The Weekly Practice You Need to Be Proactive with ADHD

Episode Summary:

Are you finding yourself flying by the seat of your pants and pulling things together at the last minute?

In this episode, we’re looking at one weekly practice that can help you shift out of that habit and become more proactive in how you approach your time, tasks, and commitments.

You’ll learn why many adults with ADHD default to reacting in the moment, whether it’s due to urgency, memory challenges, or difficulty planning ahead, and why trying to keep everything in your head doesn’t work.

We’ll walk through the purpose of a weekly review and planning session, how it helps you step back and get a clear picture of where things stand, and how it allows you to anticipate what’s coming up so you’re not constantly playing catch-up.

You’ll also get a practical overview of how to do a weekly review, including reviewing your tasks, calendar, and commitments, as well as how to plan ahead in a way that supports what’s actually important to you.

If you’re tired of relying on urgency and want a more intentional way to approach your week, this episode will help you build a practice that makes it easier to stay on track.

What You’ll Learn About ADHD and Weekly Review and Planning:

• Why ADHD adults often rely on urgency and end up reacting instead of planning ahead
• How a weekly review helps you get out of your head and see all of your commitments more clearly
• How to use a weekly review to anticipate what’s coming up so you’re not caught off guard
• What to include in your weekly review, including tasks, calendar, and upcoming priorities
• How this practice can help you be more proactive and intentional, even if you do it imperfectly

Transcript:

(00:03):

I know that sometimes you end up flying by the seat of your pants and pulling things together at the last minute. Ready to learn a weekly practice that can help you shift out of this habit so you can feel more grounded, be more proactive, and just be more productive?

You’ve tuned into Reimagining Productivity with ADHD, a podcast for ADHD adults like you who want to learn how to adopt the best strategies, tools, and skills to be able to get your essential work done in a way that works with the way your brain is wired. I’m Marla Cummins, an ADHD coach and executive function coach, and I’m glad you decided to join me today on this journey toward finding your way into doing what matters most to you without trying to do it like everyone else.

Since one of the purposes of a weekly review and planning practice is to help you be productive, let’s start by defining what it means to be productive.

(01:01): What Does It Mean For ADHD Adults To Be Productive?

The way I define it is simply this: productivity is doing what is essential, important to you, and engaging in activities that bring meaning to your life.

And as an adult with ADHD, it may be difficult for you to do this because of some of the following challenges that I’m gonna cover.

For one, it may be hard for you to resist the pull of immediate gratification. Remember, you have an interest-based nervous system. This means you may naturally gravitate toward things that are interesting, novel, challenging, and urgent, not necessarily toward those things that are important to you in the moment.

Also, because of your difficulty with both long-term memory and short-term memory, you may simply forget what is important to you until perhaps it is too late. Even though right now you try to keep a lot of this information in your head, it probably doesn’t work very well.

(02:03): How Is Being Productive A Challenge For ADHD Adults?

Right?

And if your current skill gap in your ability to organize, plan, and get started, because of your ADHD-related executive function challenges, it can be hard to be consistently productive.

As is true for many ADHD adults, your challenges with emotional regulation, whether it’s internal or external regulation, may at times also interfere with your ability to be productive.

And the last thing I’ll mention, you may have difficulty with regulating the pace at which you do different tasks, either going too fast or going too slow.

And like most people, you also need to get out of your head, as pointed out by David Allen of Getting Things Done, GTD.

When asked what gets in the way of people being productive, his answer was:

(03:20):

“It’s not one thing, but five all wrapped together. People keep stuff in their heads. They don’t decide what they need to do about stuff they know they need to do something about, and they don’t organize action reminders and support materials in functional categories.

Also, they don’t maintain and review a complete and objective inventory of their commitments. Then they waste energy and burn out, allowing their busyness to be driven by what’s latest and loudest, hoping it’s the right thing to do, but never feeling the relief that it is.”

I know this probably sounds familiar, and the question you may probably be asking right now is, so how is this related to doing a weekly review and planning session? After all, isn’t that what this podcast is about?

It is. So let’s get into that.

(04:20): What Is The Purpose of  An ADHD Weekly Review and Planning Process?

While the weekly review and planning process is certainly no magic bullet, for sure, it can definitely help you address these challenges as long as you also have the right tools to support your effort in doing this. And I’ll get to the subject of tools in a bit.

Let’s start with the purpose of the weekly review and planning process.

First, each week you get a chance, opportunity, to do a deep dive into reviewing where you’re focusing your time and energy and then asking yourself if it’s aligning with what is truly important to you right now.

And if it is not, you can make decisions about what you could do to pivot. Otherwise, without this time of “oh right, that’s what I wanted to do,” you might just end up mindlessly clocking in, doing whatever is in front of you or, yes, feels most urgent.

(05:25):

It’s also a time when you can identify challenges you’re having, as well as decide what kind of support you need, which might be asking for help at work or home, learning something new, getting a new tool, talking to your therapist or coach, leaning into some aspect of self-care, like sleep, nutrition, more social time, exercise, etc., or maybe something else.

At its core, the weekly review and planning process is really a mindfulness practice, a time to get a cup of coffee, tea, matcha, hey, a glass of wine if you want, no judgment, whatever your preference, and consider where you were the past week, where you’re going long-term or short-term, and what you need to do to get there.

And you can do this by considering general questions like, what are my goals right now, and how am I planning to get there?

(06:24):

You might also ask yourself, what’s important to me right now? And am I using my time and energy in a way that will support what I’m trying to achieve, whether that’s success in my personal or professional life?

And unlike the topics I usually talk about, you can actually create a roadmap or a checklist to do this, and you’ll definitely want to do this. More on that in a moment.

I’ll include links to the processes I refer to, such as processing meeting notes, emails, your task lists, and your calendar, with the show notes on my website.

First of all, remember, these are just suggestions. So as you’re listening to these, if you’re like, I don’t wanna do that, don’t worry about it. They’re just suggestions. And you’ll take what you think might be helpful in your weekly review and planning process and leave the rest.

(07:39): How ADHD Adults Can Do A Weekly Review

So step one is to process.

You may process paper and physical items that you have not processed from the week before. This could be mail, receipts, business cards. And remember, you’re just doing it from the week before. So if you have a whole pile that’s a backlog project, you can put that to the side because if you try to clean up everything, you’ll never get through the weekly review process anyway.

After you go through this physical stuff, you add things to your task list, or maybe you recycle it or throw it away or file it or whatever you need to do.

Then, as part of the processing, if you have notes from the previous week that you forgot to process. Now here’s a key point to this. The weekly review is not a time when you do all of this stuff. It’s more of a safety net where, oh, I forgot to process the meeting notes from Tuesday’s meeting at three, whatever.

It’s better if you process the meeting notes as much as you can soon after the meeting. But if you haven’t processed any of your meeting notes from the previous week, the weekly review is a time to do it.

And then there’s communication. Also, the weekly review is a time to look back a week in your email and say, is there anything I missed? Right?

This is also predicated on that you have a daily practice. It’s not that you’re going through all of your email and waiting for the weekly review. I wanna emphasize that, because sometimes that gets lost in translation.

Those emails that are more than a week old should be part of, again, a backlog project to do at a separate time. And you also wanna process any other forms of communication from the week before that for you may include text, voicemails, Slack or Team messages, anything that got missed, and then any other items that I haven’t mentioned.

(09:13): How ADHD Adults Can Manage Tasks

So the processing comes first because often there are tasks related to those things that you’re processing.

The second step is to actually manage your task manager, wherever you keep your tasks. And then you want to add tasks, delete tasks, review projects, make sure that all your projects have at least one step.

Also, a couple of things that you may not be doing right now that I think are helpful for people. One is to include what I call a waiting-for task. For example, let’s say you call the plumber and you’re waiting for a callback. The impulse for many adults with ADHD is like, that’s checked off my list. But it’s really not. You still have the leaky sink until the plumber comes.

So the way to accommodate this is to put in your task list, text Bob if I don’t hear from him, and then give it a date. And so then you see, did I hear from him? Yes, check it off. If I didn’t hear from him, text him.

The other thing as part of your task manager is a maybe someday list. And I want you to listen very carefully to what this is.

Oftentimes, you may get ideas. Adults with ADHD get lots of ideas, and you throw it on your task list, oh, I should do that. Some of these ideas are really things that, honestly, you’re probably not going to do. And then you look at your active list, and you say, oh, I should do that, and you keep on not doing it.

The way around this is to put it on your maybe someday list. And what this is, you could have one for work and one for home, is things that you’re not ready to let go of. You don’t wanna forget, but you have no intention or capacity to do right now.

And then every week you look, and you say, oh, do I wanna keep it here? Do I wanna make it active? Or, as is true for me often, maybe you just wanna delete it. You’re like, I’m never gonna do that.

(11:42): What Help ADHD Adults Manage Their Calendar

So then, after you curate, as I like to say, your task list, the third step is to manage your calendar.

And the thing about your calendar that’s really important to understand is that your calendar should be the hard landscape of your life. You look at your calendar, and you’ve chosen to spend your time on a specific day at a certain time in that way, and the calendar is a visual representation of this. It’s not a place to put your task list.

So when you’re managing your calendar during the weekly review, a couple of things you can do.

One thing people find helpful is to look back a week and to say, is there anything that happened last week that I forgot about? And maybe there’s a task related to it that I need to add to my task list.

Then after you’ve looked back a week, look ahead. For some people, that means looking ahead a week, some it’s a month, some it’s a quarter, whatever would give you comfort that you’re preparing for what’s around the bend.

And then the other thing that’s helpful to do is to adjust or confirm appointments. So at least the next week you may look, and you go, oh, there’s no way I am gonna be able to get to the dentist if I have this meeting or whatever. So you may need to adjust some of your meetings.

(13:19): How ADHD Adults Can Follow Through

Okay, so you’ve done processing, you’ve curated your task list, you’ve managed your calendar.

Now the next step is execution planning. And that is, how am I gonna get my stuff done?

So what you wanna do is at minimum decide where you’re gonna focus your time and energy in the next week. You can also look ahead a month, but at least next week.

You look at your calendar, you look at the tasks that are on your plate, and decide where am I gonna focus.

You might decide at that time, and you wanna be discerning and not block off too much time, but to block off time to work on specific tasks and projects in the next week. And then the key is to make sure you treat these as any other appointments.

And if you’re unsure whether that’s going to happen, I encourage you to think about what’s gonna support you in following through. Do you need a body double? Do you need a Focusmate session? What’s gonna help you actually follow through on those appointments on your calendar?

Because I’m sure you’ve tried this before, and for some of you, it just has not worked. So the key is getting the support.

You may also have recurring blocks of time for ongoing projects. I always encourage people, for example, the weekly review, to put it in their calendar as a recurring appointment.

(15:12): Weekly Reflection Helps ADHD Adults Be Proactive

And step five, which is important to do each week, is reflect. What went well the previous week, and what was a challenge? Decide if there’s anything you wanna do differently or what kind of support you might need.

In terms of deciding when to do your weekly review, here are some considerations.

First, I know it’s called a weekly review, and while I think most people would benefit from doing it weekly, you may decide it isn’t necessary for you.

If you are going to do it weekly and you work with others, I recommend Thursday or Friday morning.

One reason is that you still have time to reschedule things before the last minute. Another is that you go into the weekend feeling more grounded. And the third is that you still have a chance to follow through on anything you missed.

(16:20): Focus on Making Your Weekly Review and Planning Session A Habit

If you choose to build this habit, it will likely feel uncomfortable at first.

The key is to focus on putting in the time. People often report that initially it takes about an hour to an hour and a half, but over time it takes less.

And it’s really important to remind yourself that you’re reviewing and planning, not doing. Because you will be tempted to do tasks.

You’ll tell yourself, this will only take two minutes. But that adds up, and you won’t finish the review.

So, unless it truly takes two minutes, resist the urge, stick to the plan, and write it down instead.

It’s also important not to try to do it perfectly from the start. The more you do it, the better you’ll get.

Some weeks will be harder than others. That’s okay. If you’re consistent, an off week doesn’t matter much.

(18:23):

What I hope you’re taking away from this is that building in this time each week gives you a chance to step out of reaction mode and get a clearer sense of where things stand and what’s coming up.

And when you do that, even imperfectly, it becomes a lot easier to be more proactive instead of finding yourself flying by the seat of your pants and pulling things together at the last minute.

That’s it for now.

If this resonated with you and you’re feeling like you need more help applying what you know, you might consider joining my ADHD support and education group. It’s a weekly live group where we focus on real-life challenges, and you get practical strategies and support from people who really get what you’re dealing with, as well as from me.

If that sounds like something you’ll find helpful, you can learn more at marlacummins.com/member. I’ll also include the link in the show notes.

And until next time, this has been Reimagining Productivity with ADHD. I’m Marla Cummins, reminding you that ADHD doesn’t define you, but how you work with it can shape what’s possible.

ADHD Adults and Weekly Review and Planning Resources:

• Learn how to plan better with my Free Guide: 6 Common Planning Mistakes Adults with ADHD Make.
• Here is how ADHD adults can process meeting notes with greater ease.
• Processing email can be easier for ADHD adults using this 3-part series.
• Are you ready to learn how to tame your to-do list when you have ADHD?
• Are you using your calendar correctly? Maybe not.
• This may be the adult ADHD support group you need right now

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