A Revisit: Breaking Down an ADHD Challenge
We're on summer break, so this week is a Revisit: a favorite conversation pulled back out of the archive. In this one, Pete and Nikki put on their detective hats to break down an ADHD challenge.
The idea is simple. "I can't focus" or "I can't follow through" is too big and vague to solve, so the episode is about investigating what's actually getting in your way and finding the specific roadblock underneath. There's a memorable South Park metaphor involved, plus a practical, low-pressure approach to trying one strategy at a time and keeping track of what works. An encouraging, useful listen, whether it's your first time or a return trip.
Links & Notes
Dr. Dodge Rea's podcast, The Change Paradox, on TruStory FM — and Nikki's guest appearance, Nikki Kinzer and The ADHD Paradox.
How to ADHD with Jessica McCabe — the channel behind the motivation video that sparked this conversation (YouTube).
Tools mentioned in the episode: OmniFocus, OmniGraffle, MindNode, Todoist, and Day One.
South Park's "Gnomes" — the origin of the underpants gnomes.
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Pete Wright:
One more Revisit for you while we're on our summer break. This is a fun one, and honestly a useful one.
The whole episode is built around treating your ADHD like a detective would. Instead of landing on "I can't focus" or "I can't follow through" and calling it a day, Nikki walks through how to actually investigate the challenge. Get specific, find the real roadblock, and figure out what's underneath the thing you keep getting stuck on. And yes, at some point I drag South Park's underpants gnomes into it as a metaphor, which somehow makes complete sense by the end. You'll see.
It's a good one to sit with if you've ever told yourself a big flat "I can't" and left it there. So settle in, grab your magnifying glass, and enjoy the Revisit. We'll be back with new episodes before long. Thanks, as always, for being here.
Hello, everybody, and welcome to Taking Control, the ADHD Podcast on TruStory FM. I'm Pete Wright, and right over there is Nikki Kinzer.
Nikki Kinzer:
Hello, everyone. And for this show, I'm going to call you Detective Pete Wright.
Pete Wright:
Dun dun dun. Among the greats. Hercule Poirot.
Nikki Kinzer:
Uh-huh.
Pete Wright:
Agatha Christie. Detective Pikachu.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yep.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. I'm up there with the greats. Hey. We are talking about breaking down an ADHD challenge today. It's going to be great. It's kind of a new way of thinking about it. We talk a lot about processes, breaking down processes, breaking down projects. But how do you break down the actual ADHD challenge itself? And it will involve underpants gnomes. I'm very excited about this.
So we have a few bits of business. The first one is, you were a guest on the Change Paradox podcast.
Nikki Kinzer:
I was.
Pete Wright:
And it just went live last week, as we record this on Friday. And you were great.
Nikki Kinzer:
Oh, thank you. It was so fun. I was interviewed by Dr. Dodge.
Pete Wright:
Dr. Dodge. And this is his new show. A lot of you, when he was a guest on our show, had asked, when he starts his podcast, would you please let us know? Well, this is us letting you know. He has started his podcast. Nikki was on it. And you can find the link in the show notes. It's over at trustory.fm/thechangeparadox. It was a great episode. And I love the idea of change, and changing your life and behavior around that which does not change, right? Your ADHD is a thing that exists.
Nikki Kinzer:
Exactly, right.
Pete Wright:
So how do you change around it? That's the ADHD paradox. It was a really neat conversation. I was glad to be able to listen to it, though I did not participate, which was weird.
Nikki Kinzer:
You did not.
Pete Wright:
It was so weird.
Nikki Kinzer:
It was weird to talk about you, because there were a couple of times where I'd be like, "my co-host Pete Wright." And Pete is there. He's just not talking. He's in the background doing his tech stuff. But yeah, it was a little strange not having you there.
Pete Wright:
It was very strange. Super fun, and I'm super glad and grateful that you were able to do that. So that's the first bit of business. And the second is, I've got to tell you about my dog.
Nikki Kinzer:
Uh-oh.
Pete Wright:
Can I do this on Thanksgiving? We did a presentation a long time ago about how you resolve an ADHD spiral. Do you remember that?
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes.
Pete Wright:
And I think the last thing was, like, when your dog runs away and gets in the mud or something like that.
Nikki Kinzer:
When your dog runs away. Yes.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. So it's Thanksgiving, we're all kind of relaxing in the evening. And the wildlife on a clear night is getting active. This is very new to us in suburbia. We've only had the dog for a couple of years. At night, all the animals are out. We've seen raccoons and everything. And for the house, we got a sauna, like a hot box sauna, where you zip up in it and you set the temperature and your little head sticks out.
Nikki Kinzer:
Oh, yes.
Pete Wright:
And I was doing the sauna one night. You sit in there at 150 degrees.
Nikki Kinzer:
I want a picture of that.
Pete Wright:
It's ridiculous, but you sit in there and you just sweat. That's the whole thing. You just sweat. 150 degrees for an hour. So I'm in the middle of this, and I hear downstairs a commotion. And then I hear little feet running fast, and it's our dog, and then silence. And then a smell comes over the house, and I think, oh my God, am I on fire right now in this hot box? I think I'm on fire. Something is on fire. The smell is so bad. Is my hair on fire? I don't know what's going on, and chaos ensues. And I turn around and hear my wife downstairs saying, oh my God, I think Gambit got sprayed by a skunk.
Nikki Kinzer:
Oh, yes, it has.
Pete Wright:
Has this ever happened to you with your animals? This was totally new.
Nikki Kinzer:
It's terrible.
Pete Wright:
It is so terrible. So he went and lodged himself under my side of the bed. He got sprayed full in the face, and was dripping the stuff throughout our house. He went careening through the house with the skunk. So right now, today, it has become the fixating element that distracts me always. I turn right, and I smell the whiff of it. We've tried everything. And everything that we've read is, you do all the treatments, you do everything with the vinegar and all of this stuff, and then you wait like two months, because that's what it's going to take to get rid of every last trace. But I am noticing just how sensitive I am to smell, because we're moving furniture, we're doing the cleaning. It was just horrific, and that has become a distracting feature. Just being in my house is a fight right now.
Nikki Kinzer:
To be in there.
Pete Wright:
It is the worst. Just to be in there.
Nikki Kinzer:
Oh my gosh, how awful.
Pete Wright:
That was it. The dog is fine. We don't have anything super threatening. We don't have dingoes, coyotes, bears in our yard.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes, dingoes.
Pete Wright:
We don't do that. But we do have, now, skunks. And they were cranky at my boy, so yeah.
Nikki Kinzer:
And they like to spray. Yes, they're cranky.
Pete Wright:
So bad, right?
Nikki Kinzer:
Wow. So that's so interesting, because next Thanksgiving, I wonder what the story's going to be. Because this Thanksgiving it was you and your skunk. Last Thanksgiving, it was me falling through the roof.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. Which was priceless.
Nikki Kinzer:
We're not having good luck here.
Pete Wright:
That is a gift that keeps giving. Also, don't forget, we're in the middle of a pandemic.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right. Yeah, exactly. Oh, I'm so sorry. Well, I hope that it's not two months.
Pete Wright:
Oh, me too.
Nikki Kinzer:
I hope it's more like two hours.
Pete Wright:
Me too.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah, that's awful.
Pete Wright:
You'd think you get used to it. I don't get used to it. I don't acclimate to it. It's bad.
Nikki Kinzer:
No. Now that you're saying that, Charlie's never been sprayed by a skunk, but what he's done is — we have a lot of deer, a lot of wildlife where we are. And he'll get into the deer poop, or whatever the poop is, and he'll lay on it, and it's all over him.
Pete Wright:
Sure he will. Oh, that's awful.
Nikki Kinzer:
And then he comes in, and it's just disgusting. But it's not an ongoing thing like the skunk spray.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer:
So I'm sorry. That sucks. Oh, can I say that? Okay.
Pete Wright:
We do have a question from our Discord community, and I wanted — it's appropriate for our topic today, and I'm also incredibly lazy and just didn't want to type all of my thoughts out. So I thought we would answer it right now.
Nikki Kinzer:
I think that's a great idea.
Pete Wright:
And post a link back. This one comes from our Discord community, and it is: if memory serves, several of you in the Discord world have said that you have become entrepreneurs or gone independent in recent years, including you, Pete. I'm considering it again now, but as always, I'm struggling with anxieties about structure, organization, et cetera. How did you guys deal with that? What do you think?
Nikki Kinzer:
Well, my first response is, you get help. You don't do it all on your own.
Pete Wright:
It's hard. I think having some sort of support is really useful. I would say, for me, finding the right time was everything, because I had tried to do this a number of times before. I tried to do it while I was still working, to kind of ease out of one and into another. And I'm sure I've told this story before. I couldn't do it. Nobody would answer the phone. Your focus is just not — when you already struggle with focus, having to split that limited focus with a day job and efforts to do your own thing at night is really hard. So it wasn't until I finally just said, you know what, I quit. I'm done with a day job, and I'm going to do this full time.
The structure — I did what I think everybody recommends at first, which is to just pretend you have a day job. Set the hours and the alerts and the alarms and the breaks for lunch, and do all of those things until you figure out what your own mode is.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes.
Pete Wright:
Because there are people who want to sleep late and take advantage of that, but then you've got to figure out where the work happens. So manufacturing a structure around when you are available, and most importantly when you are not, I think is incredibly important. If you're going to end the day at five, then really end the day. Leave the laptop in another room. End the day.
I think having a space that is yours matters. If you don't have an office, pick a corner. Have something you can set aside as the space that is dedicated to work. A separate phone line is useful if you have a heavy phone presence. Set up a Zoom phone account so you have a phone number that rings to you, so you can turn that off at the end of the day, and be protective of that. Setting up a separate email address, separate phone, separate space — all of that serves to create the invisible barriers that you no longer have by going to an office every day. And a lot of people make that decision where there's a break point, where you say, okay, now I'm making enough and I have enough structure that I need an office and I need more support. And you get to make that call. I have chosen not to make that call, and the people that I work with are all completely distributed. They're not in the same state. We don't want a physical presence. But at some point you'll be able to make that call yourself, and that's another thing worth considering. So I don't know. I'm spitballing here.
Nikki Kinzer:
Well, one of the things that really helped me was you, Pete. Because you started with me at the very beginning, when I was an organizer. You helped with the website. You were right there from the beginning. And there were so many things that you knew that I couldn't possibly know about the technology. There were a lot of things that you offered and recommended that helped with the organization. When we first started working together, you had introduced me to OmniFocus. I worked with that for a while. You then showed me things, and all of this has evolved. But just these little things, like MindNode and OmniGraffle, all of these things that can help you organize your tasks and your projects, was a lifesaver, because I didn't know about those things, and I wouldn't have known about them if I didn't have you to say, hey, check this out, this might help you. So I think it's important to look at that, even if you're not tech savvy, because I wasn't. And I was still able to figure out how to use those systems in a very simple way, and kept track of things.
Pete Wright:
I would also add to that, as a parallel point, if you are tech savvy, recognize that you're going to need to figure out when to stop. Because it's really easy to invest in too many systems, and suddenly you have too many subscription bills monthly. You have all of these things you've subscribed to to help you get organized. And if you live with ADHD and you're trying to start your own business, it can be really easy to get in system overload and not even recognize it until you're way too distributed.
Nikki Kinzer:
Well, and with that point too, it does take money to start a business. Even though what you and I do is so much online, and we don't have to have customers coming into our stores, you do have to understand that it is a business. Whatever business you choose, whether it's a service or whatever, it is a business, and it is going to cost money. And like you said, be really aware of what systems are going to help you, and upgrade them. If something's going to really help you, don't be afraid to do the premium, because you're going to get so much more than just doing the basics.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. The same thing goes with investing in technology. Investing in hardware, phones, tablets, computers. If it's for your business, make sure it's bulletproof. Don't get the cheapest because you think you're a startup. Invest. Do it right.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
So I guess that's it. Without more specific questions — if you have more specific questions, dear listener, please post them back in the Discord. We'll post this link. And thank you for asking the question. I think it's a great one. It's a good one to revisit, especially as we come up toward the end of the year and we look at reflections, and frankly look at investing in some things for taxes here in the US. It's almost a new year. Is it time to buy a new computer? Let's see what we can invest in ourselves.
Nikki Kinzer:
Hey, that's right.
Pete Wright:
So that's where we are. And that actually leads us really well into our topic for today. Breaking down an ADHD challenge. Set us up.
Nikki Kinzer:
Okay. Well, it is time for you, Detective Pete Wright, to put on your investigator hat. And what's that eyeglass thing?
Pete Wright:
That's a magnifying glass.
Nikki Kinzer:
Magnifying glass. Yes.
Pete Wright:
I was thinking a monocle, but no, that's — I'm not an industrialist.
Nikki Kinzer:
No. You are going to be looking really close at things to try to solve the case. I love this, because it really is about being a detective. We talk a lot about breaking projects down into smaller pieces. This is something we talk about on the show, in blog posts, in conversations with clients. It's obviously a big thing. When we do this breaking-down journey, it's making things easier for us to get started, to tackle. It's less overwhelming. But what we don't always talk about is breaking down specific ADHD challenges.
The reason I brought this up today is that I had a Facebook question. We had posted a video from Jessica McCabe of How to ADHD. And the question underneath was, well, what about when you get stuck? The video was about motivation, and then the question was, what if you get stuck? And that's kind of a big question, right?
Pete Wright:
Right.
Nikki Kinzer:
Because what exactly are you stuck on? We don't know. So one of the things we want to do when we're breaking down ADHD challenges is recognize, when are we doing that black-and-white thinking? When I say I'm stuck, what does that mean? I can't get organized — what does that mean? I can't follow through on what, exactly? I'm not motivated. When comments like this are made, we are just thinking way too broad. So what we need to do is really zero in on what's really happening. And also recognize when you're using words like "can't" and "never" — what are they, Pete?
Pete Wright:
Yeah, they're limiting beliefs, Nikki.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes, that's right.
Pete Wright:
I love this. I've been really drilling down on symptomatic thinking too. What are the behaviors that are actually symptoms of something different that's going on? And that, I think, is where the detective stuff comes in, because so much of my behavior might be driven by something not yet addressed. How do you shorten the distance between the initiative — the thing I want to accomplish — and the action, a result, without getting caught up in symptoms or symptomatic thinking? That's what leads to the limiting beliefs. And figuring out how not to let yourself get trapped by, oh, I can't do that because of ADHD.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right. You're almost surrendering to that. Like, okay, I'm just going to — this is just the way it is.
Pete Wright:
Right.
Nikki Kinzer:
Well, and as a coach, I always ask a lot of questions. So now it's your turn, Detective Pete Wright, and all the listeners out there, to ask these questions to yourself to kind of solve your own case. What is really going on here, and how can I do something about it, and not get rid of the "can't"? So the very first thing I want to talk about is identify. You really have to be very specific about what's challenging you.
For example, if the statement is "I can't organize," here are some questions you can start asking yourself. Are there certain items that are harder for you to organize than others? Which ones are those? Do you notice a difference between your home organization and your work organization? How are they different? We want to see, if something works really well at work, is there a way to transfer that and make it work at home? Is there a time of day that is consistent with your perceived inability to take on certain tasks? This is something you added, Pete, and I want you to expand on that.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. I run into this all the time. I think, okay, I guess I can't write. I just can't write. But it turns out that if you look at why I'm in this state of creative block, it's always at the same time in my calendar, say four o'clock in the afternoon. And four o'clock in the afternoon, it turns out, is the most distracted time in the house, and I can't find a quiet space. If I just get stuck in the "can't write" part, there's this big open question of, maybe you should try a different time. Maybe you should move your schedule around to figure that out. And that rides into consistent distractions. If you're trying everything at four o'clock — well, at four o'clock the kids are off school and they're raiding the fridge for snacks, and I'm trying to do my billing, and of course I can't do my billing. "I guess I can't focus, I have ADHD" is one possible outcome. The other is, I need to go sit in my car, because it's completely silent, even if it's just in the garage with my laptop open. Then I might be able to get it done.
And I think you can get even more specific. This couch right behind me has a great and comfortable material. But if I wear a certain shirt and I'm sitting down to try to do a couch podcast, that shirt gets caught funny and it rides up in the back.
Nikki Kinzer:
Oh no.
Pete Wright:
One thing is, I could say, well, I guess I could just never podcast here, because it's not comfortable. But I could also change my shirt. If I'm not aware that this is what's happening, because I'm distracted by the environment and ADHD and whatever it is, then I never ask that question. I never stop and get introspective and investigative and curious about it. Instead I jump straight to judgment. Be curious, not judgmental.
Nikki Kinzer:
Be curious. I love that. Yes, be curious, not judgmental. That's definitely a great takeaway. Well, and one of the other examples we have is, I hear a lot that "I can't follow through with things." And I have a hard time believing that you can't follow through with anything, even though that may be how you feel.
Pete Wright:
Yes.
Nikki Kinzer:
It's not true. So what we need to do is, again, be very curious without judgment. What specific tasks do you struggle with? What are the roadblocks that are getting in your way? Because as soon as you can start seeing the roadblocks — like what you just perfectly described. It's the couch, the shirt, that's a roadblock. It's the time of day, that's a roadblock. As soon as you can figure out what those are, then you can start really looking at solutions and opportunities for change. And we want to look at what things you are able to follow through with, and what makes those things different. It could be just as simple as your interest, right? Because we know that ADHD minds are driven to what they're interested and engaged in. So then that leads into a whole other conversation, because motivation, as we've talked about, is not necessarily the right question to ask on how to do something. It's how to get started. So if you know that you're not interested in something, and that's a roadblock, then the question changes to, what can I do to get started on this? The more specific you can be about where you're stuck, the better, because now you can investigate those possible strategies.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer:
And I'm just going to say, it's a lot more efficient to search for ways to be on time than tips on time management.
Pete Wright:
Right. Just sort of throwing tips at the problem.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes.
Pete Wright:
Rather than actually being introspective about what is symptomatic of you not being able to focus or manage your time.
Nikki Kinzer:
Exactly.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer:
So what are these underpants gnomes all about?
Pete Wright:
I love that you don't — do you know who Trey Parker and Matt Stone are?
Nikki Kinzer:
No.
Pete Wright:
Okay, they're the creators behind South Park. Trey Parker, Matt Stone.
Nikki Kinzer:
Oh, okay. Well, I know what South Park is, yes.
Pete Wright:
So South Park is an awful show to love, and I do love it. I actually went to college with Trey Parker and Matt Stone.
Nikki Kinzer:
Oh, really?
Pete Wright:
Yeah. They were in the film school, and I was in the journalism school, and we were a year apart. It's just fantastic that they have found such success in their kind of comedy.
Nikki Kinzer:
Did you know that? Oh, cool.
Pete Wright:
They deal with ADHD in their own unique way, and they have put a lot of that into the show. One of my very favorite episodes, the most ADHD of all of their episodes, was season two, episode seventeen. And that was called "Gnomes." Part of the story was that there is a new giant coffee chain called Harbucks moving into South Park. And it was competing with the little guy, and the little guy is Mr. Tweek's coffee. Tweek is one of the children characters, and he's completely buzzed out, because the parents just give him coffee all the time, and he's constantly shaking. And the kids ask, do you think you should give him coffee? Because maybe he's shaking all the time because of all the coffee. And the mom says, oh no, he has ADD, attention deficit disorder. And I think that is just amazing. There's a sequence where the kids are literally passed out in their own vomit, because they've had coffee all night to stay up.
Nikki Kinzer:
All right.
Pete Wright:
The real story, though, is this, and this is what made this episode a meme, because it has become a massive online meme. Dealing with the gnomes. The gnomes come in at night and they steal your underpants, and then they go and put them in a cave. That's what we find out. They're the underpants gnomes. And when the kids finally see the underpants gnomes in action, they say, hey gnomes, why are you doing this? And the gnomes say, come down and see our business plan. We love big corporations, because we're a big corporation, and there are gnomes everywhere. And there's a mountain of underpants in this underground cavern. And they present their business plan. And their business plan is, step one, collect underpants. And the kids say, well, that's great. What's phase two? And they yell around, and nobody has an answer. And one of them says, but phase three is profit. So here's their chart. Phase one, collect underpants. Phase two, question mark. Phase three, profit.
Okay, now you know the underpants thing. It's everywhere, and it's used as a meme to define when companies don't know why they're doing something, and they lose a lot of money and go out of business, because they didn't know what phase two was.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right.
Pete Wright:
This connects to this episode in a very intimate way for me. Which is, my goodness, I'm investigating these symptoms of why I can't do things. And it's step one, distraction. Step two, question mark. Step three, oh well, ADHD.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right, yes.
Pete Wright:
Do you see how it connects back to underpants gnomes, Nikki? I did it.
Nikki Kinzer:
Step two is like, not known.
Pete Wright:
Step two is, I guess I don't know. It's a cereal, you know?
Nikki Kinzer:
Don't know. Yeah.
Pete Wright:
I live this, and I think about their little chart — step one, question marks, phase two, phase three, profit — all the time. And it hit me so hard here. Why? Because step one, I'm not on time. I'm not a timely person. I have an internalized negative limiting belief.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right.
Pete Wright:
Step two is the process. I'm not on time because — we have to focus on the "because," we have to let it carry the weight. Why am I not on time? What is it? Is it because I lose my keys, because I don't have a bowl by the door with my keys and wallet in it? Maybe I should try that, because step three is the new state. I'm now on time, thanks to these accommodations.
Nikki Kinzer:
The bowl. Right.
Pete Wright:
I have done the X, Y, and Z to solve the question mark in phase two. I love this. Figure out the phase two question mark, and you solve this problem.
Nikki Kinzer:
Absolutely. Oh, that's great. Thank you for bringing that to the show.
Pete Wright:
Underpants gnomes.
Nikki Kinzer:
It's fantastic. Underpants gnomes. It's so true. We're missing that second step. And that's exactly what this is about — identifying and figuring out what that is. And I'm going to take it just a little step further, which is really understanding why it matters to you. What makes a difference in your life if you make this new state? If you make these changes, which we're going to talk about in just a second about taking action, how is that going to benefit you? That's a really important piece of getting down to solving the case. It's identifying and knowing why this is important to you.
Once we can really take the time to research and investigate, then we can start looking at what the possibilities are. What are the strategies? So we're doing this research piece. But I'm not necessarily saying go on Google and type a bunch of sentences to find out what you're looking for. I want you to look inside of yourself, because most people I've talked to who have ADHD will say, I know exactly what to do, I'm just not sure how to do it. Or, I'm having a hard time getting started. So we have to be careful of that black-and-white thinking, that you don't really know, because you probably do. You probably do know some ideas and some tips that have resonated with you. So think about, what have you tried before? Because most likely you've tried something. What worked? What didn't work? When it worked, what was different? Was it a different time of day? Were you wearing a different shirt? We can tie all of this back into what we were talking about earlier.
But also, ask your community. Ask other ADHDers what helps them, what works for them. Our Patreon is an excellent opportunity for you to do that. People want to help others. They want to share their ideas. And that could save you a lot of time, because you're actually talking to somebody who has experienced the exact same thing and can share what's working for them.
Pete Wright:
Absolutely.
Nikki Kinzer:
We want to try one strategy. We don't want to try ten. You might get ten tips on how to leave the house on time, but we want to try one strategy. We want to start small. I'm always an advocate of starting small. Practice, and like you said, be curious about it. No judgment on the outcome. Don't be tied to the outcome. All you're doing at this point is practicing. But we do want to pay attention for the week that you're practicing. So have reminders. I'm not a huge fan of trackers, but sometimes it can really help, because if you're trying to track your time, or track your distractions, those things really do help. You have to know what's getting in your way. So definitely be paying attention. You're investigating a case. That's how I would look at it. You're really trying to get all the information that you can.
Evaluate at the end of the week, once you've tried the strategy — how did it go? What worked, what didn't. And one of the biggest things I would say to our listeners is, have a place where you save your strategies that work. So that the next time this comes about, you can actually go back to this place and look at the strategies that worked before for your future cases. We're going to wrap this back around to being an investigator. It's too easy to forget. So we want to somehow track the things that work for you, whether that's in a journal, a bullet journal, a file, a computer.
Pete Wright:
Right.
Nikki Kinzer:
I don't know, Pete, what you would do. How do you track your strategies that work for you?
Pete Wright:
Well, to get started on a strategy or a new process or tool, I'm tracking it into Todoist. I create things I want to build habits out of. I have a little routines project, and I have the repeating tasks in there, and that kind of gets me going. And then, as something works or doesn't work — if it doesn't work, and I find I'm just checking it off every day and not doing it, that's an indicator that I need to go back and revise that task. So I'll go in and edit the task and see, what's it going to take to make this work? And I track at the end of the day. I have a little pop-up in my Day One app, the journal app. It pops up in the corner of my screen at four o'clock every day, and I use that to just talk about how the day went. What did I accomplish?
Nikki Kinzer:
Right.
Pete Wright:
What did I ship? What is it that I am trying to create for myself as that guide to future success?
Nikki Kinzer:
Well, and I like that you bring up "what did I ship" again, because I think that's a really big point. I know that has resonated with a lot of people who have listened to the show. "What did I ship" is such a healthier way of looking at it, and then documenting that too.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, right. Like this live stream. The live stream is something that we're shipping today, and it's to our members, and it's important. I'm proud and happy at the end of the day that we did this. And also, tomorrow I have an edit job to get the podcast ready to go out in those channels, and I'm going to ship that. So those tasks — I think it's really important to focus on what things you're introducing into the world, and be happy about that.
Nikki Kinzer:
That's right.
Pete Wright:
There you go. This is great. Nice job.
Nikki Kinzer:
Well, thank you.
Pete Wright:
We appreciate you downloading and listening to the show. Thank you for your time and attention. Don't forget, if you have something to contribute to the conversation, head over to the Show Talk channel in our Discord server, and join us right there by becoming a supporting member at the Deluxe level. 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.
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