Hacking Your ADHD

One of the hottest trends to come out of the self-help world over the last few years is gratitude. And it's no surprise, gratitude has been found to be one of the greatest indicators of overall well-being. I'm usually pretty skeptical about things that get hyped quite as much as gratitude has been - I mean when you see the list of things that a gratitude practice can help with it's pretty easy to roll your eyes. I mean can gratitude really do all those things that people say it can?

Today we'll be exploring the mechanisms that make gratitude work - and also perhaps tempering some of the hype around it - then we'll be looking at ways we can find things to be grateful in our lives as well as looking at some ways that we can start a gratitude practice.

And I'll admit, this episode is a little less ADHD-focused - but gratitude was something that was on my mind, for reasons that I get into during the episode. And so even though this episode is a little less ADHD specific I still think everyone can get a lot out of it. Support me on Patreon Connect with me on: Facebook Twitter Instagram or ask me a question on my Contact Page Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/gratitude This Episode's Top Tips

1. Gratitude is showing thanks and appreciation and it has a tremendous impact on our brains. Gratitude can help us release build our relationships, regulate stress, improve sleep quality, build self-esteem and make us happier.
2. One way we can practice gratitude is through mindfulness and seeing all the things in our lives that are going right. It's easy for us to latch onto the negative things that happen during our day. We'll miss all the things that went right because when things go according to plan they can often become invisible.
3. We can also practice gratitude by journaling or writing a letter to someone in our lives that has greatly impacted us.

Sequencing is all about the order in which we do things. Sometimes it seems like it doesn't matter what comes first, but also try putting your pants on after you put on your shoes.

Sequencing is something I've come to realize is a big deal with ADHD. The order in which we do things has a big impact on our overall productivity, but more than that, some of our other issues with ADHD make the sequence in which we do things much more important.

Today we're going to be exploring how the order we do things is important for our ADHD brains and then we'll be looking at some ways that we can use sequencing to our advantage.

Support me on Patreon Connect with me on: Facebook Twitter Instagram or ask me a question on my Contact Page Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/sequencing This Episode's Top Tips

1. Sequencing is order in which we do things and it matters because it can have a big impact on how we remember things and execute our plans.
2. Planning can help with our ability to sequence things properly - one technique that can be especially helpful in making sure we don't forget steps is to start our planning from the end and working our way backwards.
3. Part of sequencing is making sure that we're paying attention to tasks that will get us off track and making sure we're not putting those right before things we actually want to do.
4. Batching tasks is a great way to make sure we're not getting ourselves off track - but remember we don't have to an entire batch at once, we can still break batches into reasonable chunks.

Hey team, I'm going to be taking a little time off in August and I thought that I'd dredge up a few episodes from the archives.

Today we're going to be hitting on an idea that has been a reoccurring theme in the last few episodes and that's personal energy management.

While many of us have realized that we only have so much time in our day, we tend to still believe that we're going to have the same amount of energy from sun up to sundown. But we know this isn't true. Our energy levels vary throughout the day and if we want to be getting the most out of our days we have to try and work with these rhythms of energy.

Today we're going to be discussing how we can work on creating our schedules around when we do have energy instead of just when we've got a free spot on the calendar. We'll be looking at some of the different areas of energy management as well as how our energy levels fluctuate throughout the day. And we'll also spend a little time on how you can make a little more energy. Support me on Patreon Connect with me on: Facebook Twitter Instagram or ask me a question on my Contact Page Find the full show note at HackingYourADHD.com/energymanagement This Episode's Top Tips

1. Energy management is about realizing it's not just about how many hours you have in the day, but also how much energy you've got during the day.
2. Your energy levels are going to fluctuate up and down throughout the day, and if you want to get the most out of your schedule try scheduling your most important tasks during your high energy times, preferably early in the day.
3. Limit your commitments so that you have enough time to work on the projects that are important to you.
4. If you're low on energy try having some water or a healthy snack - you can also try to change your state by listening to some music or going on a short walk.

I want to start this episode off by saying that this is something I'm bad at - and not in the sense that what I do to celebrate is bad or that I'm not celebrating the small wins throughout my day. It's bad in the sense that I almost entirely skip the whole thing.

Recently this podcast tipped past half a million downloads. That's a pretty big milestone and is pretty indicative of how successful this endeavor has been. But it was barely a blip for me. I didn't want to acknowledge the success because it can be hard for me to acknowledge when I do things well.

So this episode is as much for me as it is for all of you and in this episode, we're going to be exploring what it means to have small wins and also how we can celebrate them. Support me on Patreon Connect with me on: Facebook Twitter Instagram or ask me a question on my Contact Page Find the full show note at HackingYourADHD.com/winning This Episode's Top Tips

1. Celebrating our wins is a way to boost our confidence and it will actively encourage us to seek out that same success again.
2. We can differentiate intrinsic and extrinsic motivation by thinking of intrinsic as what to do because it's interesting and inherently satisfying. Extrinsic motivation comes from rewards or from avoiding punishment. Both can be important parts of how we celebrate our success.
3. Start celebrating your wins by acknowledging when they happen and then letting yourself do something fun to celebrate that success.
4. Don't get down on yourself when the wins aren't coming - we're not always going to have smooth sailing, but only focusing on what didn't happen tends to make us overlook all the good things that did happen.

As we've been working on goals one place I want us to take a step back on and think about is meeting ourselves where we are.

As we get going with our planning we tend to decide that well we want to do all of the things. And I mean why not, there are a lot of things that I want to do, if I don't start now, when am I going to start? I can't tell you how many ill-fated adventures I've started because of that whole "if not now, when?" line - there are so many things that I should be investing my time in now. I need to be meditating and exercising more and eating healthier and saving money and work on business and building my relationships and learning new skills and on and on and on.

I'm sure everyone listening has that list of things they know that they should be starting on now because the sooner the better results you'll see down the line. But we're not starting on them... or when we do we don't stick with the changes.

Today we're going to be looking at what it means to meet ourselves where we're at and then some of the ways that we can work on making that happen.\ Support me on Patreon Feel free to ask me a question on my Contact Page Find the full show note at HackingYourADHD.com/80 This Episode's Top Tips

1. We only have so much time and energy we can put into any given day - giving ourselves the self-compassion to accept this is our first step in meeting ourselves where we're at.
2. When we're trying to add things back into our life that we've previously done it can feel like we picked up the wrong puzzle pieces and this is because we often don't think about how our circumstances have changed. Just because we did something before doesn't mean it will be necessarily easy for us to just pick right back up.
3. After we approach what we're capable of with self-compassion we need to decide on some of the things that we're not going to do. This gives us the mental space to focus on the things we can do right now.
4. Celebrate your small wins because they are the stepping stones to reaching your goals.

The first thing we've got to understand is that when we ask, when should I quit? We're also asking, when should I persevere? And they often serve as the same answer - I should quit when it doesn't make sense to keep going. I keep going when it doesn't make sense to quit. Unfortunately is really easy to get those messages mixed up and with ADHD we've all got a trail of unfinished projects and ideas that are weighing us down every time we need to make this decision again. Support me on Patreon Connect with me on: Facebook Twitter Instagram or ask me a question on my Contact Page Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/whentoquit This Episode's Top Tips

1. We've got to give up the notion that winners never quit. Persistence doesn't guarantee success - we can persist at the wrong things forever and never make progress.
2. There are two curves we've got to look for when starting something new - the dip and the cul-de-sac. A cul-de-sac is a dead end. The dip is the point where things start to get hard - we've got to stop quitting things when they get hard and embrace the dip.
3. We'll often stick out things we should quit. There are a lot of reasons that we might stick something out like the sunk cost fallacy or the planning fallacy. Regardless of why we're sticking around, once we realize that we're in a dead-end we've got to accept that we need to quit and try something new.

Last week dove into how goals work and the science behind them - now we're going to be taking all of that and looking at how we can better create our goals through simple frameworks. A lot of these frameworks come from a business setting, but with a little tweaking, we can absolutely make them work for personal use as well.

Today we're going to be looking at a few of the different frameworks we can use for our goal setting as well as hitting the why behind setting those goals. Support me on Patreon Connect with me on: Facebook Twitter Instagram or ask me a question on my Contact Page Find the full show note at HackingYourADHD.com/frameworks This Episode's Top Tips

1. SMART goals are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. You can make them SMARTER by adding a step to Evaluate our goals and then to Readjust them.
2. Using the Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) framework, we're looking for the specific things that we can do every day that will naturally lead us to reaching our goals.
3. A big, hairy, audacious goal is something that exists on a large time frame and will push us out of our comfort zone. We can use these big goals to help guide our thinking behind the other goals we're setting.
4. Ikigai is the Japanese ideology of finding the joy of life through purpose. We can use this idea to help create the kinds of big goals that are going to have real meaning behind them.

As we continue to think about our fresh start one clear area that we're going to hit is that of, well what should we even be focusing on. That's where goal setting comes into play and while I did touch on this in the original fresh start episode, I think it's worth giving more consideration.

When we think about goals there's a ton of different ways to think about them, but at their basics, a goal is simply a future result that you are directing your effort. Now there are a lot of different ways that we can go about setting those goals and we'll get into that more next week when I go through some of the various frameworks. But before we get into those frameworks it's important to understand how goals actually work and why we even want to set them. Support me on Patreon Connect with me on: Facebook Twitter Instagram or ask me a question on my Contact Page Find the full show note at HackingYourADHD.com/freshstartgoals This Episode's Top Tips

1. There are 4 mechanisms we need to keep in mind when trying to complete our goals, those are focus, effort, persistence, and strategy.
2. We can think of goals fitting into three broad categories - outcome, performance, and process. Outcome and performance goals focus on things we can measure and process goals focus on the things that we do.
3. With an any benefit approach to our goals we're going to end up trying to focus on doing everything - instead, we need to prioritize those things that are most important and do them before we even think about those lower priority goals.

One of the things I never quite got a grasp on is seasons... I mean I grew up in Hawaii and we basically had hot and not quite as hot. But this comes up for me because technically we're still in Spring right now so I guess this could still be a Spring Cleaning episode - officially Summer starts on the Solstice in June on the 20th... so I made in by like a week if you're listening to this when it comes out.

Regardless of if this is Spring Cleaning or not, cleaning can be a great way to signal the start of something new. We all get used to the mess in our space and freshening things up can not only signal the start of something new but also shift our mindset.

Today I'll be exploring the benefits of cleaning, how we can update our space, some tips on accountability, and then get into a few of the specific things that you can do. Support me on Patreon Connect with me on: Facebook Twitter Instagram or ask me a question on my Contact Page Find the full show note at HackingYourADHD.com/freshstartcleaning This Episode's Top Tips

1. You can help spur your fresh start by rearranging your space - this doesn't have to be a big move, but sprucing up your environment can help it feel new and like you are starting fresh.
2. Getting rid of our old stuff can help lift mental burdens and take care of old open loops. Our accumulated stuff often carries more mental weight than we really know.
3. To help keep on track during cleaning make sure you create some accountability. It can be a great way to help you follow through with your planning and also in the moment through body doubling.
4. Leave yourself notes as to where you left off in your cleaning so when you come back you can pick it back up without having to try and figure out what you were trying to do. While it may seem like we wouldn't forget, it's easy to lose track of where we were at in our plans.

In just one more month we're going to be coming up on the halfway point of 2021 — I know, I have no idea how it got here either.

But with this mark in time we're starting to see a shift going on - while COVID certainly isn't a thing of the past, the vaccine role out has opened up a lot of possibilities for what we want our future to look like.

At the end of 2020, I did some planning for 2021, but I knew that a lot of it was going to be uncertain so I didn't make too many specific plans. But now that I'm getting a better grasp of what the future might hold — although let's be honest, with ADHD we're always going to have a lot of uncertainty — I felt like it was time to go over those plans again and maybe give myself a fresh start.

In this episode, we're going to be talking about the fresh start effect, go over some stuff on planning, and how we can work on sticking to those plans. Support me on Patreon Feel free to ask me a question on my Contact Page Find the full show note at HackingYourADHD.com/76 This Episode's Top Tips

1. Fresh starts can help us let go of our past performance and embrace our new self.
2. We can effectively create motivation with financial incentives, but often that isn't enough for us to follow through on some of the things that we really do want to do. We also need to create reminders and a plan on how we want to accomplish our goals.
3. Don't try and do all the new things at once - pace yourself and create a plan on what you want to do first. Try and focus on doing the things that by doing them will make everything else easier.
4. We need to be flexible with our plans because we are going to hit speed bumps - while we can't plan for everything we can work on ways to help us get back up when we get knocked down.