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Hi, welcome to ADHD Friendly. I am Patty. I'm a professionally certified ADHD coach. And my passion is finding ways to create more ease in my life with an ADHD brain. And I love to bring them here and share what I am experimenting with and trying and learning and new research I'm reading about to help hopefully do the same in your life. This is episode 223, and I am going to be celebrating a Christmas celebration. I know we're, we're into January, almost the very end, beginning of February, but I do have a Christmas celebration. And then I'm going to share an ADHD Friendly tip, a product of the week. And my main topic is planning for the future with ADHD can be really hard to do. So I'm going to share some tips on how to kind of lean into it, ease into it, if you will, with a little bit more ease. If you would like more support than I can offer in this podcast format, check out my ADHD Friendly membership and resources@adhdfriendly.com ADHD Friendly is where adders get more things done. All right, so let's jump in. This is my celebration. I know it's a Christmas celebration, but it's a big one because I really was resisting packing up Christmas this year. Did not want to do it, just had no motivation. Wanted it packed up, but did not want to do it. So it was that classic. I just wanted it done, but I had to figure out how to motivate myself to do it. And what I did was I just put on a movie that I didn't have to pay attention to, but I would enjoy having on in the background. So I picked Spider Man Homecoming with Tom Holland because I have not seen it in a while and I enjoy it, but I know what happens, so I'm not needing to sit and pay attention to it. And then I asked my son and my husband to bring up all of the Christmas boxes from the basement, and I told them I wanted them to bring them back down when I was finished packing it up. So I, or I outsourced what I could and then I just focused on one area at a time and packed up so I could see the progress I was making. I wasn't kind of going from room to room. I just started one area at a time and watched, you know, listened to the background of the movie. And it ended up being not as difficult as I thought it would be. It did take about six hours, which is about what I thought it would take. But I did have lunch break in there, so it wasn't non stop. It was probably, honestly it was probably four and a half or five hours of dedicated time packing up. But I got it done and it, it the momentum from having the first area cleared and having all of the bins piling up by the basement and knowing I wasn't going to have to bring them down was really satisfying. So I'm just celebrating that I found a way to start. I outsourced what I could and I created a little sparkle with what I put on the television to listen to in the background because I just wasn't feeling it to try to listen to an audiobook or a podcast. Like I really wanted something that if I wanted to look at the screen I could. So I found a movie. So thanks Spider Man. It really helped me get Christmas packed up. Okay, now for my update on what I purchased this week. I am really dialed into tracking my purchases again as we're kicking off this new year and I only have one thing that I purchased which is a celebration, but it was definitely impulsive. But I'm loving it so I don't regret it and I'm sharing it here because it I think it's going to be one of my favorite things this year already. So it is the Life Hacks 2026 calendar. It is a day to day calendar and this specific one that I'm recommending because I there are a couple that I found and this was on Amazon for 8.99 so it's also my product of the week. So if you're looking for it, this is by Keith Bradford. There was another one I saw that wasn't by a person, it was just like a company name and I looked at the images and I really liked the layout of this one more. It just seemed more applicable. I was looking for in terms of specific hacks and I've already pulled three so I know we're into January, so I went through and read all of the hacks through the date that it arrived and what I love about it is it gives you a hack every day and they're so some of them are just so actionable and helpful that I'm just kind of blown away that I didn't already know some of these things. So I'm going to share just a few of them. Three of them that I pulled off just earlier this month. This one I just loved. So this was from January 5th and it said need to take your medications at a specific time every day. Give your dog a treat each time you do and you'll Start getting a friendly reminder from your dog to take your meds. I love this idea. If you have a dog and you struggle to remember, I love the idea of maybe even keeping like a little pet treat jar next to you where you keep your medicine. You remember to do it. My dogs know what time it is. They know exactly. Like, they're so food oriented that nothing gets by them. I have to literally start adjusting when I feed them, when, when we're getting close to daylight savings time, beginning or ending, so that they're adjusting to that upcoming time change a little bit more easily because they're so wired to the time. So I just love that idea so much. So they come on a sheet like this, you tear it off. What I love though, is also on the back, it has little additional things. So maybe it asked you a quiz question on the back of one and the next day, the next day's will have the answer to it. So it's just a way to keep you coming back and looking at it. So the next one that I pulled was on January 7th, and this one said, did you know that the four ghosts in Pac man are programmed to act differently? No. I've been playing Pac man since I was a kid. I had no idea. It said, if you really want to beat the game, you need to know that the red ghost chases you, the pink ghost tries to position itself in a set way, the blue ghost tries to ambush you, and the orange ghost is random. I had no idea. I get so panicked anytime any of the ghosts appears that my brain has never been able to focus on any of the differences in how they are approaching me. But even now, as I think about it, I do kind of remember seeing, you know, some of them just kind of like hanging out, going up and down. So I just found that so fascinating for something that I never knew about. All right. And the last One came from January 11th. And this one said, Start consuming educational content at 1.5 times speed. You'll save time. And studies have shown that the rate of retention is exactly the same as at normal speed. I always listen to my podcasts at 1.4 as well as my audiobooks. It drives my husband crazy if it's playing when he walks in a room or he gets my car and it's connected. He does not like the faster speed. But I do believe it's true. Once I get into a story, I can listen to podcasts at that speed with no problem. But once I get into a story, I. I can't do it. In the beginning but once I'm aware of the characters and the plot and what's going on, I can put it up to 1.4. Seems to be like a really comfortable level for me. But I found that interesting that they shared that research shows that you retain the same amount of information as you do at normal speed. So again, really helpful, interesting little tidbits of information. So that is my product of the week and the thing I purchased this week, 8.99 on Amazon. Again, this is by Keith Bradford. Thanks, Keith. It's great. Little, great little find. All right, now for my tip this week, and it is to reconnect with an old friend. Now, keeping up with friends when we have adhd, brain wiring is really challenging for a lot of us. And the regularity, the consistency, is an additional challenge. And what I know from my own personal experience and a lot of my clients have also shared with me, is the longer we go without checking in, the harder it gets. We start building up a narrative in our head about what happened. And I can't reach out now. I never, you know, reached out after this happened or I never followed through with my intention to invite them over or whatever it is. So the structure of keeping in touch with friends can feel not only difficult, but impossible. I have lived in seven states. I counted this for the purpose of this episode. And I have friends in all seven states that I'm very proud of having to some degree, kept in touch with. I also have additional friends in other states that moved away from me that we've kept in touch with. Now I want to level this out by saying I'm not great at keeping up with friends. I'm just not. And a lot of times I'll avoid even the attempt of keeping up with friends because I know I'm not good at it. So I want to set that expectation that I'm not going to. I'll be like, oh, my gosh, I'm going to hate, you know, that we're not near each other anymore. But I don't promise to keep in touch because I'm just not good at it. But I have learned a few things that have made it easier for me to keep in touch. And there is a quality to the friendship that I would say lends itself to be more conducive to this working. And by far and away for me, the friends that are not judgmental and are very, oh, my gosh, I was so excited to hear from you. Like, they don't. They don't hold anything against me if I haven't reached out in a long time are the ones that I'm able to sustain because I don't get in my head as much about them. And I know that they know I genuinely mean it. When I reach out, I'm like, oh, my gosh, I. I wish I, you know, I thought of you a million times, but I never reached out. I do think of my friends a lot, but it's not usually at a time I can reach out is the frustrating dynamic that often happens for me. So I wanted to share just some quick tips that might help if you want to explore a way to reconnect with an old friend who maybe you haven't gotten in touch with in a while and you would like to. So the first tip is just to text a quick little note, just, you know, a quick maybe like, hi, I'm thinking about you and I would love to catch up. Do you have any time in the next week or two to schedule a quick call? It's letting them know that you haven't forgotten them, that you're thinking about them and you're asking for a time. I like to add that second part because if I just say, let me know if you'd like to catch up or something less specific, like, hey, you know, I just want to let you know I was thinking about you and, you know, I'll reach out again soon and it puts it on me to then do the next step again. It doesn't work. So I like to kind of say, like, look at my schedule and see, like, I do have time in the next couple of weeks, so I'll sometimes even offer, like, hey, I have time over the weekend. If you're free sometime, let me know. Or my, you know, next two weeks, I'm pretty available in the evenings. Let me know if there's a time that would work for you. So I'm basically, you know, kind of hitting that ball into their court, if you will, and waiting for them to get back to me. And that feels an invitation again, not an expectation, but it's just, hey, just letting you know I'm thinking about you. The next tip is to, once you've reconnected with someone, to stay connected with them, schedule a repeated event. Whether it's a phone call once a week or, you know, have meeting for coffee on Friday mornings or once a month, lunches, you know, something that's regularly, regularly on the schedule that you can just check at the end of the day the time that you're together and see does that still work. So I have A repeated call every Friday with my good friend Linda. And every Friday before we hang up, we look at our calendars and see, are we talking next Friday? And we can always cancel if we need to. But having that regular schedule really does help us stay in touch. And the friends that I've stayed in touch with the longest and the most consistently, we have set up this automatic appointment with each other that is so much easier to reschedule than it is just to get something on the calendar out of nothingness. So schedule repeat ongoing times that allow you to have some structure, and then you can just change it if you need to, instead of trying to reach out and schedule something cold. And then the last tip that I'll share is if you really feel uncomfortable about reaching out to someone, pick a physical card. Like, go and. And find a nice card that you know, you're. You're really wanting to pick because it has that energy that you want to convey or a picture on it that reminds you of them, or just a blank card that, you know or, you know, a note. It doesn't have to be anything fancy, but send something if you have their address that lets them know that you really are thinking about them and you would love to reconnect. It takes more effort. It absolutely, you know, requires another level of commitment, but it can really bridge that gap. If it's someone that you feel like a lot of time has gone by and you're uncomfortable just sending a text or an email, it can maybe make it a little bit of a different energetic feeling to think, yeah, I'm going to send them a card and just let them know I'm really, you know, thinking about them. And I. I hate that we've not talked in such a long time. So just explore what might work for you. If you have other things that have helped you to stay in touch or reconnect with friends that have worked, please post in this episode's notes. It's episode 223. Would love to hear all of the other strategies that help, because this is a really common challenge for a lot of us. So let's put our brains together and help each other to figure this one out in ways that work for our unique brain wiring. All right, now for my main topic for the week, and that is planning for the future when you have adhd. So remember, I always want to start with what makes something hard so we have that understanding. I always say it's not an excuse, it's an explanation for why this is really hard for ADHD brains. So Our executive function skills are impacted by adhd. That means things like planning, prioritizing, managing our time, organizing our thoughts, our goal directed persistence, our ability to start a task, our ability to use our working memory in a way that holds our intentions in mind while we're working on things. All of these things are impacted by adhd. They are a big reason why planning for the future with ADHD is a struggle for almost, I would say all of us. If you have ADHD brain wiring, this is most likely something that you struggle with to some degree, if not a huge degree. Research actually shows that scaffolding with extra external structure reduces the amount of overwhelm that we experience and it increases our success with being able to follow through. So I want to share some structures that could help you to support yourself to plan for the future a little bit more easily and a little bit more successfully. So the first is to externalize your plan. If you guys have been regular listeners to this podcast, you know I am really big on external concrete visual things because they support our brain so beautifully. So externalize whatever your plan is for whatever future you're planning for. So write it down, get your thoughts out of your head into something you can see and plan with. Maybe use sticky notes, your calendar, notebooks, make it visible, whatever that means for you. If you're planning for the end of the week, the end of the month, your retirement, whatever the future is that you're trying to plan for, make it visible and external. The next tip is to create structure with concrete prompts. So instead of a vague plan like I'm going to retire by the time I'm 60, or whatever it is, create some structure around what it is you're trying to do. So it might be if, then statements like if blank happens, then I will do blank. So if the first Sunday of the month, you know, if you like, I've started recently planning once a month around what I'm trying to aim towards regarding my retirement. So it might be if it's the first Sunday of the month, then I look at my monthly spending with my partner. So something simple, but it gives you structure that reminds you of what your intention is and the scaffolding that you're putting around it. Those concrete prompts will build a bridge from your intention to plan for something and the action you're going to take towards it. If we keep it in our head with adhd, it stays in our head. It doesn't turn into an action or progress moving towards that goal. Number three, black, blackwards, backwards, planet so chunk it down into steps that you are seeing what you're navigating towards, and then backwards planning it to where you are today so you can follow that path to get to that goal. So again, if it's, let's say, retirement or a vacation, it might be, I will need this by this time in order to do that. So right now I have. So let's say I want to go on a family vacation in the beginning of 2027. So we'll say like a year from now. And let's say I'll need $5,000 to take the entire family, airfare, hotel, food, whatever, just a round number. And right now, let's say I have a thousand dollars. So if I need to have four more thousand dollars by the time I'm going on the vacation, what do I need to do each month to get to that goal? So it just helps you to break it down into manageable steps that you can actually see and navigate towards. And you can also look at it and say, that's absolutely not realistic. Like if I expect to have $5,000 by next January and I need to have a way to create 4,000 more towards that by a year from now, So I have 12 months to do that. It literally creates the awareness of what that looks like and you can adjust instead of getting frustrated. So it really does support your future self to see it more easily. The next tip is to build in rewards. This is one of my favorites. So, for example, I'm doing a weekly money check in with my husband, and I initially thought, well, let's do it once a month. Once a month is way too long. It takes way too much effort for me to pull back my brain and remember what we did financially, what I spent money on, all those, you know, weeks before. So to do it weekly, we're playing around with the thing we used to do that worked, and that's, you know, going out to breakfast, going out to eat while we talk about it, so that we order food and then we talk about it. It's like this limited time that we can talk about it. So it creates urgency. Because once the food arrives, if we keep talking about it, it's because we want to and we're really into it, but we don't have to if we use that structure to pull us into what it is we want to cover. So the reward of going to breakfast makes it sparkly enough to follow through with the intention. I've noticed if we just stay in the house and try to start a conversation, it's just not sparkly enough. So the reward increases the follow through. That's just another external structure that can help follow through in planning for your future self. So those are just three or I'm sorry, four tips that can create some of that structure that will help to plan for future you remember, you don't have to have the perfect plan for the next year, the next week, the next decade, whatever the amount of time is that you're trying to plan. But a little future planning is better than no planning at all. And if you pick one structure to experiment with, you're going to have a chance to notice how it works for you. What else would work better or what you like, what you don't like. So maybe add one future task to the calendar and then notice how that structure works. Or add one visual prompt. You know, try one of those structures to scaffold around something you're doing in the future and notice if it works well, if it doesn't, what you would change to make it work better. Progress comes from experimenting. So we need to break out of our now not now brains where all we can see is what's right in front of us. And trying to stretch our brain to something that's not happening right now requires that scaffolding around it. So bridge the gap with structure and break out of the now not now brain so that you're supporting your future self by planning a little bit more than you naturally do. All right, now for our transition to my book of the week this week. It is a sequel to a book that I read years ago. This one is the book Woman's Daughter by Kim Michelle Richardson and it is the sequel to the book Woman of Troublesome Creek, which I loved. There's also the reason I I picked this. I didn't know this existed. This came out in 2022, but I saw that coming in April of this year. There's a companion novel to this series called the Mountains we call home. The book Woman's Legacy and that's a nonfiction book about the women of Kentucky who got on pack mules and horses and rode out to really far in the woods places where people did not have access to reading material to bring them things to read, get things out into the communities. In this book we are back of course in the mountains of Kentucky and Honey Lovett, who is the daughter of the famous blue skinned pack horse librarian from the first book, blue skin was a blood condition that made her skin appear blue and she was highly, I hate to say, really not liked because they they Saw her skin as being unnatural. And so she was definitely. She definitely experienced a lot of prejudice and her daughter has a bit of that. So she wears gloves to try to hide her hand condition because there's so much stigma in the area. They don't understand it and they have a lot of prejudice against her. So she's the daughter and she picks up her mother's old route and begins a journey of delivering book books of her own. And she goes through her own trials and tribulations. I did enjoy it. Not as much as the first one, but definitely enjoyable read. I gave it three and a half out of five stars. So I do recommend the book Woman's Daughter. All right. Finally, our book. Our book. Our quote for the week. This is from Adam Grant. Adam says how I love this. This is about introverts. If you're an introvert, I just, I hope this speaks to you in the way it spoke to me. I found it really comforting. So Adam Grant says how introverted you are has nothing to do with how much you like interacting with people. Social introverts love people but often get overloaded. Shy introverts love adventure but often avoid attention. That had me thinking for a while because I love the idea that just because you're an introvert doesn't mean you don't like people. It just means you might get overwhelmed by, you know, a lot of them or, you know, the amount of time you're spending with one and you need to kind of back off and have some alone time to recharge. But I also loved the idea of the difference between a social introvert and a shy introvert. Again, might. I would say I'm much more of that shy introvert and I don't like the attention. So that just resonate, resonated so much with me that I thought I have to share that in case any of you have had that experience. And it, it gives something to almost like another anchor of understanding to kind of pin down what your own experience has been with being an introvert. So that's it for this episode. As always, take what works for you. Leave the rest behind. I'll see you next week with a brand new episode. Until then, tally ho.