Here’s a quick one mid week (backdated to last week,) and I’ll give you a more substantial post on Friday… hopefully.  I have lots of clients who really stress out about meal planning and shopping. I know I’ve posted about that before. But I think sometimes I make it sound harder than it is. Really, you have some starch in your house. Roasting and baking potatoes, regular and pearled couscous, fries, wild, arborio, spanish and jasmine rice, nice bread to grill, hot dog/sausage and sandwich rolls, baked and black beans, tortillas and a both short and long pastas are what we usually have on hand. You keep those in stock as your “par.”  Then you think about how many days you want to cook, how many days you want to pull something out of the freezer, and how many days you want to do take out or eat leftovers. I generally figure look at the nights we will all be home and think about 7 dinners that need to happen. 1. Right now, I’m doing 5 Guys one night a week while my wife works late and the kids have practice. 2. We’ve got tons of Matzo Ball Soup in the Freezer. Add a roll and a salad/some veggies = a meal. Might be potato leek, chile, Fejoada, Kale soup, etc.  3 & 4. There’s always a pasta in here somewhere, maybe two. I’ve got several I rotate through. I’ve got pesto in the freeze, cacciatore, meatballs, amatriciana, and artichoke pasta when Michelle is out like this Friday.  5 & 6 are usually a piece of meat, a veggie, and one of those starches. I generally have chicken breast and thighs, sausages, pork tenderloins or chops, 80% lean burger, and eye round steak hanging out in the freezer. 7. I…

Here’s the schedule from Friday of vacation week. Having gotten my big work project done for the week, I could focus mostly on home/personal stuff. You will note that I already realized I misordered things while making the list and just gave them new numbers and accurate times. Errands in the afternoon. Probably my most accurate execution of the week. But no more or less productive. Just stuck to the plan ’cause there was no reason not too.

Thursday was much like Tuesday, without the gardening. I woke up with a fire under me to finish the copy for my new website. And I pretty much pushed everything else aside and banged that out… except I play a game with E and did his schedule with him. But again, the framework made for a productive day, despite it being changed quite a bit. I was in control. I decided what to work on. I was efficient and productive. WIN! Though you might not be able to tell that from first look at the schedule…

Wednesday I had some clients and some appointments. So I was less aggressive with the schedule and ended up sticking more to it. Still a good day.

Amended: wrote about the wrong day… Tuesday was was supposed to be the nicest day of the week. So I planned to spend a lot of the day doing the garden stuff that was on my agenda for the week. MOst of my morning was taken up in the garden. I did hit my two major daily goals of playing a game with my oldest for 45 minutes and doing / teaching his schedule with him. But a lot of the rest of my schedule was ad hoc as I was making good progress on my website redo. So I rolled with lots of changes.

If you are a regular reader you know that I post schedules from time to time to show how I think of time and tasks and how they interact. I don’t use the schedule that often anymore since most of my days are filled with clients. But, when I am suffering from a very, very full plate and big chunks of free time, I use my tried and true scheduling techniques to maximize my productivity. Last week was a vacation week for my kids. I had both of them home on on Monday and My oldest home for the whole week but I had a tremendous amount to do. So I made schedules every day.  Actually, first I made a list of goals that I wanted to accomplish every day which included eating well, not drinking too much, playing a game with my son for at least 45 minutes, meditating, and some other stuff. And, I narrowed down some of the work projects I’d been saving for my off week into manageable chunks and looked at where they fit on my calendar. Then I went day by day with my schedule. I Think I’m going to try to post daily this week with my daily schedules from last week so you san see in real time (a week delayed) what I did to maximize my productivity.  As you can see from Monday’s schedule, I got up late, got into my day late, and was behind from the the get go. I also made many a daily change to my schedule based on how I was feeling, what the weather was like, how priorities changed, etc. I didn’t get everything done. But I got sooooo much more done and lowered my anxiety level so much compared to if I had rolled without a schedule. …

Here’s a bonus mid-week quickie. I often need some Ativan (lorazepam) to sleep. Sometimes I wake up with my brain on overdrive or one of my kids needs me and I can’t get back to sleep and need to take some in the dark of my room in haze of not-sleep. I stick or glue something on to the top of my pill container so that I can easily find it in the dark. I used several things over time that have eventually fallen off. Currently I have this sweet googly eye that I can feel in the dark and/or see easily amongst my other pill bottles in my nightstand. 

Progress is not a straight line. If that is your expectation, you will disappoint yourself. And, likely you will eventually stop trying to make progress. Setbacks, backsliding, and “relapses” are part of the progress. Three steps forward and two steps back exist as an aphorism for a reason. It is part of the human condition. We, as ADHDers, are no exception to that. In fact, we are double vulnerable because we crave and often expect instant gratification. But progress is a process. It does not happen in a day. It is rarely a smooth and rutt-free road.  This is triply true of ADHD humans who struggle with depression and anxiety. As a setback can trigger all the negative thoughts and feelings in our heads that send us deeper into a shame spiral and take us further away from the process of progress. I have learned over the years to judge my progress in many areas not by whether or not I fall off the proverbial horse, but by how quickly I get back on it.A bad week is better than a bad month.  A bad day is better than a bad week. A bad morning when you can recover and have a good afternoon… well, that’s just not so bad at all.  So, be kind to yourself when you fall. Dust yourself off. And get right back up. Eventually, it’s worth considering why and how you fell, especially if it is a pattern. (Maybe talk to your coach about it.) But in that moment getting back to the process of progress is the biggest victory you can achieve.  Standard Disclaimer:  In an effort to foil my own perfectionist tendencies, I do not edit my posts much… if at all. Please excuse and typos, mistakes, grammatical errors, or awkward phrasing. I…

I may have had an epiphany of my own when working with a client last week. He and I got very specific about how he was feeling and differentiated his anxiety from his shame. And, what I realized is that they have different behavioral levers and can cripple in different ways. I’m still exploring this. But I figured I’d share what I’m working on with my 24 devoted readers and you hundreds of bots that Google keeps telling me are real people trafficking my site every month.  Anxiety is a sinister and crippling problem. I deal with it in a myriad of ways. Pharmacologically with my antidepressant and with benzodiazepines. I also use exercise, self talk, mindfulness, meditation, generally self care, and other ways. I’d estimate that about 80% of my clients also deal with anxiety. Over the years I think that has made me somewhat of a lay expert… if that’s not an oxymoron. I’ve also done some training in CBT which I have incorporated into my coaching for many years now.  What I know about anxiety, particularly in how it affects ADHDers, is that we put things off because they make us anxious (and because of the ADHD reasons that we put them off.) But there are two competing anxieties at any given time. There is the anxiety of doing Thing A and the anxiety of not doing Thing A. Because our time sense is wonky, we aren’t good at the concept of “later.” So the anxiety of not getting Thing A done is relatively low as we put it off for a period of time. Meanwhile the anxiety of not doing Thing A slowly builds based on our theoretical knowledge that we should do it, that we might not have time (whatever that means,) there will be…

If you are a regular, you know that I semi-regularly post one of my daily schedules. I don’t often make them anymore. They are an example of a skill that I have drilled for so long that I have internalized it for all but the most intense days. This week is intense; not many clients/meeting, but soooo much to do. I need to maximize my productivity, which means making good decisions about how I spend my time and on what. So, I fall back on my tried and true scheduling. This is a skill that I work on with MANY of my clients. And I always remind them that the metric of success is comparing your productivity to not having a schedule at all. I often post schedules that went pretty well. I’m taking this opportunity to post one that involves: My having done some things the night before Dealing with two serous tantrums by my six-year-old that were “unscheduled” An hour long meeting that I didn’t think I was going to have to attend… that I was wrong about Some important revelations about priorities that caused me reevaluate why I had put certain things on this schedule in the first place This schedule was for Tuesday the 30th of March 2021. My overall experience was this: I got the number one personal thing done on my list Once I reevaluated, I got a good hour and a half of work done on my number one work priority.  Around three-and-a-half hours of meetings and two hours of parenting that feels really successful. The only thing I really missed was not working out because my workout was gardening that got cancelled. But that was also an active choice later in the day.  Of course I didn’t make all these notes during…

Accountability is a very important part of coaching. In large part is my job to figure out how much accountability to offer I think I’ve lost several potential clients lately because I’m very upfront in my consultations about not providing too much active accountability. My goal is for you to not need me. How can we get there if you are depending on me for accountability? It is always my goal to teach you to be accountable to yourself. Maybe I’m wrong, but isn’t that what we are all looking for? Not to say we don’t have people we rely on in many aspects of our lives. I think of it like a WWII bomber crew. (See a great, if schmaltzy movie, Memphis Belle.) We can’t “put those bombs in the pickle barrel” on our own. But don’t we want to be the pilot, the officer, running the show? Of course we use experts and we outsource and we create a team if we can. That’s life in a highly specialized world. You might take a cooking class. I’ve taken classes in small business accounting, woodworking, Microsoft Excel. I have a gardening consultant because I can’t learn everything from books. I outsource my bookkeeping because that small business accounting class only served to educate me to the fact that that is not how my brain works. I have a tax attorney who does my taxes every year. Pre-pandemic I outsourced some of our laundry.  On the other hand, I grow most of my own produce in the summer. I do a lot of my own butchering, I do a lot of plumbing, some small carpentry, painting, and a little bit of electric. The point being that I run the show. I make the decisions about what I do and what…

Self care is a buzzwork in our society these days. But some of us have been talking about self care for years, especially in the context of ADHD. I can’t speak to neurotypical folks. I’ve only been inside an ADHD guy’s brain. But I can tell you that ADHD people seem to have a particularly hard time with self care. I think there are many reasons that this is the case. We tend to have fewer hours in the day to be productive. (If you are familiar with ADHD, you know what I mean and I don’t have to go on a six paragraph tangent about it!) We also suffer from low self esteem due to the way that our ADHD negatively affects our day to day and big picture success. And, our struggles with the skills and executive functions of time management, initiation, follow through, consistency, and delaying gratification all make it harder for us to practice good self care. And fundamentally, self care might be not-so-stimulation and repetitive sometimes.  But I had a really interesting session with a client about a month ago during which I challenged him to even question the concept of self care. He was going through a really difficult time in his life. He’s in the healthcare field and directly works with patients, but is not higher end of the healthcare pay/stability scale. So, work is very stressful for him. And, he is going through a tremendously stressful time with his soon-to-be-ex-wife. So, he came into a session and wanted to talk about his failures in the self care arena. He felt like he wasn’t living up to his own expectations (and his almost-ex-wife’s expectations) of how he was keeping the house. He wasn’t making the choice to spend the energy to make and…