Top 5 Reasons Your ADHD Brain Struggles with Calendars

Episode Summary

If you’ve ever opened your calendar and felt overwhelmed, guilty, or just plain confused, you’re not alone. A lot of adults with ADHD struggle to make traditional calendar systems work, even though they know they need one.

In this episode, I explore why that happens. I’ll walk you through some of the hidden reasons calendars often fail ADHD brains and explain how decision fatigue, time blindness, and unrealistic expectations can quietly erode your trust in your calendar. Before you can build a system that truly supports you, it helps to understand why it hasn’t worked in the past.

What You’ll Learn About ADHD Challenges With Calendars:

• Why many adults with ADHD can feel anxious or defeated by their calendar
• How decision fatigue, time blindness, and inconsistent energy interfere with using a calendar consistently
• Why well-meaning strategies like time blocking or stacked meetings can quietly backfire for ADHD adults
• What does it mean if you’ve stopped checking or trusting your calendar altogether
• Why the problem isn’t laziness or lack of effort. It’s a mismatch between the tool and your ADHD brain

Transcript: ADHD Adults and Calendars

(00:01):
Do you have a love-hate relationship with your calendar? You know you need one, but it just doesn’t work for you. You’ve tuned into Scattered, Focused, Done, 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, and I’m glad you decided to join me today on this journey to reimagining productivity with ADHD so you can get what is important to you done without trying to do it like everyone else.

Let’s take a moment to look at your relationship with your calendar. If you are like many people I work with, you already know you need a calendar. After all, we all need to know where we’re supposed to be, right? But despite knowing it should be helpful, your calendar might just be making you more anxious.

(01:01):
And if that’s the case, of course you’re not going to want to look at it all the time. Why would you want to interact with a tool that makes you feel tense or even like you’re failing?

Today I want to talk about why so many ADHD adults feel let down by calendar systems that are supposed to help. I’ve talked about calendars before on this podcast, but when I re-listened to that episode, I realized that something was really missing, the why.

I wanted to revisit this now because a lot of people I work with are trying to get back on track, and their calendar is usually one of the first things they try to fix. But if you don’t understand why it hasn’t worked for you yet, it’s hard to make it work going forward.

Why is it, you may wonder, that something so simple, just putting things on a calendar, can be so hard to do consistently with ADHD?

Why is it so hard to use a calendar with ADHD?

(01:53):
That’s what we’re going to explore today. We’re going to focus on the why in this episode. And then next week, I’ll walk you through the how, strategies that can help you actually make a calendar work for your brain, your energy, and your life.

Let’s get into it. When you learn how to use your calendar in a way that actually works for your brain, you’ll likely change your relationship with calendars.

Ideally, when you look at your calendar, you’ll be able to see the hard landscape of your life, at least as it stands right now. Of course, things will change, that’s life. But a good calendar gives you a clear view of what time- and date-sensitive things you have right now. It also helps protect your energy and your focus.

(02:51):
In some cases, you get to decide how to spend your time. In others, like meetings or appointments, the decision’s already been made. Either way, your calendar should reflect what’s actually happening so you can stop trying to carry it all in your head. And it can help you visualize your week too.

When it’s working, you can look ahead and say, okay, here’s what’s coming up and here’s what I need to do to get ready for it. In short, your calendar should be your anchor. It can give you something solid to hold onto when your day maybe starts to spin.

Sounds nice, right? And we’ll talk more next time about how to actually get there. But first, let’s look at what might be going wrong right now.

(04:02):
Let’s talk about one of the biggest reasons your calendar might feel like it’s working against you. It might be demanding just too many decisions, and too often.

As you probably know, future thinking and decision-making are executive function challenges for ADHD adults. But that’s exactly what most calendars require. You need to look ahead, make a choice, and stick to it.

ADHD just doesn’t work that way for many of us. There’s now and not now. Anything outside of now can feel blurry, abstract, or just too far away to act on.

Now, of course, using a calendar will always involve some decision-making. But if you are having to decide every hour whether to follow through on something, it’s going to lead to overload, and sometimes even shutdown.

Why do ADHD brains struggle with calendar decisions?

(05:04):
Your calendar may have become a decision-making nightmare. Here’s how that can happen.

Maybe it’s full of tasks you don’t actually need to do at that specific time, but you put them there hoping it’ll help you remember. So when that time rolls around, you have to stop and ask, am I really going to do this now?

Often the answer to that question is, no, I don’t need to do it right now. So then you may end up feeling bad, like you failed again.

Maybe you’ve got overlapping meetings or appointments, and every day feels like a game of calendar Tetris.

Or maybe you’ve added events you haven’t committed to, but you don’t want to forget about them. Now you have to revisit the decision every time you see it. Should I go? Do I want to? What if I don’t?

Some calendar apps even have a category called “events I could go to.” And sure, that sounds helpful. But for the ADHD brain, it can just add to the fog.

(06:01):
Another thing hanging out on your calendar, making you feel like you’re behind before the day even starts.

Even beyond decision overload, calendars can feel like a bad fit for the ADHD brain not because they’re a bad tool, but because they’re based on a few assumptions that don’t always hold true for us.

Here are the three biggest ones.

First, they assume a consistent level of energy. But ADHD energy is anything but consistent. We often make calendar plans based on what we hope we’ll feel like that day, not who we actually are when the time comes.

Second, they rely on follow-through. And with ADHD, intention and action don’t always connect. You might want to do what’s on your calendar. You might even feel excited when you schedule it. But in the moment, you can’t always get there. And that disconnect can leave you feeling ashamed or defeated.

Third, calendars rely on habit. They assume you’ll check them consistently, follow routines, and use the same structure day after day. But ADHD often makes it hard to stick with habits that aren’t immediately rewarding.

What makes many calendars a bad fit for ADHD adults?

(07:16):
So if a calendar has let you down, or many calendars, or if you’ve stopped using one altogether, it’s probably not because you’re doing anything wrong. It’s just that the tool isn’t accounting for the way your brain actually works.

And even if you are checking your calendar or trying to, you might still not trust it. That lack of trust can quietly erode your ability to rely on it.

One common reason is what I like to call the Lego calendar. This is when your calendar is packed with back-to-back appointments, meetings, or tasks. Everything fits, technically, but it only works if you can snap from one thing to the next without needing a break or a buffer, which most of us can’t. Especially with ADHD.

(08:16):
So you fall behind early in the day. Then everything else gets squeezed, rushed, or maybe even skipped.

And even though you might sense this isn’t going to work when you put it together, you still think, “Well, I have to get this all done. It’ll just have to fit.”

That kind of time optimism is totally understandable, and it’s often fueled by ADHD time blindness. It’s hard for you to estimate how long things will take when your brain doesn’t track time predictably.

Another reason you might not trust your calendar, you’re not totally sure if you missed something. Maybe you didn’t write everything down. So even when you do check your calendar, it may still feel a little shaky, like there might be something hiding that you forgot to add.

(09:12):
And when you don’t trust your calendar to hold what matters, it makes sense that you may stop using it effectively or avoid looking at it, or maybe even start feeling more stressed every time you do.

Even when you’ve done the hard work of putting things in your calendar, you might still not check it as often as you need to. So then you end up missing meetings or showing up late or realizing halfway through the day that you forgot something important.

And it’s not that you don’t care. It’s that looking at your calendar can feel like one more demand, or one more chance to feel behind.

And you might set reminders for calendar events, thinking that’ll help. But when the reminder pops up while you’re in the middle of something and can’t shift gears, then you ignore it.

Or you’re not sure whether this reminder actually matters. Maybe you set it for a task you intended to do but don’t need to do.

Why don’t calendar reminders and alerts work for ADHD adults?

(10:14):
And if you’ve got reminders going off all day, for tasks, events, random pings, none of them really register anymore. It just becomes noise. You start ignoring them by default. And that includes the ones that actually do matter.

Over time, this makes it even harder to rely on your calendar. You might start to wonder, why bother if I’m just going to miss it anyway?

If your calendar hasn’t been working for you yet, it’s not because you’re flaky. It’s because most calendar systems just aren’t designed with your ADHD brain in mind.

A lot of my clients tell me, “I want to use a calendar. I just don’t trust myself to follow through.” And that makes sense. When you’ve tried and failed enough times, it’s hard to want to try again.

(11:16):
So if you’ve stopped using your calendar altogether, that’s not laziness, it’s self-protection. You’ve tried. You’ve followed the advice. When it didn’t work, it felt like maybe you were the problem.

So you may find yourself stuck in this cycle. You decide to give it another try, a fresh start. It doesn’t work the way you hoped. You assume you messed up somehow. So then you try harder, more rules, more reminders. It fails again. You give up. You feel discouraged. And the next time you think about starting over, it feels even harder.

But there is another way.

Next week we’ll walk together through how to rebuild your relationship with your calendar so it can actually support you instead of stressing you out. This isn’t about forcing yourself to use a calendar the way other people do. It’s about reshaping your calendar so it feels like something that supports you, something you can actually trust.

That’s it for now. I’m really glad you joined me.

If you’re finding it hard to get a handle on your time, or use a calendar in a way that actually works for your brain, you don’t have to figure it out on your own. I offer one-to-one coaching for adults with ADHD who want practical support with time management, planning, and follow-through. You can learn more about how I work at marlacummins.com, and if you’re curious to learn more, reach out. I’m happy to chat.

Until next time, this has been Scattered, Focused, Done – Reimagining Productivity with ADHD. I’m Marla Cummins, and I’m glad you’re here, doing the work. Keep it up. You’ve got this.

ADHD Related Links & Resources

• Learn how to plan better with my Free Guide: 6 Common Planning Mistakes Adults with ADHD Make
• Learn more about the 1-3-5 Rule to help you plan your day with your ADHD brain in mind
• Ready for individualized support? Let’s talk about 1-1 ADHD coaching