Making Home Management Easier With ADHD

Episode Summary:

Do you sometimes feel like managing your home life is harder than managing your work life with ADHD?

In this episode, we’ll explore why many adults with ADHD struggle with the ongoing maintenance of everyday life, even when they’re functioning reasonably well professionally.

You’ll learn why home life can feel especially difficult for ADHD adults, including the lack of built-in structure, accountability, urgency, and external support that often exist at work.

We’ll also look at how challenges at home, including clutter, unfinished tasks, finances, meal planning, and everyday responsibilities, can create stress and mental overload that spills into other parts of life, including work.

Through a variety of examples, you’ll learn ways adults with ADHD can approach home management more intentionally by reducing friction, creating more realistic expectations, and working with the way they naturally function rather than against it.

If you’ve been feeling overwhelmed by the endless maintenance of everyday life, this episode will help you think differently about what may actually help make home management feel more doable.

What You’ll Learn About ADHD and Home Management:

• Why home life can sometimes feel harder to manage than work for adults with ADHD
• How unfinished tasks, clutter, finances, and life admin can create ongoing mental overload
• Why reducing friction and creating more realistic expectations can make home management easier
• How adults with ADHD can approach finances, meal planning, and follow-through more sustainably
• Why working with the way your brain naturally functions is often more effective than trying harder

Transcript:

(00:03): Why Managing Home Life Can Be Hard For ADHD Adults

For many adults with ADHD, oftentimes the hardest part isn’t your professional life. It’s really the endless maintenance of just your everyday home life.

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 to doing what matters most to you. Without trying to do it like everyone else.

Well, work may be challenging for you at times. Again, managing your personal life I know can sometimes feel well even harder for adults with ADHD. And honestly, that’s never surprising to me when I’m working with clients on this part of their lives.

(01:02):

One reason is that work often comes with built-in structure and accountability. There are meetings, deadlines, expectations, emails to answer, people waiting on you and consequences if things don’t get done. Even if that structure isn’t always enough, it still creates a framework that can help you follow through.

And home life is well different at home. Many tasks are repetitive, self-directed and easy to postpone, such as paying bills, dealing with paperwork, scheduling appointments, keeping up with chores, handling maintenance, managing clutter, and following through on errands.

And much of it depends on you creating your own structure, your own systems, and your own sense of urgency, even if there are deadlines, like when bills are due and when you’re already using so much energy to manage work.

Home life can sometimes become an afterthought. That is, until something becomes truly urgent, your back goes out again. Maybe because you didn’t follow up with your PT, or you get a hefty fine for not paying the bill.

(02:18): Why Adults Want To Manage Their Personal Life Better With ADHD

You get it? So in this episode, I wanna share examples of how one might manage home life in different contexts. Not to give you an exhaustive blueprint, but rather to help you see that it takes thoughtful planning and support to make home management easier.

So let’s get into it. First, what are your reasons for wanting to manage your home life better? Maybe you wanna be more of an equal partner at home, but right now, maybe there’s tension around managing household responsibilities, or maybe you’re just tired of constantly feeling buried under dishes, laundry, paperwork, clutter, and all the other unfinished tasks that seem to pile up so easily.

It may be that you’re tired of paying late fees on bills or dealing with the stress that comes from always feeling behind with various administrative tasks. And then again, it might be that you just wanna take better care of yourself by exercising more consistently, sleeping better, eating well, or making and keeping medical or other appointments.

(03:24):

Maybe there’s another reason I haven’t mentioned, but whatever your reasons have you thought about the ease with which you do or don’t manage your home, like also affects your work life?

Because if things feel chaotic, stressful, or constantly unfinished at home, that mental load can follow you into your workday. I’m sure you get that. We’ve all heard people suggest that you should leave work at work, but can you really leave home at home all the time?

I don’t think so. The stress, clutter, unfinished tasks, and overwhelm at home. Don’t just stay behind when you sit down to work. So when you find yourself thinking that you have too much to do at work, to focus on home, consider how doing well at work is, at least in part, dependent on how things are going for you at home.

So let’s get into the part that you’ve been waiting for, which is what does it take to manage your home life better?

(04:27):

As I mentioned earlier, I’ll offer some higher-level ideas to consider when thinking about how to create a home life that feels more manageable and sustainable for you. As you’re listening and before you start trying to change everything all at once, take notice of which parts of your home and personal life are currently creating the most stress, friction, overwhelm, or mental load for you.

And then start there. Because, as you already know, taking on too much at once is a sure recipe for potential failure. For some people, it may be keeping up with household responsibilities so the burden doesn’t fall unevenly on your partner.

For others, it may be following through on commitments, managing finances and paperwork. And again, as I said earlier, staying on top of appointments, meal planning, exercising, et cetera. For some adults with ADHD, even maintaining friendships, responding to messages or making plans consistently can start to feel overwhelming when everything else is already demanding so much mental energy.

(05:39): How Do ADHD Adults Create A Better Home Life

I know there are certainly other areas that may come to mind for you. The point again, here isn’t to create an exhaustive list or blueprint for you. It’s to help you start identifying the areas of your life that feel hardest to manage so you can begin thinking more intentionally about what support structure, systems or changes might actually help you.

I’m hoping that as I go through these various areas and describe ways that you can approach them, that it will spark some ideas for you and how you think about your own challenges at home. But I also encourage you to remember that identifying the change you want to experiment with is hard work.

They won’t all work out the way you want. So as I often say, if you’ve been listening to my podcast for a while, it’s important to approach this endeavor as well with self-compassion.

(06:37): How ADHD Adults Can Manage Their Finances Better

And you may decide you need feedback from someone in your circles or a professional who can help you figure out why it is not working for you, whatever you’re doing now, and what you can try differently as you iterate.

So to start with, when it comes to finances, while you may have other reasons, I’ve found that many adults with ADHD avoid dealing with them for two primary reasons. One is the fear that they might, what they might find the other is not feeling confident in their ability to make good financial decisions, while also believing that they should already know how to manage all of this.

After all, they are adults as their thinking goes. So, unfortunately, sometimes the conclusion is why bother? So let’s start with the fear of what you may find.

Yes, I know you already know that avoiding financial issues and decisions may only make them worse, but looking at your finances when you’re not confident in your ability to untangle them probably won’t be very helpful either, right?

(07:50):

Usually, what I’ve discovered is the key is to enlist the help of someone else before you open Pandora’s Box, and not just someone who can hold your hand, but someone who actually may be able to help you with deciding next steps, even if it’s not the entire roadmap.

And when you find this person, it’s gonna be equally important to be willing to tolerate the discomfort that goes along with opening Pandora’s Box because that is not going to magically go away for most people. First, it’s important to remember that managing finances is like any other aspect of home life.

It’s just a skillset. Maybe not one you were taught, but I bet you can learn how to do this if you’re willing to go through the messy discomfort. Recently, I worked with two clients who both had a lot of anxiety about finances.

One decided to start meeting regularly with her mother, who had much more experience managing money.

(08:54):

Another decided to meet with a financial advisor together with his fiancée. In both cases, progress started when they stopped expecting themselves to know everything already and became willing to ask for help.

So once you’ve worked with someone to get your finances in an organized enough way, the other important piece when it comes to finances is creating a regular structure around them rather than dealing with them only when there’s a crisis.

Because where people often run into trouble is trying to handle finances reactively or just doing ’em on the fly instead of giving themselves dedicated time and space to manage them. For some people, that may mean having a weekly appointment to review bills, bank accounts, spending investments, whatever you have; for others, every couple of weeks or once a month may be enough.

Also, many people find that if possible, automating as much as possible, like bills, reduces a lot of the mental load. And last to do this. Well, it’s really useful to have a clear visual picture of what’s going on financially because when information is scattered across accounts, apps, bills, emails, and statements, it can become much harder to stay engaged and make decisions consistently.

So this is where tools that consolidate the information in one piece can sometimes be super helpful. For some people, apps like Monarch Money or Quicken Simplifi or some other budgeting and financial tracking tool makes it just easier to see what’s happening at a glance rather than trying to keep things in your head.

(10:44): Adults With ADHD Want To Be More Reliable At Home

So another area that many who work with me come to coaching wanting to improve is their reliability, whether that’s following through on commitments, contributing enough at home, or to the wider community, or just honestly getting places on time.

For example, I was recently working with a client who was struggling with getting places on time and in an effort to please people, she would agree to a timeline without giving it sufficient thought time blindness. Thank you, ADHD.

As is true for many adults with ADHD, when she would give it thought, she would be overly optimistic. That is, as long as the stars align, just perfectly sure she could make it work. And people in her life, understandably, became frustrated.

Part of the issue was that she wasn’t accounting for how she actually moved through the world. She would leave her place and need to go back in to get something she forgot, or she would work up right up to the last minute.

So rather than criticizing herself for those patterns or changing them, she started planning for them. She gave more realistic estimates for when she would arrive and built in extra buffer time to account for the way she transitioned out of work mode into getting to places where she needed to be.

(12:12):

In another example, a former client agreed to take out the recycling. He kept on forgetting, or he would look at it and decide, eh, there wasn’t enough that he needed to take it out. Then it was overflowing. And this was a source of constant tension between him and his spouse.

So instead of trying to remember to take it out or estimate when the exact right time was, he eventually decided to take the recycling out every single day on his way to work, regardless of how much was in it, if it was one can or a stack of papers, he took it out by removing the need to constantly evaluate whether it was time, the task just became easier to follow through.

In another case, a client’s spouse wanted him to take on more responsibilities at home, and honestly, he wanted to, too. That’s why he came to work with me.

(13:07):

But because he struggled to follow through consistently, his spouse had gradually stopped trusting that things would get done and ended up carrying too much of the load herself. Eventually, they did divide responsibilities more clearly, and then he and I worked together on creating the support and structure he needed to follow through more reliably.

In the end, honestly, part of the solution was actually fairly simple. He blocked off two hours every Friday, specifically for household administration and life maintenance tasks rather than trying to squeeze them in on the fly.

And I think this is an important point. Often, becoming more reliable with ADHD is about working with the way you naturally operate and putting systems in place to account for this rather than battling, so to speak. What is so, meal planning is another area where many adults with ADHD struggle, and that again makes sense to me.

(14:15): ADHD Adults Often Struggle With Meal Planning

After all, there are so many decisions that need to be made, planning, execution, hopefully before the salmon is rancid, right? And to make matters worse, many parts of this process have to be repeated every single day or at least every week.

And when you’re feeding other people, the complexity can increase exponentially because of varying preferences, schedules, and expectations. It’s complicated to be sure, but in fact, one of the biggest issues I see for many adults with ADHD is that they often have unrealistic expectations around food and meal preparation.

That is, they often think it should just be easier, but really, it’s not easier. It can become easier if you create the structure to make it at least a little simpler and easier. I think the best question to ask if you’re struggling with this is not what’s the ideal way to eat, but rather what’s realistically sustainable for me right now?

(15:25):

And at different points in life, the answer for you may look different. For some people, having a structured system around shopping, meal planning and meal prep works really well. I’ve worked with people as they set this up for themselves and their families.

They may shop on the same day every week, rotate through a list they created of meals and do meal prep on a certain day. For others, though, simplifying expectations is the way they go. I had one client who kept a running list of restaurants and prepared meal options she liked, so she didn’t have to reinvent the wheel every time she was hungry and exhausted.

So instead of expecting herself to suddenly become someone who loved meal prep, she focused on making sure she had food available that was easy enough to access consistently.

And I think that’s another really important distinction. Often, managing food more effectively with ADHD is less about creating the perfect meal planning system and more about reducing friction, simplifying decisions and creating something sustainable enough that you can actually maintain it.

(16:46): How ADHD Adults Handle Clutter, Including Laundry, At Home

I know there may be other areas of your life that you’re interested in addressing right now. Still, in this episode, the last one, I wanna talk about is your physical stuff and home maintenance, because again, many adults with ADHD struggle in these areas as well.

Maybe for you, it includes disorganized spaces or too much stuff, and then maybe needing to buy new stuff when you can’t find something. Or maybe it’s laundry or keeping up with regular cleaning and maintenance.

And while these may seem like all separate issues, they often have similar underlying friction points. That is, there are usually critical moments of choice where things can either stay manageable or start to pile up. Take putting away laundry, for example.

One thing I often hear people say is, I’ll do it later, but if you say this, I bet later doesn’t come with a day or time, right?

(17:49):

It just means not now. And one reason you may say this is that it feels better to promise to come back to it later rather than acknowledging that you just don’t wanna deal with it right now, and you have no idea when you will.

Another reason people resist doing tasks, and in this case putting away their laundry, is that they overestimate how difficult and or time-consuming folding and putting away laundry will actually be. If you time yourself, I bet you can get a more accurate sense of how long it takes, and you may also find out that it’s not that bad after all, versus the time and energy putting into not doing it and thinking about how you should be doing it.

Bonus if you make it a game and play beat the clock to see how fast you can do it, as this may create enough stimulation and urgency to make the task easier to start and stay engaged with.

(18:51):

For some people, pairing it with something enjoyable, like watching a program you like, also lowers the friction even further. Another common friction point when it comes to stuff around the house is moving too quickly through transitions and putting things down wherever you are when you’re in a hurry because, well, it just seems easiest in the moment.

And again, you may tell yourself, I’ll deal with it later with, right? No actual plan when later will be. But often, slowing down just enough to put something where it belongs in that critical moment of choice saves a tremendous amount of time and stress later when you’re trying to find it again and again.

This all takes practice because right now, you’re maybe in the habit of moving quickly. And then there’s the challenge of ongoing accumulation of stuff. For example, I have a client who loves crafting and also enjoys thrift shopping over time.

(20:00):

She’s accumulated so many supplies that she often couldn’t find what she needed, which sometimes led to buying duplicates. So to turn this around, she first decided to stop buying new items while gradually organizing what she already owns.

And while she didn’t think of herself as a morning person, we agreed that she would try spending time first thing in the morning doing this, as she kept on putting it off. And she was surprised to find out this worked so well for her that the muscle memory of the satisfaction of her efforts motivated her to continue.

And she also body doubled with her spouse while they watched television together. Her brother, who lives many states away, has even offered to body double with her over FaceTime. They haven’t done it yet, but she’s looking forward to doing it. So I think that’s a good place to end. Getting more organized with your physical stuff isn’t about Marie Kondo-ing your house.

Well, of course, you could do that if you want. It’s about recognizing what you could do differently at various critical moments of choice, reducing the friction and getting the support you need to get organized enough, whatever that means to you.

(21:27):

What I hope you’re taking away from this episode is that managing home life can be hard for some as hard or harder than managing work, and you’re not missing something if you thought it should be easier.

I also hope you’re walking away from this episode with some ideas of where you wanna focus your efforts to make your home life a little less onerous and more the way you want it. So that’s it for now.

I’m really glad you joined me, and if you’d like support getting a handle on home management and the day-to-day demands of life with ADHD, I do offer one-on-one coaching for adults with executive function challenges.

You can learn more at marlacummins.com/coaching, and if you’re curious whether coaching might be helpful, feel free to reach out. I’m always happy to chat.

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.

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ADHD Adults and Challenges at Work Resources:

• Learn how to plan better with my Free Guide: 6 Common Planning Mistakes Adults with ADHD Make.

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