we do talk a little bit at the very end about long-term planning, but we only go to quarterly goals because this is not a book about your life in the sense of what do I want to do with my life or what are my goals in 10 years from now? We're not paying attention to that piece. We're talking about the now, which is-
Pete Wright:
Maybe that's book two. We don't know yet. Might be.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah, maybe that's book two. But most people that I know that live with ADHD, that is where they are. They're in the now and that's what they have the most trouble with and is the most frustrating. So we are talking about time management, how you spend your time. Yes, there is some productivity things here because when you are able to plan your week and have a better idea of what you need to do and plan that out on the calendar, of course you're going to be more productive. But the book is not always just, it's not centered around just getting more done. We really want you to be thoughtful and intentional on what you're getting done and how you're spending your time, how you're organizing and prioritizing what's most important to you.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. What is it that made this focus on planning for ADHDers so important for ADHDers who already think they plan?
Nikki Kinzer:
I have found in my experience with my membership and working with one-on-one clients, and really the focus of my work for the last two to three years has been around planning. And what I found is that most people with ADHD do not plan like they have ADHD.
Pete Wright:
Okay, this is huge. Why?
Nikki Kinzer:
This is so big. Because it's almost like you want to deny the fact that your ADHD is disrupting your life. And so what I'd like to do instead is I want to put these really high expectations on myself and think that I can get all of these things done in a day, but then I get disappointed and then the shame starts to happen where, why can't I do this? And you start comparing yourself to everybody else thinking that they can do this, but really you don't know if they can do this or not. You're not walking in anybody else's shoes to figure out how much stuff they're getting done on their to-do list, but it leads to such high expectations and such disappointment.
And so when we don't look at our ADHD and say, okay, this is something we need to factor in, then you're always going to have this unrealistic expectation that you're never going to meet. And if you do, even one day, then you're going to look at that one day and think, well, I did it that one day, why can't I do it every day? It's just never going to serve you. And so-
Pete Wright:
Well, not to ignore the fact that all the planning, how to plan, how to get things done, getting things done, all the resources for planning assume you don't have ADHD, so why would you plan like you have ADHD when you've been taught time and again by people who don't?
Nikki Kinzer:
And this is why we wrote the book.
Pete Wright:
This is why we wrote the book, and this is why it's so important that we at least throw out all the ideas of planning and say, look what happens if you sit down and just sit in the space where you are aware of your own ADHD before you start planning your day and your week and your month in your quarter. What would that be like if you did that?
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes. What would that be like?
Pete Wright:
If you just knew up upfront that it might be different for you. What kind of permission would you have to give yourself? What sort of patience would you have to give yourself to plan like that? And that's really the intention. So let's talk about the big three, can we? The big three tools.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes, they are executive functions is basically what we're talking about. So ADHD is challenged with having these set of cognitive abilities that is known as executive function. So probably once you were diagnosed with ADHD, you heard this word. What are executive functions? And basically they're the mental skills that help us manage our daily lives. So the ones that impact planning specifically our organization, prioritization, time management, distractions, working memory, adaptability, set shifting and emotional regulation. So these are all things that we talk about in the book. But what I want to focus on are these three today, organization prioritization and time management because these are the three areas that we talk a lot about in the book and giving you different ways to figure this out with your ADHD, planning with your ADHD.
So with organization, planning, we are organizing your projects and tasks, and what we want to do is break them down into actual steps. This is difficult to do when you're not clear about how you want to organize projects or tasks. If you're not clear on how to break down projects, if you get really overwhelmed or you're looking at everything as a whole and not individually, all of this can be really difficult. When you don't have a trusted calendar or a task manager, and we call this a work box and the book because we use our own different kind of terminology because that's what Pete and I do. And as Pete has said, your calendar is telling you where you need to be and your task manager is telling you what you need to do. But it's really hard to trust either one of them if everything is everywhere and you don't have a system or a way to work with these tools. So this is a big part of what we're talking about in the book.
And then prioritization is so difficult for the ADHD mind to figure out what needs to be done today because everything feels urgent. You feel like you're always behind, everything is late, even if that's not true, it's the feeling and emotions are running high when you're looking at these lists. Overwhelm kicks in, nothing gets done. All that shame spiral hits, there's a lot of should have, could haves that just keep going on in your mind. So in the book, we're going to help you figure out how to prioritize.
Time management. Okay, that's such a big word. And notice that in our titles we don't talk about time management. We don't really use time management as a selling point. We will talk next week more about the ADHD time zone, which is why it's so important for you to think about your ADHD when you plan because your perceptions of time are off.
So if you're planning like you don't have ADHD, it's very difficult to plan because you're going to be completely off. Things are going to take longer than you expect. Some things are going to take less time than what you expect. A whole day feels like a long time, but it goes by really fast. So there's a lot of things in that area that we have to explore. So when you take these three executive functions and others that we explained in the book, you can start to see why, oh, this is difficult for my ADHD mind. No wonder I hate doing it. No wonder I do it once and then not want to do it again because these are very hard things to do.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, they're incredibly hard. And I think so much of this, we opened this with executive function. So much of this is because of the tricks that we play on ourselves, and this is where I wanted to do a reading. Is that okay?
Nikki Kinzer:
Please, yes.
Pete Wright:
I don't know, this might be too long, too short. I don't know. I'm just going to go with it and we'll see what-
Nikki Kinzer:
This is from the book.
Pete Wright:
It's from the book and it opens, it's from one of my sections early in the book and it opens with me talking to Jordan. Jordan is my friend who has ADHD, my friend who does not exist, but I just needed someone to talk to in my part of the book. And so Jordan exists, and I hope eventually you see some of yourself in Jordan.
"But Pete," you're saying, "you haven't once said executive function."
"I know Jordan, and that's a terrific segue. See, our ADHD is marked by wildly inconsistent performance in no small part because our executive functioning dial has been busted right off our neurological console. That means we get to have days where we are outstanding, days that are written about by bards and told to our children's children. We also have days that are marked by such standards as barely getting out of bed, that conditions us to set expectations of high performance, believing we can do anything anytime we set out to do it and only meeting those standards some of the time.
Intermittent reinforcement drives us batty, giving us the benefit of visions of success fractured into pieces by disappointment. The result is self-image of someone capable of doing hard things if only we could work hard enough to do it this time, the same time we did it last time.
The other switch on our executive function console that's all busted up is the chaos control function. Because we feel out of control so often, our drive to regain it, to find order in disorder can fuel perfectionistic tendencies. We have to watch that, Jordan, because if you're anything like me, when I push on that control function, I can become downright disagreeable, accidentally cultivating an atmosphere of contention in an effort to control chaos gets in the way of building relationships of trust and respect with others, and no one wants to solve hard problems with a jerk. I've been a jerk before. I'm sure I'll be a jerk again. I don't like myself when I'm in that space.
Being aware and talking about how I am feeling in a given situation with the people who matter to me helps to ground me and return me from the more maladaptive strivings of perfectionism. Rejection sensitivity is a nontrivial component of perfectionism. Ask yourself, how do you carry rejection? For me, it's heavy. The slightest criticism can become an extraordinary weight dragging me into that dangerous territory of hyper focus on the worst parts of my identity. This might normally be the part where I tell you that you should just change your mindset. Right? Go ahead, stop doing that thing, Jordan. Stop focusing on the bad stuff that brings you down. But I can't tell you that. Living with ADHD, we know that just telling ourselves to stop doing a thing because it's damaging to our psyche is a fool's game.
You felt bad before. You'll feel bad again. No one feels good all the time. Such a downer, right? But you can't solve ADHD. You can't cure it. You can't skip with it through a field of sunflowers and butterflies. Anything that you try to do to hide from the fact that you have ADHD is a con, and that sucks.
What if instead you were to rewire that relationship? What if you were to go to bed tonight with a thought in your head that you are in a partnership with your ADHD, that you were a coach working with a different part of you, a player that has different skills than you do. That part of you, the ADHD player inside you, brings talents that you wouldn't know how to harness on your own. Your job becomes not one of stamping down on that part of you distancing yourself from the player forever. Your job is to nurture them, cultivate them, celebrate their victories, and thoughtfully coach them through their troubles."
What do you think? Was that okay?
Nikki Kinzer:
I love it. I love it, and I hope everybody else loves it, too.
Pete Wright:
Well, it's fun.
Nikki Kinzer:
Well, it's beautiful and you're such a great writer and it brings such life to the book. So yes, that's a piece that you have to look forward to. It's wonderful.
Pete Wright:
Well, it gets to the thing that drives me batty about what we were talking about and why planning is so hard for me. It's because those dials are broken, right? It's the experience of having to balance my own inner perfectionistic tendencies against a scale that was not created for me.
Nikki Kinzer:
For you. Yeah. Right.
Pete Wright:
Right. That's the hard part. That's the trick that our brains play on us, and that's what we have to rewire.
Nikki Kinzer:
We have to rewire it, and we also, I mean, that's why the book's title is Unapologetically ADHD, because we want you to start living your life without having to apologize for who you are or how you like to work, or that you do get distracted every once in a while or all the time, whatever it might be, if it's a great day or a bad day. Yeah, absolutely. I love how your stories tie into the message of the book and how... It's just great. It's great.
Pete Wright:
But I do want to talk about this because I think you're teasing your way into radical acceptance, which is about this experience of how we see ourselves.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes. And this was really important for me to put in the book because I was inspired by a book that I did a book club on from, Sari Solden and Dr. Michelle Frank, A Radical Guide for Women with ADHD, and they talk about radical acceptance. And I was really touched by that book. It really resonated a lot of different ways with the women that I had done the book club with. And I wanted to put something in this book about radical acceptance, because that's really what we're asking when you're saying you're going to be unapologetically ADHD, you're radically accepting something. And the definition of acceptance of just acceptance is the action of consenting to receive or undertake something offered. I don't love this definition because I don't think that many people with ADHD feel as they have consented to having ADHD. It wasn't a choice.This wasn't something that they said, "Yeah, sure. Go ahead and give this to my brain."
I like radical acceptance better because it means you let go of the need to control, judge and wish things were different than they are. So it doesn't mean that you must like what's happening, it means you no longer resist something you cannot change, and it means to give yourself the same self-compassion as you would someone you love. And that is so much of what you were talking about in your passage, your essay too, is that it's not resisting it. And so that's really, I just think such an important piece to sit on and think about.
Pete Wright:
That's the mission certainly of us coming together to write the book, is that we hope that by the end, at least of this first section, you see yourself not as somebody who has to just constantly adjust and adapt to unpredictability of their brain, but somebody who accepts a reality. Because once you accept the reality, you can move forward and make change. It doesn't have to look like somebody else's reality. It really does not.
Nikki Kinzer:
And it teaches that muscle or builds that muscle around being flexible and being resilient on those days that ADHD shows up the loudest. And absolutely it does those things. Now next week, we're going to explore this ADHD time zone, what you need to know about your own habits in order to be a better planner. And that's going to give you quite a bit of insight. In the book, there's lots of different questions and exercises and things for you to do because you got to learn more about who you are.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, time does not equal time for the ADHDer.
Nikki Kinzer:
No it does not.
Pete Wright:
And we're going to talk all about that next week. Thank you everybody for hanging out with us and indulging us as we explore what we've created. Again, we're really excited about it. We hope you will help extend and embrace that excitement. And you can find it takecontroladhd.com/adhdbook. Should be easy to remember right there on the website. The release date is September 4th, so as this drops to the public, nay six days from now, on release day and we've got more coming up.
Nikki Kinzer:
We sure do.
Pete Wright:
I got links, too. We do have a question about the other formats of the book. Is it available for pre-order as an ebook? I think they told us something about that, right?
Nikki Kinzer:
They did. So for retailers, they typically do not put that available until a week before the publishing date. So if you want the ebook, I would check Amazon a week before September 4th.
Pete Wright:
So as this goes live to the public, the ebook should be available.
Nikki Kinzer:
It should be available. Yeah. Right.
Pete Wright:
Right. And hardcover ships September. Right now we're hearing it should be delivered on or about September 4th. It is officially released September 4th. So thank you all. Thank you all so much. Thanks for your time and your attention. Takecontroladhd.com/adhdbook. That's it for us. On behalf of Nikki Kinzer, I'm Pete Wright. We'll see you next week right here on Taking Control, The ADHD Podcast.
