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Foreign. You are listening to the Navigating Adult ADHD podcast with your ADHD coach and expert, Xena. Hello, my friend. Welcome back. We're Navigating Adult ADHD today and we had a really good question the other day inside the Adulting with ADHD membership. And so I wanted to answer that here and share with you all. And we're going to take it a little bit deeper as well. So that question was, how do I manage my calendar as somebody who has adhd? So that's what we're going to dive into today, my friend. All right. Because let's be honest, for a lot of us with adhd, time management can be a challenge. And that might look like running late, being late to lunch with a friend or your doctor's appointment. Even when it's something really important, something you care about, it might look like underestimating how long everything is going to take, leaving everything till the last minute, forgetting what you were meant to be doing, struggling to start something that's boring. Getting stuck deciding what to do first. Or this is one of my favourites, hyper focusing and just disappearing into something for hours. Maybe it's making plans that don't match your energy or your capacity. I used to do that all the time when it came to making evening plans. Oh my God, I'd love to do that. Yes. You know, sign me up for that class or that thing that starts at 7pm knowing full well now, right. That my energy, my capacity is just not there in the evenings. I'm done. It's very unlikely I am coming to evening things. But making plans that don't match your energy or your capacity, that's a big one. Right? Feeling confused about where the day went, constantly feeling like you're behind. Okay, managing time with adhd, it's not hard because we don't care. It's hard because of a bunch of different brain based differences that we have. Brain based differences that can mess with how we see, feel, estimate, remember and respond to time. So I want to dive into what some of those differences are before we get into me sharing with you how I manage my own calendar. Okay, so one of these first differences that we have is time blindness. I've talked about that before on the podcast. I'm going to mention a couple of other episodes towards the end where you can go deeper on this because this is a really big one. So time blindness is when time feels like slippery or vague or invisible. It's harder to sense the passing of time. It's difficult to estimate how long things will Take or to sort of feel the difference between now and not now. Okay, so this could look like thinking you can quickly do three things before you leave the house, but then you end up being 20 minutes late. Maybe you sit down to scroll or do some research, something that you think is genuinely taking, you know, about 10 minutes and you look up and it's been 90 minutes. Being shocked that the appointment you booked ages ago is all of a sudden tomorrow. Leaving things until the last minute, not because you're lazy, but because your brain does not fully register time until the deadline is like breathing down your neck. Thinking that a task is going to take you 15 minutes, when in actual fact it takes 45. The amount of time I hear from people who think, oh, yeah, it takes me five minutes to get ready in the morning, then I have them actually time every task, as in how long it takes to get out of bed, because sometimes you hit snooze, how long it takes to shower, how long it takes to brush your teeth, put your makeup on or moisturize whatever you're doing, how long it takes to get dressed, how long it takes to eat breakfast, to pack your bag for the day, to get in the car. Like when you add all of that up, it's not five minutes. But it's so funny how we often think, oh, yeah, it takes me five minutes to get ready. Okay, so the next difference that we can experience is difficulty with planning and prioritizing. Okay, this is one of the executive functions that does not always function so well. This is where ADHD can make it hard for us to zoom out, to organize the different steps, to decide what matters most and put things in a realistic order. Because when everything feels important, when everything feels urgent or interesting or even annoying, it's all overwhelming at the same time. It can be really hard to know, well, what do I actually do first? So this could look like you write a to do list and it's got 35 things on it and then you just feel paralyzed looking at it. Maybe this used to be me, right? And let me be fully transparent, sometimes it still is. Okay, when you spend ages color coding a plan or, you know, making a plan, choosing a planner, but not doing the actual shit on the plan. So I can get so much dopamine from starting a planner or coming up with this beautiful color coded, neon exciting system, like all the dopamine is in that, right? But then to actually start doing it, like do the shit on the plan, it's so different. Okay, this can also look like doing five little Admin tasks to avoid that one big job that actually really matters. Maybe you look at your week and you think, oh yeah, I can definitely do all of that, huh? Definitely. Even though there are not enough hours, energy or spoons in the friggin universe. Okay, yeah, I'm looking at you and I'm also looking in the mirror. Don't get me wrong, the next one is working memory. Working memory is our brain's like mental sticky note system, except that we've got budget sticky notes and they fall off the wall. Okay? The adhesive is no good. So this is what helps you to hold information in your mind long enough for you to be able to use it. And when working memory is shaky, it can make time management way harder because you're constantly dropping those post it notes. You're missing bits of the plan. Okay, so this might look like opening up your laptop to do one task and then completely forgetting what you're doing as soon as you see all of the notifications. Gosh, that so gets me. I have to remember. And of course this post it note falls off the wall. But I try to remember to shut down my Gmail. I've got like multiple Gmail accounts, okay. And I have to try to remember sometimes to shut them down because that's one of those things that can get me. Because it actually says on the tab at the top where the Gmail is. It'll tell you how many unread emails you've got. And I know, oh, this inbox has got 10 and this has got one. And then all of a sudden there's like 11 or 12 and I'm like, oh my God, there's new ones. And I'm so distracted by that that I can completely forget what I had opened up my laptop to do. Gets me every time another one, like it could be going upstairs to get your phone. Then you see that, oh, actually the laundry needs doing. So you grab that and then you oops, start something else and you never return with your again, working memory. Forgetting that you had planned to start work early because the morning just all of a sudden filled up with extra things, other things, right? Reading a text message and thinking, okay, cool, I'm going to reply to that in a minute. And then you remember three days later, hello, that one's for sure me. My friends, that is working memory can play a big role in our ability to manage our calendar and manage our time. And then of course, we've got to talk about the dopamine because chasing dopamine is a big bit of this, right? ADHD isn't just about attention. It's also a lot about regulation, interest, motivation, reward. Hello, dopamine. Our ADHD brains are very often pulled towards what feels stimulating or novel or urgent or pleasurable or somewhat comforting and relieving right now. So that means that our time can get hijacked by whatever is going to give us that quick release of dopamine. While those low dopamine tasks, like for me, one of those is like replying to emails. Oh my gosh, no, not my favorite. But those sorts of tasks can feel super painful for us to engage with. Okay, so yes, dopamine plays a big role here too. So let me give you a few examples. It could be that you are planning to do the invoicing today, but instead you end up reorganizing your website, right? Researching the answer to a random question and then deep cleaning your office desk drawer because all of that feels more stimulating or interesting in comparison to the invoicing. It might be that you pick up your phone for just one second and then all of a sudden you're swallowed up by text messages and reels and online shopping or articles because all of that's giving you this dopamine. It could be that you hyper focus on a project for five hours and completely forget to go eat food, to go pee, or even that you need to go to bed. It can also be that you put off boring tasks until they become so urgent that they finally create enough dopamine or drive or panic whatever is fuelling you to actually do it. Okay, now I so get this, my friend. Like, I get how hard it can be to manage time to manage our calendars. And we're not even like, we haven't even talked about the demands of day to day life, okay? Like we have more demands on us today than ever before, but it's not what we're going to talk about. I want to share with you how I manage my calendar. This is a question I have had with quite a lot and one that really stood out recently. We had a whole bunch of people on our adulting with ADHD coaching call recently and this was a real big topic of conversation. So how do I manage my calendar? First of all, I want you to imagine that you are in charge of your best friend's calendar, okay? Your best mate. You are in charge of their calendar, of scheduling their appointments, their work day, their personal stuff, their doctor's appointments, all the things you are in charge of it. You get to decide how to space it out, what to do with it. Like how would you treat your best friend's calendar? Because my guess is you probably would not cram her or him. Them. You would not cram them full of work appointments, like full of shit. You're not gonna like go back to back with no whites space and you know, make them work 12 hours a day. That's not what you would do, right? So this is how I approach my calendar. I think about how would I treat my best friend's calendar? Because ultimately that's how I want to treat my own calendar. That's how I want to treat myself. Okay? So when it comes to putting things into my calendar, I first of all put the non negotiables in. For me, that looks like, like my coaching course with my clients. It can also look like having doctor's appointments or you know, medical appointments that you have. And then I also include the travel time to and from those appointments. For a lot of people that will be work. So let's say you work 8 till 4. If you put in your 8 till 4, that is your non negotiable work time, where you're actually in an office building working, then there would be travel time. Now maybe it takes you 20 minutes to drive to work, five minutes to actually get a park and get into the building. So you allow 30 minutes of travel time each side. So you would leave at 7:30. So this 7:30 to 8 you've got travel to work. 8 till 4 is at work and then 4 to 4:30 is travel home. Okay, again, those are your non negotiables. Maybe you have a doctor's visit, maybe you have an appointment with a therapist. Those are the non negotiables. Those go in first and I have a certain color for those. For me it's like a bright pink color. For all of my non negotiables after that, the very next thing that I schedule, and I recommend this to everyone, is you schedule time. For you. We are so often the last thing that we make time for. And here's the thing, if we don't take care of ourself like we are the asset, if we don't take care of ourself, if we don't prioritize, prioritize ourself, if we don't, you know, make ourself important and our needs important, then we're not going to be able to do the non negotiables. We're not going to be able to go to work. Right? So we like. I can't stress this one enough. Please put in Time for you, because you matter, my friend. So I put in, for example, this, for me, this looks like. And this is always in a green color. It looks like gym classes. So I go to the gym three days a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and I have to travel to that gym. So I put in the gym class, I put in travel time either side. And then when I get back, I also put in shower time. Okay, I put in lunch breaks. Because I work from home for myself. So that's something that's so easy to overlook. Am I excellent at sticking to them? No, I'm not excellent at it. I'm working on it. But I always put them in there. I also put in walks. So in the morning, what my calendar looks like is typically I'll get up around 6, 6:30, depending on the day. So say my. I get up at 6 and I go for a walk. And I've got like, I think it's about two hours blocked out in my calendar from 6 till 8 or maybe 8:30, where I get up, I go for my walk, I come home, I make a coffee, I have some breakfast. Sometimes I might have a shower, but I get dressed, I get ready for work. I also sit down and I journal, like all of that. That stuff is in my calendar. And I have enough time for that to happen before I start my workday. So that is a priority for me. Like that's me taking care of me, fueling myself. So that's in there. I've got the gyms, I've got the walks, I've got coffee dates with friends. Maybe it's dinner with friends. Things that take care of you, things that fill your cup up. Why is this so important? Why am I like, banging on about this point? Because one, you are the asset and you need to take care of you. But two, these things give us the brain chemicals that we got a little less of. My friends, these things, they give us dopamine, they give us serotonin, they give us oxytocin, they give us good feeling, brain chemicals. These are the things that also help us to regulate. So these things really do matter. When we prioritize these things, it helps us to have more energy, more motivation to be able to do the other things that we need to do that we want to do with our time. Okay? So the first thing I put in my calendar is those non negotiables. The second thing is scheduling time for me for those things that help me to fill my cup up, to feel my best, to regulate me, all of that. Okay? And Then third, schedule all the other shit around that. Everything else goes around that. Now I also recommend, and this is 100% what I live by is having one primary calendar system. And I do recommend that this is electronic because we always have our phone with us. Like we're practically glued to our phones in this day and age, let's be honest. Okay, how many of us take the phone to the toilet? I'm not going to answer that. Okay, you know, and I know the answer to that. My point is not that you're like making appointments necessarily with people in the toilet, but hey, whatever, whatever floats your boat. But my point is that if we have an electronic system, the likelihood of us having our phone with us with our. For me it's iCal, right? The, the one that connects to, to Mac and iPhone. But if it's Google, whatever, we've got that with us. So that when we're out with someone and they're like, oh, hey, how about 3pm on Thursday? You can check if that slot is available, right? You've got that there so that you're not then having to go, oh, let me get back to you when I get home. Hello. Working memory is going to forget, right? Or we go, oh yeah, I think that's fine. And so we book it, but then we forget to write it somewhere so we forget to show up. Okay, ask me how I know. Of course. But again, having that one primary calendaring system, which of course I recommend that being electronic, that just there's no one system that's better than all of the others, like there's no one specific one. I definitely recommend adding colors so that you can separate things out. So in all of these electronic systems you can color code things. So work might be one color, personal stuff might be another color. Maybe appointments is one color, or friends is a color, family, whatever. Like you can literally break that down into different colors just to help you better understand it and create some separation when you look at it. Okay, so one primary calendaring system, again electronic. I definitely recommend going that way. Then this is where I kind of contradict myself. The second thing I recommend is to make that system visual on a day to day basis. Now this, I'm going to give you a couple of different ways that I do this. And here's what I mean. I have a giant wall planner on my wal. Stare at it right now in my office. Okay, 2026 Collins wall planner. And on that I have the bigger things so that I can glance at that and I can see school holidays are here. The week that we have, the kids are in this color. Going up to Mel Robbins in Auckland. Was on this weekend, flying to Wellington to see my family this weekend. Oh, I've got an annual leave holiday booked on these weekends. Oh, somebody's coming here. Like, I can see the bigger things, right? I've got the speaking engagement there. I've got, you know, this other important work event here. Like, like those things are on that big wall planner. Okay? The daily little stuff is not on there. Just the biggest stuff so that I can glance over. But also it's a visual representation of the year of time. Okay? And this is big. We need to have those visual representations. But also I can look at that because somebody's like, oh, will you be ready for that in two weeks? And if I look at that and see. Actually, no, I've got this big thing coming up next week. Two weeks is not enough time. I actually wanna. It helps me to sort of zoom out on time, I think is what I'm trying to say here. It's really good to have that visual. Okay, What I mean by doing this day to day is one of the ways you can do this is you print out a copy of your electronic calendar. So you just print out the Monday through Friday or the Monday to Sunday version of that and have that visually sitting next to you as you're working. So at your desk at work, or for me, like I have it right next to me here where I'm standing at my desk. So I keep a piece of. What is it? I keep a little notebook next to my mouse pad. And this notebook is for me to scribble all the shit that my brain thinks of and wants to remember and tells me I need to do or has forgotten. I literally keep this pad here and I scribble shit on it all day. On that pad I have a little neon yellow post it note each day and each day I'll look at my calendar and I will transfer what's in my calendar to that post it note. Okay? So this morning it was 9:00am Client, right? Then it was 10:30am Record this podcast. Okay? I'd already drafted it yesterday, otherwise I would have had that on there. And then it's 12pm another client, 1:30pm another client, and then 3pm something else. So I've got those things listed out in front of me. Could I just have my visual calendar up on the screen 100%. Either way, it's about making that day's activities visual. Okay, this is a big one. We need to have it in sight to be in mind. We know ADHD brains are very out of sight, out of mind. Okay. Again, it's just, there's no wrong way to do that. But again, one primary calendar and making it visual in some way so that you can still see the time. Now in your calendaring system, I want to really encourage you to have white space. Don't fill up every single waking hour, every single minute. Have some white space that I went through a period of time where I would, you know, fill my calendar up including travel time, including breaks, all of that, but just fill it up like you know, a 40 plus hour week in a calendar where I would just fill it up. And for me, when I look at that, it feels very overwhelming and I feel very anxious. Okay. I have, you know, having coached people for over 10 years now, I have learned the importance of white space for our brains and being generous with time. So if you are including travel time, which is something we often forget, be generous with that instead of yes. Google tells me it's going to take me 23 minutes to get there. Okay. But what I'm forgetting is I might be running late to get in the car. I might also have difficulty getting a park. I might need to walk to find this place I haven't been to before. Let me be generous and give myself 40 minutes. Okay, be generous with your time for yourself for the sake of yourself where possible. And I know this is not always possible. Okay, reconsider scheduling back to back appointments, especially if that's something that makes you anxious. Okay. This is something I have learned over time is I try not to schedule back to back, but that of course doesn't always happen. I try to put a 15 minute buffer in between those appointments so that I've got a bit of overlap. But also we know as ADHD is that sometimes we have difficulty switching between tasks. So that little bit of a buffer really can help with that. Okay, now the next one, and I've already kind of alluded to this, is make time visible. I 100% have clocks everywhere. Like I got a clock on the wall here in the office and that doesn't even count. Like I've also got my, my phone with my time on it, my laptop and my computer with the time on it. So making time visual is really important because again, out of sight, out of mind. But one of the things really worth investing in and you can get these for like 15 to 20 New Zealand dollars. So even less if you're talking American, probably like 10, but it's the visual timer. I'm trying to think, is there another fancy name for it? But it's a visual timer. If you Google visual timer adhd, you will get this little kind of desk clock, like a little square kind of a clock come up. But what you do is you turn the dial to the amount of time that you want. So say, for example, you think a task is gonna take you 20 minutes, you turn the dial to 20 minutes and there's this little colored wedge that will come out and it will show highlight 20 minutes. And as soon as you put it down, it starts going and it will slowly cut the color off so there'll be less and less color as your time disappears, so that you're seeing that visual representation of time. And then it'll buzz or ring or whatever it does at the end. And now, again, this is really helpful to help to understand time and how long things take and what the passing of time feels like, because this can be one of our biggest challenges. Hello, time blindness. Okay, so that is something like, again, it's really cheap, but can be very, very helpful when it comes to sort of estimating time, understanding time, all of that. Now, the last thing I'm going to tell you that I do and recommend is doing a keeping a time journal for a whole week. So I haven't done this now, I would say, for probably three or four, maybe even six months. Actually, I'm definitely due to do this again. I, I recommend doing this sort of quarterly, but I, yeah, I probably haven't done it for. Yeah, actually I'm definitely due to do one. So maybe there's another podcast coming. We'll see. But this is such a valuable thing to do because time is something that so often we, again, we don't feel it passing. We don't realize it's passing, but we often underestimate how long something is going to take. So when I do this, as I said before, I've got that piece of paper next to me, my kind of. What is it? And just a plain notebook, a white notebook, right, with lines on it. I will literally just jot down everything I do throughout the day. So recording this podcast, I would have been studying, you know, started podcast at, you know, let's say it was 9am and then I'll say drafted notes, edited something, hit record at 9:15. And then I recorded through to this time, editing, uploaded, you know, finished at 10:45, and then scrolled on my phone for 10 minutes at 5:2, made a coffee, and then it might be 11:05 started to whatever. So I'm just keeping these tiny little notes of what I'm doing throughout the day and how long things take. This was how I actually discovered that recording a podcast does not take one hour, no matter how many times my brain likes to tell me it doesn't. Or it does rather. So again, this can be so helpful when it comes to understanding where your time goes and what you're spending time on, where you lose time. Right? Because often we will lose it if we're really honest with ourselves, because we pick up our phone and we go down an Internet rabbit hole and we're watching cat TikTok videos for 30 minutes. But also really helps to understand how long tasks take. So when I talked about this recently in the Adulting with ADHD coaching call, one of our members there talked about an app that he uses and it's called Working Hours. So it's the Working Hours app, and I think it's a paid, paid 12 or 13 ish dollars app. I have not used it, so I can't comment on it, but he was talking about how helpful that is when it comes to tracking where his time goes at work, specifically what projects he's on, what he's working on, where it goes, et cetera, how long things take, which is often way longer than he estimates, all of that. So he talked about how that's a really simple, easy, electronic way of doing it. Again, I totally just do it the paper way. That works for me. There's no wrong way to do it, but there's such a helpful exercise to do. As I said, like roughly every quarter. All right, now, my friend, the number one thing I do to manage my time is manage my mind. Because let me be honest, when I sit down to do work, when I sit down in my office chair, I do not automatically feel like doing what's in my calendar. Especially if that little block says write email and reply to emails in your inbox. My friend, that is not my favorite thing to do. I'd so much rather go find one of my cats to cuddle or, you know, watch TikTok videos for 30 minutes. So again, managing my mind is the number one thing I do. Now, I'm not going to go into detail about that because I talk about that in depth in episode number 58, which is called ADHD and time management. Okay, so number 58 is definitely one I would recommend. But also there is a more recent episode two, which is more focused on time blindness. So that's episode number 151, ADHD and time blindness. And in that I talk about five things that I that actually support time blindness, things that I do that I recommend that definitely help where time blindness is concerned. Okay. All right, my friends, this has been a fun episode to record, and hopefully it has been a helpful one for you. All right, take care out there. Huge, huge love. I'll speak to you soon. Thing. Hey friend, if you want some more help navigating and thriving with ADHD and some help applying everything that you're learning here on the podcast, then head over to our website, navigating adult adhd.com.