Why Your Plans Fall Apart
This week kicks off a three-part series on planning, and it starts where every planning conversation should: with honesty about why plans fall apart in the first place. Pete opens with his own cascading construction disaster at home, where raccoon damage set off a chain reaction of disruptions that has bled directly into his work life. Nikki’s diagnosis is both simple and profound: when you make a plan, you’re trying to predict the future with the information you have right now. When that future doesn’t cooperate, the real problem isn’t the plan failing. It’s that we treat plan failure like a personal failure.
From there, Nikki walks through the full spectrum of executive function challenges that make ADHD planning uniquely hard: time blindness that operates at every scale from individual task to entire month, working memory that drops the ball the moment you turn around, prioritization paralysis where everything feels equally urgent, the cognitive inflexibility that turns one bad morning into a ruined day, emotional regulation struggles and the sharp edge of RSD when disappointing someone is unavoidable, and sustained attention that evaporates the moment your environment gets interesting. At the center of it all is what Pete calls “fantasy Pete,” the imaginary version of himself who wields time like a saber and never lets anyone down, and whom nobody would actually like at a party.
The antidote isn’t a better system. It’s moving from shame to curiosity. Nikki’s framework: instead of asking what’s wrong with you, ask what your brain actually needs. Find the friction. Learn your own flavor of ADHD. Build in margin so that when things go sideways, you have something left in the tank for recovery. The episode closes on Pete’s central paradox, the one he returns to with clients again and again: it’s not your fault, but it is yours. You didn’t design this brain. But you’re the one who has to work with it, and building that muscle, one honest conversation at a time, is exactly what this trilogy is for.
If this episode hit close to home, we made something to help it land a little deeper. Your Planning Reflection is a free companion guide—just four honest questions to help you connect what you heard to what's actually happening in your own life. No productivity exercise. No grade at the end. Just a quiet moment to start paying attention.
Links & Notes
Lattice by Pete D. Wright — Pete’s new science fiction novella, now available on Amazon
Unapologetically ADHD by Pete Wright and Nikki Kinzer — the planning book behind this trilogy
Your Planning Reflection worksheet — Nikki’s four-question companion to this episode, available now!
GPS Guided Planning Sessions — Nikki’s membership planning program
The ADHD Podcast on Patreon — early access, Discord, and live stream recordings
The Spanish Prisoner (1997, dir. David Mamet) — Pete’s most underrated film, home of the worry quote
Ricky Jay — magician, actor, and unwitting aphorist: “Worry is interest paid in advance on a debt that never comes due”
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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 D. Wright.
Pete Wright
Pete D. Wright, that's what they call me, and we are going to talk today about uh some good stuff. Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer
We are, but you know what? Before we talk about that, I think you should uh introduce to our audience uh a little project that you've been working on.
Pete Wright
What, oh my gosh, really? On the public show?
Nikki Kinzer
On the public show, we are here to support Pete D. Wright.
Pete Wright
Oh my goodness. Well, all right. Uh okay. So for the last little while I've been working on a story of fiction. It is science fiction. And it it's a novella, it's an easy, quick read, and it's a book that I've published that's out there in the world, and it's called Lattice, a novella by Pete D. Wright. And uh you can get it right now on Amazon and other places coming soon, but I'm very, very excited about my entry into the world of being a struggling fiction writer. That's another piece of the Pete pie. Thank you.
Nikki Kinzer
Well, congratulations. This is great. So, yes, everyone get that book. Support Pete. Read his science fiction.
Pete Wright
Yeah. And the question that has come up before, which I have not had a good answer to, is will there be an audiobook? And I don't know, because it would be me doing it, and I'm very busy and audiobooks are hard to produce singly. And so uh I'm working on it. At some point, yeah, probably.
Nikki Kinzer
I bet you you're not gonna do it immediately, but I bet it's gonna be in the works at some point. That's my guess. Yeah.
Pete Wright
Um, but I'm very excited about just sort of testing the waters and seeing what it's like out there.
Nikki Kinzer
Yeah, you've got a book out there.
Pete Wright
Yeah. Yeah. It's really, really fun. I'm very enthusiastic about the whole process. I did self-publish it and I am grateful to have been able to do that because I've learned so much about the backside of the business of books. And I have to say I love it. Having gone through both ways, um, I really, really love it. And so I'm eager to have some people out there with it in their hands. It's a little thing.
Nikki Kinzer
It's awesome.
Pete Wright
It's really great.
Nikki Kinzer
And guess what we're gonna talk about today? That has to do with the other book that you co-wrote.
Pete Wright
What? I did. Yes.
Nikki Kinzer
We're gonna talk about planning.
Pete Wright
We're gonna talk about planning and why your plans fall apart.
Nikki Kinzer
Yeah. Yeah.
Pete Wright
And I'm very excited about that too, because tis the season for us to talk about planning. We've got a little series coming up. We've got a three-fur. We've got a little trilogy of planning episodes uh that are coming up this week and the next two weeks to follow. Before we get into the show, we got to talk about our Patreon community because if you're a regular listener, this is uh it's probably your next move. Members to our Patreon community get uh early access to every episode. They get access to our member only channels in Discord and a seat in the live stream, where you can join us for the recordings of the show. You can ask questions to our guests and to us in the chat as we record, and we throw in special events all the time. But honestly, the thing we hear people talk about the most isn't any of that. It's the community itself. This is a group of amazing people, all of them living with ADHD, who show up for each other in a way that is just really special. If you've ever wanted to be more than just a listener, this is where that happens. Visit patreon.com/theADHDpodcast to learn more and join us. And if you decide you're not ready for that, that's great too. You can find us on takecontroladhd.com, connect with us on the socials, and join us in Discord on the free side and sign up for our weekly email. We'd love to have you wherever you land. Nikki Kinzer, why do your plans fall apart?
Nikki Kinzer
This is the first of our series, and um I'm of course thrilled to be talking about it. And uh yeah, why do our plans fall apart? That's exactly what we're gonna talk about today. But I want to set the stage a little bit. I'm gonna start with you, Pete. Um, share with the audience a personal story from you where you felt like, you know, your planning fell apart and maybe you detoured and shut down, or maybe you like looked at it and thought, no, I can pick up the pieces and everything will be okay. Like share with us. What are your planning disasters like?
Pete Wright
You know, we're sort of living in it right now, so it's very raw, because many of our members will know we're dealing with the year-long result of the ravages of a family of giant raccoons on our house and the cascading failures. We're starting the reconstruction part. And so part of our kitchen has been torn out. Yesterday they came and pulled apart much of our deck. Uh they're supposed to come start residing the house and painting it, but because of things falling apart, things continue to sort of fall apart. And what I think we don't recognize, what I'll speak for myself, what I can forget because my ADHD brain has other plans often for me, is that cascading failures in one area cause cascading failures in others. And I often try to ignore the relationship between those two. So when the house is falling apart, I tend not to stay on top of my task list the way I pride myself on doing day to day. And things slow down just because of the cognitive load of living in uncertainty and what that does to me, that major disruption.
Nikki Kinzer
Yeah. Major disruption.
Pete Wright
Um and it is incredibly challenging to do that, right? That's the dominoes of planning. And it makes me reflect on something we've talked about a bunch, reflect on margin. The sort of value, the future value of time, right? Like how much margin I have is directly related to how much recovery I have and how soon I'll be able to find myself back on top of things when things go south. So right now we're in the middle of construction planning that is deeply uncertain and involves way too many people for me to be comfortable. And yet we're, you know, we're finding our way through it. And it is distressing.
Nikki Kinzer
Mm-hmm.
Pete Wright
That's probably a muddy story for your question because I'm still living right in it, but it's all I'm thinking about, right?
Nikki Kinzer
Right. Well, of course. Yeah, that makes sense. I would say that it's interesting because you have that connection between what's going on at home and how that affects things that are happening in your professional life and vice versa. And we do, we forget that when one is in chaos, the other one is gonna go in chaos too.
Pete Wright
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer
But yet you feel like it shouldn't be because like they shouldn't be connected, but they are, you know, of course.
Pete Wright
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer
So that makes sense. You know, it's interesting because one of the biggest challenges I think I see with clients when the plans fall apart is that we forget that we're trying to predict the future.
Pete Wright
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer
And so when you make a plan, you're basing it on the information that you have right now.
Pete Wright
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer
And uh, that's gonna change and we forget how much it changes. And what I notice most is that when it changes, a lot of people will then take that as a personal failure, that they did something wrong because they didn't account for the interruptions or the distractions, or they didn't account for something taking longer than they expected. They think it's their fault, when really in reality it just took longer than what they expected.
Pete Wright
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer
Or they got interrupted and you didn't know that your child was gonna be sick or was gonna be banging down your door, you know, like, um, so yeah, I think we have a lot to talk about today, really.
Pete Wright
Okay. All right.
Nikki Kinzer
Yeah. Cause there's a lot of reasons why.
Pete Wright
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer
And so I hope that for this particular episode, I hope we can bring some awareness. And what I really hope is that people take away that this is not their fault. It's not a personal failure. And um have a little bit more understanding of how their brain works and go from there.
Pete Wright
Yeah, let's do it.
Nikki Kinzer
Yeah. So I brought up the book, Unapologetically ADHD, because we talk a lot about this in the book.
Pete Wright
So I brought up a book that apologized.
Nikki Kinzer
And I think, you know, one of the reasons that we wrote the book that was important is because we're never really taught how to plan. How to use a calendar or how to use a to-do list or a task manager. And if you have been taught how to plan, if you go to any type of productivity book or planning book, they're not taking your ADHD in consideration. Except for our book.
Pete Wright
Right.
Nikki Kinzer
Our book we consider your ADHD.
Pete Wright
That's the one. Right.
Nikki Kinzer
But for the most part, they're not. And so naturally what people are doing is they're planning like they don't have ADHD. They're overcompensating their day because they they're not taking into account their ADHD and they probably already feel behind. They probably already feel like they're missing things. And so um there's a lot that is going on. So let's think of it this way. If you have an instruction manual, but half of it is in a language that you can't read.
Pete Wright
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer
So you've got one side in English, the other is, I don't know, French, and you don't read French, um, you're gonna be missing things. You're gonna be missing things.
Pete Wright
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer
And it's not a character flaw. It's a gap that just hasn't been filled. You don't understand it. You can't see it. You can't apply it. Right? And then of course there's this internal voice that shows up every time the planning falls apart. And this is what I was talking about before, is that I should be able to do this. Everyone else manages their time so nicely. What is wrong with me? And who are the people that we're comparing ourselves to?
Pete Wright
Yeah, it's a great question.
Nikki Kinzer
Right?
Pete Wright
Fantasy Pete?
Nikki Kinzer
Right. Yeah, fantasy Pete, or um uh you know, a colleague that doesn't have ADHD, that's not very fair.
Pete Wright
It's pretty much fantasy Pete. Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer
Um friends who mask really well.
Pete Wright
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer
You know, colleagues who are masking. Because we always think that the grass is greener on the other side, but we really don't know. We don't know what their internal struggles are. But it looks like everything's going really well and that's who we're comparing ourselves to. And there's just this exhaustion, right, of performing and when you're still really struggling.
Pete Wright
My comparisons to fantasy Pete invariably end in a moral failing. That I am incapable, but the guy in my head surely would have been capable. Uh ends up making me feel like I've failed on an existential level. Right?
Nikki Kinzer
Mm-hmm.
Pete Wright
That's the shame part. And honestly, if I could let go a hundred percent of the time, and I'm really a lot better at this now than I was 25 years ago. Um but I I think speaking more broadly, if I let go of that feeling of letting down someone so dramatically that it feels like the weight of the world is on my shoulders, the exhaustion becomes much less paralyzing, right? It's not as big of a deal because I have the energy to recover.
Nikki Kinzer
Yes. Because the opposite of that, if you stay in the shame spiral, then it's making it harder for you to try again next time, right? Because what's happening is that's what your memory, you're you're remembering that. And you're holding on to that. And then there's that thought of, well, why am I going to try a new planner? Why am I going to try a new system? It doesn't work.
Pete Wright
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer
Um and never has. And so it just compounds, you know, over the years, over all of this time that everything has failed. Why am I going to just add another failure? And so what I love about what you're saying is that if you can start to move away from that, right? Am I understanding that correctly?
Pete Wright
Yeah. Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer
And let go of some of that, uh, then you're able to move forward and you're able to, yeah.
Pete Wright
Yeah. It it's to let go of that which is imaginary, right?
Nikki Kinzer
These high expectations.
Pete Wright
Focus on the fact and truth, right? The fact and truth is I'm here, I'm present in my skin, I'm capable of making change in my life. That's all I need to worry about because I have all the resources I need to do the next thing on my list.
Nikki Kinzer
Right.
Pete Wright
How I feel about those things in a time of crisis is irrelevant to me getting them done. It just weighs me down.
Nikki Kinzer
Yes.
Pete Wright
And uh there's a great Ricky Jay line in the movie The Spanish Prisoner, which uh probably no one in our audience right now has seen and loves as much as I do. Um, but he says, don't worry, worry is interest paid on a debt that never comes due. That is so true. We're just collecting interest and no one will ever, ever come calling for that interest. Like that emotional weight, it serves no one.
Nikki Kinzer
Absolutely. Yeah, that's a powerful little quote.
Pete Wright
Right?
Nikki Kinzer
Mm-hmm.
Pete Wright
More people should have seen that movie.
Nikki Kinzer
Mm-hmm. Well, at least they got the quote. So that's good.
Pete Wright
You're welcome.
Nikki Kinzer
Our job is done.
Pete Wright
Our job is done.
Nikki Kinzer
All right. I'm gonna talk about some things that really go into the reason why uh planning uh tends to fall apart. And it's not shiny, uh, but it's important to understand because this really is how your brain is working. And so we have these executive functions, right? That are basically the management system of your brain. So they're the part that helps you start things. They help you switch between things, that transition thing, time that we need, um in recovery time. They keep track of things. They manage your time. But for most people, this system runs pretty quietly in the background. You don't even notice that it's working. For ADHD brains, it doesn't run quietly and sometimes it doesn't run at all. So if we think about that GPS that has gone like wonky and is having you go into all these detours, you may still get to the same place, but boy was it a ride to get there.
Pete Wright
Right.
Nikki Kinzer
Uh and so that's what's happening with these executive functions. And there's specific ones that are very related and connected to planning. And time blindness is one of them. When you have a hard time understanding how long something's gonna take um or how much time has passed, it's really hard to plan for that. And we get stuck in that um in that cycle of I don't know how long something's gonna take, so I really can't plan for it.
Pete Wright
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer
But yet I try to, and it takes longer than I thought, and so I've planned for too much on my day, right?
Pete Wright
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer
So that that's always gonna get us.
Pete Wright
Right.
Nikki Kinzer
Because time blindness is real and it's really hard to plan when you're not sure. So what we want to do is lean into that not being sure and plan a little bit differently. And we'll talk later about that. But that time blindness is definitely one of those things.
Pete Wright
Yeah, and uh the thing about time blindness is it is insidious because it impacts us at a micro level, at a task level, and at a global level, at a like day, week, month level. And it is very difficult because it scales effortlessly. It seems like all the other stuff that that we deal with, all the other problems, the things that affect our planning, are like we can at least target them, but time blindness is the one that feels almost least in our control.
Nikki Kinzer
Right. It is because you really don't know how long something's gonna take you until you're in it.
Pete Wright
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer
Right?
Pete Wright
Right.
Nikki Kinzer
Or you don't know.
Pete Wright
And at any given time we don't know how time is affecting our brain while we're doing it.
Nikki Kinzer
Right. And what if you get into hyperfocus mode?
Pete Wright
Right.
Nikki Kinzer
And now time is just a blur, but you got a lot done, which is great.
Pete Wright
That's it.
Nikki Kinzer
But yeah, it really definitely impacts how you plan. Working memory is also a huge factor. This is when it's difficult to hold multiple tasks or details in your mind while planning. And so we talked about memory, right?
Pete Wright
Right.
Nikki Kinzer
We've talked about memory in the aging series, but this is this is a true ADHD challenge, regardless of how old you are, we don't want to keep things in our mind. You will forget them. They will get lost. They will get um or they'll get uh remembered at the wrong time. And so this working memory is definitely an issue that we have to consider. Uh planning and prioritization is an executive function.
Pete Wright
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer
We're talking about planning kind of as a whole, but it you know, it is hard to decide the priorities.
Pete Wright
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer
Um we talk a lot about this in our GPS membership program around, you know, how, what is the most important task or what's an urgent task, what's important, what is a task that needs to be um put away and not looked at. And it's really hard to know that when you have ADHD because everything feels important. Everything feels urgent because you are going back to that feeling of being behind. You're seeing cascading tasks, you're seeing due dates that maybe they're real, maybe they're not, but you're seeing them.
Pete Wright
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer
And it's all a blur and it's really difficult to know what. Giving advice to somebody and just saying, okay, let's go pick out our three most important tasks without any kind of education around how to do that is really difficult because they all feel important.
Pete Wright
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer
Um the organization piece, uh, difficulty creating and maintaining systems that keep information accessible. So when we talk about our workbox in our book, we're talking about the organization of our planning tools. We're talking about how do we organize our calendar? How do we work in our task managers? When this executive function isn't working well, it is really hard to maintain those systems.
Pete Wright
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer
And then we think it's our fault. Or we think it's the tools' fault.
Pete Wright
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer
And now we need to get a new tool. Which is not, and we're gonna talk about tools next week.
Pete Wright
Okay, good.
Nikki Kinzer
But that I mean.
Pete Wright
As somebody who's a recovering toolaholic.
Nikki Kinzer
Yes. Well yes, exactly. Then we have this uh cognitive flexibility, trouble uh adjusting when the plan goes wrong, when it changes course.
Pete Wright
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer
That is so difficult because you you run into the all-or-nothing thinking that ADHD um holds very dearly. If my plan doesn't go well in the morning, my whole day is ruined. If I have to take a day off for some reason, then I am a whole day behind. Um if even like, what I'll see is people will take a day off and they think that they have to put five working days into four working days, which is not reasonable.
Pete Wright
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer
But they're having trouble adjusting to that. Um and so when things go wrong, when you have home stuff that you're working on and it takes away from work stuff, that is really hard to adjust. It's hard to figure out what's realistic because you can't get everything done on Friday that you had planned to get done in five days.
Pete Wright
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer
But we think we can.
Pete Wright
Again, I think it goes back to our fantasy Pete, right? Because Fantasy Pete can totally do that because he wields time like a saber.
Nikki Kinzer
Yes, yes.
Pete Wright
He can do whatever he wants with time. He can make four days fit into three. Of course he can.
Nikki Kinzer
Yes, of course.
Pete Wright
He makes those decisions all the time. And he's successful at it. Oh, God. That guy. Nobody likes him at parties, though.
Nikki Kinzer
I know.
Pete Wright
Woof. He's tough hang.
Nikki Kinzer
Well, speaking of parties, then you have this uh emotional regulation, right?
Pete Wright
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer
You're overwhelmed, you're frustrated, you shut down when it feels like it's too much, you avoid. That can get you in trouble. RSD, oh my gosh.
Pete Wright
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer
That's gonna shine bright when your plans don't go the way that you expect them to, or you take on too much and now you have to disappoint somebody. That fear of rejection and disappointing somebody else is is is heavy. And then we've got the sustained attention.
Pete Wright
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer
You have ADHD. There's gonna be distractions. It's gonna be hard to stay focused on some of these things because we're planning like we don't have ADHD. So we're thinking, you know, we may put in a two-hour time block thinking this is going to be deep work. This is going to be really great. I'm going to focus on this. And then all of a sudden, you know, you can't focus. The buzzing in the office is bugging you or you can hear you know, the kids playing outside and you want to go play with them. Like that's more fun, you know?
Pete Wright
You know, mostly the kids are inside playing video games and I want to go outside and play outside alone.
Nikki Kinzer
So. And have some fun.
Pete Wright
Yeah, and just have some fun.
Nikki Kinzer
Right, yeah.
Pete Wright
I want to jump in some leaves. Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer
Exactly. Yeah, yeah. So when you start to really consider, okay ADHD is not just one thing. It's not just distractions. It's a lot of things that are going on when you're trying to plan. It starts to make more sense of why this is difficult. And uh what I hope is again that people can start taking away some of that self-blame and understand and start really understanding what's happening in their brain.
Pete Wright
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer
There's also this thing that we talk about in the book, your flavor of ADHD.
Pete Wright
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer
What do you think when when we wrote that? What were your thoughts around the message that you wanted to share?
Pete Wright
Well, I think that we spend a lot of time thinking diagnostically because that's how we're taught to think when we are approaching our ADHD, when we're diagnosed or when we first start evaluating the specifics of the way ADHD impacts our lives. And I I think it's important to step back and think about, you know, it's more nuanced than that. It's more nuanced than just a diagnostic. And to figure out what our own rhythms are with our ADHD, to figure out, you know, maybe it's as practical as when am I actually productive in any given day? When are my most productive days during the week? They're not the same for everybody and those sprints of productivity probably come in unpredictable times. But, you know, you can start to read the tea leaves. You may be as consistent as the weather, but that doesn't mean you can't start to see patterns. And that's what living with ADHD confidently really is, is pattern recognition. It's trying to figure out how your body and your brain respond to stimulus in a way that is effective and not maladaptive. And so that's what we're talking about. That's what I'm thinking about, you know.
Nikki Kinzer
Absolutely.
Pete Wright
And maybe it it's also, yeah, I mean, it's also when I think about those concepts that we wrote about now three years ago.
Nikki Kinzer
Oh, absolutely.
Pete Wright
Age on us. And I'm evolving the way I think about them from the point they were put in print. But that's where my head is right now.
Nikki Kinzer
Mm-hmm. Yeah, no, I absolutely agree, and I think it is looking for um those patterns and what it means to you. Like what what works with your brain rhythms? What works with your energy patterns? Um what kinds of natural tendencies uh do you just have? Instead of working against them, how do you lean into them? You know, you do need recovery time. Um when we talked about the opportunity cost a while back, uh, I think the highlight of that show is that we need not only buffer time and transition time between tasks, but the harder the task is, the more focus you have on it, the more recovery time that we need to have. And learning more about yourself I think makes makes a big difference.
Pete Wright
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer
And so that's what we definitely mean. I agree with you about the flavor of uh ADHD. And I think the one of the takeaways I want people to have here is letting go from shame to curiosity.
Pete Wright
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer
Right. Um, when we can start to be curious about these patterns and our energy levels and okay, what would happen if I didn't have 10 things on my list? Um and really start thinking about instead of what's wrong with me, but ask what what does your brain actually need here. What is the friction? We talk about friction a lot on the show and I talk about friction a lot in the GPS program. You know, what is stopping you from doing something? And instead of ignoring it and avoiding it and just kind of continuing to live with it as is, once we actually start sitting there and thinking about what's the friction, then we can get to a little bit more of what can I do about it? Um and that makes a big difference because it's not your fault, right? It's not your fault. We got to figure out what the options are, what's going on.
Pete Wright
Yeah, it's not your fault, but it is yours.
Nikki Kinzer
But it is yours.
Pete Wright
It's not your fault, but it is yours. This is a thing that amazes me that I do and that really, really bright people living with ADHD do that stems from this shame bit, which looks something like this. Uh, I'm really busy. Like I have way too many tasks on my list, but they're all urgent tasks. They're like urgent for today and I have to do them. And I say, well, um, how much time do you have? Well, I've got meetings that I have to be at. I have to be at these meetings for like six straight hours today. So really I have about an hour and a half. Then I'm on a commute for two hours. So I have an hour and a half to do all these tasks. And then I say, well, how long do you think it'll take to do those tasks? And he said, oh, easily a day. And then I say, well, do you see how those things are, those two items are not cooperating with one another? If it takes you a day, but you functionally only have an hour and a half, you will not be able to do those things. The response is, but I have to.
Nikki Kinzer
Yes.
Pete Wright
That is where it's broken.
Nikki Kinzer
Yes.
Pete Wright
That's it. And you know the only thing you can be sure of on days like that, weeks like that, months like that, is that at the end of the day, week, month, when you're exhausted, you will feel wrong and you will have let down people in your effort to maintain a sham.
Nikki Kinzer
Yeah.
Pete Wright
I talk about that with people all the time. And I am stunned that this is a thing that we are living with because they're not alone. I'm not alone. I do it to myself, but it doesn't even matter. Once you see it in somebody else, it doesn't matter whether or not you can see it in yourself. It's just the muscle you have to build on your own.
Nikki Kinzer
And get comfortable with that, right? Like to get comfortable with it, all of a sudden what you felt like has to get done you realize it doesn't.
Pete Wright
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer
And you have to be comfortable with that, whatever whatever that means. And that's yeah.
Pete Wright
And would you be more comfortable just going about your day, having taken that hour and a half in the morning and let everybody know it's just not going to get done because I'm a human being and I'm out of time?
Nikki Kinzer
Go ahead. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Pete Wright
And it doesn't mean I don't care about this thing. It just means I have to make choices. Today is not your day.
Nikki Kinzer
Right. You have to make choices.
Pete Wright
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer
Yes. Mm-hmm.
Pete Wright
I do it.
Nikki Kinzer
Good stuff.
Pete Wright
I yeah, it's really good stuff. Yeah, it's uh it's a muscle. All of this is a muscle.
Nikki Kinzer
Absolutely.
Pete Wright
This, that's what this whole trilogy is gonna be about. Uh over the next uh three weeks we're talking about stuff and you did it again. You spun up a thing.
Nikki Kinzer
I did. And it's such a creative title.
Pete Wright
Oh do tell. Do we need to workshop this again live?
Nikki Kinzer
It really isn't. It was Yeah. It's really funny because I looked at the title. I'm like, wow, it doesn't sound fancy at all.
Pete Wright
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer
Uh but what it is, it's a short reflection worksheet to go with today's episode. It's four questions to help you connect uh what we talked about today to your own experience. Right? So I think that's the key is what is your experience.
Pete Wright
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer
And it is called your planning reflection. How fancy is that? I am so fancy.
Pete Wright
So good.
Nikki Kinzer
Uh, and you can find it in our show notes. And also, just a reminder, in case you didn't know, we wrote a book about planning. Called Unapologetically ADHD.
Pete Wright
We did.
Nikki Kinzer
Go get it if you don't have it yet.
Pete Wright
You can still get it, it's still on shelves.
Nikki Kinzer
Yep.
Pete Wright
Somebody, somebody likes it. They're stocking it.
Nikki Kinzer
They're stocking it.
Pete Wright
That's good.
Nikki Kinzer
Yep, it's still there.
Pete Wright
Yep. Awesome. That's in the show notes too. We sure appreciate you. We appreciate your time and your attention for hanging with us this week, for starting this little trilogy with us talking about planning. And uh I promise as we continue to go, we'll feel better about planning. We'll feel better.
Nikki Kinzer
Yes.
Pete Wright
Things can get better. Uh so stick with us. Don't forget if you have something to contribute to this conversation, we're heading over to the Show Talk channel in the Discord server, and you can join us right there by becoming a supporting member at the deluxe level or better. On behalf of Nikki Kinzer, I'm Pete D. Wright, and we'll see you right back here next week on Taking Control, the ADHD podcast.
