ADHD & TIME MANAGEMENT - The best system to get things done!! (ADHD tips)

hey guys welcome back to my channel my name is candice and i help girls and women with adhd understand and manage their brain today i wanted to make a video about the time management strategies and like my planning strategies that i've put into place so that i can organize my life on a day-to-day basis know what i'm going to do throughout the day and keep track of my to-do's and actually get stuff done it took me a while to figure out like the system to put all the elements together because i used several apps and concepts to manage my time and manage my life i wanted to go through all of them in a more or less structured way i'm doing this video because i think it's really important for someone with adhd to have a reliable system to get organized but we often fail to have one because it's so hard for us to find a system that works most of the systems that are presented out there whether on youtube or anywhere on the internet is usually not made for someone with adhd and more for someone who's neurotypical i've tried a lot of neurotypical systems like having like a physical planner this never worked for me i tried like many different types of planners like the very basic ones and somewhere you had like prompts and stuff and usually i never i it's not usually like i never kept it and it fell um out of my mind after about a week or two that's why i'm making this video because in the last few weeks i put together a lot of stuff that has made me quite productive and able to relax knowing that i have a system put in place so nothing's falling through the cracks and i know i'm going to get things done so that's what i wanted to tell you today i'm going to go through all those little things that i use on a day-to-day basis so if you're interested then let's get started okay so first thing is i started using this method when i was in my first year of uni and this method is time blocking i was completely new to time blocking at the time and i didn't know what it was but i was reading this book that i have right there called how to become a straight a student this book was written by cal newport and i'm a huge fan of cal newport if you don't know the guy he wrote deep work so that they can ignore you digital minimalism so he's really into like healthy productivity and getting away from technology as far as i can tell this book was written like in his early years as an author he basically went around the states asking successful students like straight a students how they manage their time and all the techniques that they use to have straight a's all the time the first chapters was on how to manage your time and the title is actually quite catchy because it says how to manage your time in less than five minutes a day as usual i'm always looking for a new system to put in place in my life to like get more stuff done so i was like oh interesting and i read the chapter so he basically says that to organize your time you only need to have one sheet of paper you can do it digitally of course and you can do it just on a random piece of paper or notebook and you basically split your sheet of paper into two on one side you write your schedule of the day so you write today's schedule and then you time block everything in your day from the moment you start your day to the moment you stop working basically it can be like from 9 to 9 30 i'll do yoga from 9 30 to 10 i'll commute to work from 10 to 11 i'll work on that specific paper and you just do all those time chunks that you can alter as you want because you're writing them down so you can do like 20 minutes time chunks five an hour an hour and a half more you can really design it however you want which is the strength of this method once you're done you have an overview of your whole day in time chunks this can seem very overwhelming to the people who don't really like time blocking because they feel it's restraining a way but it's actually the opposite you realize that once you start time blocking you know what you're supposed to do at any time of the day and you don't you're not distracted by wanting to do something else while you're doing something this is very huge for someone with adhd because i always feel like i could be doing a million other things when i'm doing something and so having time blocking takes a bit of this stress away the stress of like wanting to do everything at once and then on the second column on the right you actually put like all the things to remember for the future so you log in anything that comes up during the day that you hadn't written down anywhere for example if you remember that you need to do laundry you won't schedule it right away in your week or in your day you just want to write it down on the right so that you remember to go back to it the next day when you plan your day and either plan it for the next day or you can add this to do to another date that's why the system requires uh a calendar so calendar just says like get any paper calendar that should be able to contain like 10 or 12 to do's per day so that you can log in those things to remember and then when you're on the specific day you have all those to-do's and you could sort through them and say okay i want to do laundry i want to work on my essay i said also that i would buy a gift for my mom but actually i want to do that later so i'm going to move it to next week you write it down on another day and then we get to that day then you decide am i doing it today am i doing it next time etc so it's a very easy straightforward system for getting things done and knowing where your time goes that alone is not really sufficient for me i don't like using a calendar like just a plain calendar and having those to do's like floating around so i actually use this with notion if you don't know notion it's an amazing note-taking app and it has a lot of powers instead of logging my task into a plain calendar i just log them into this task management system which makes it really easy because i can annotate the task i can add context i can add whether i need to do them asap or not and then i can go back to this task list and then put it in my day planning time blocking thing as i go so it's really really useful to have notion in the back so you need to have like a somewhere where you log your task it can be anything i use notion you can use literally anything there's another step that i use to make my time blocking more appealing one thing we struggle with when we have adhd is time blindness and i know that if you have adc you're very familiar with this we don't really know where time goes unless we have like proper boundaries and limits to remind us that time passes one very good app that i discovered and started using avidly because of the widget that they developed is the app a waves every day is a circle and you can fill in the circle with tasks that are categorized you have eat sleep relax work flow you basically drag and drop let's say i'm doing my morning routine this is a flow activity so i'll just drag and drop flow into my circle and then i can adjust the time that it takes me to do this activity from there you can just like reconstruct your day so i usually do my time blocking on a piece of paper or on my ipad actually and then i take all the chunks and i like to put them in o waves because then it makes it digital so i can be reminded of when i need to switch tasks and i can see it on my phone on my widget every time i open my screen i can see what i'm supposed to do and it also shows you the evolution of the test so like how far i am through the task with a little circle so it's extremely useful i love it i always advise it to people with adhd to try it because it's so colorful and fun and you can switch emojis you can switch a lot of things up to make it very personal which is why i really love it and the color coding thing is huge for me that is i guess the second element of my day planning so if you zoom back and you think more in terms of planning year months and weeks i do use a calendar and i actually used apple's calendar so ical i guess i tried using google calendar i don't know why apple seems more convenient for me and instinctive i use color coding again so i think i split in terms of personal work studies like some very broad themes in my life and so i know when i add an event to my calendar that it corresponds to a specific bucket so actually that's the term that thomas frank uses in his last video so he made a video about how to organize yourself and like what calendar to choose so i'll definitely link this in the description below it's a very good video that summarizes why it's good for example to separate your life into buckets so that's the terms he uses and to color code those buckets so you make it very easy to know where your time goes so even something very trivial like having drinks with friends i will write it down in my calendar because i want to make sure that remember i'll get like a reminder an hour or two before so that i never forget and also it allows me to see clearly in a week what i have planned so it's been really useful and i do this with any event that comes up regardless of its nature if you do this when you have adhd it saves you a lot of time and energy you don't have to keep anything in your head and feel bad about forgetting stuff anymore it's okay to just put everything down on paper and let your brain work on something more stimulating than keeping events in your head so yeah i guess that was like the third point using a calendar and putting everything possible you can think of in it so you can see that i have developed this system for myself and it works quite well actually you can't see that it works but i'm telling you it does for me and those elements are seriously something needed by anyone with adhd especially the time blocking thing which is a lifesaver and i can say that because when i first started it in my first year of uni it was the system that actually lasted the longest i realized that i used it for almost like a month and a half which is very long in terms of me trying out stuff i usually quit like after a week so a month and a half was a long time and i got so much done at that time and obviously something made me fall off track and then started again like years later but i knew that there was something in there so i always come back to it when i feel stressed and i try other techniques that don't work i'm like i know that time blocking works but i just need to figure out a way to make it attractive and make it stick and i think i found this uh recently and that's why i wanted to share it with you obviously i know it's gonna evolve and i'm gonna add layers to the system or maybe simplify it this is just how it works for me right now um i also when i tried bullet journaling a few weeks ago so i realized it wasn't for me because i tried again another system and it didn't really work but i kept the habit tracking thing and i thought it was a bit stupid at first but actually it really does again make me see time pass because it's very easy if you don't try to just like kind of see time as a unreal thing um and tracking your habits makes you see when you tick boxes that correspond to actual days you can see how you've been doing over the past few weeks a month and it's quite useful to reflect back back on yeah your habits your goals how close are you getting to goals etc and that's another aspect that i need to include in my system which is liking right now is how to manage goals and planning for the future because my system is really good for planning short term in terms of so days and weeks i guess but i still don't have a good and non overwhelming way to plan for the weeks ahead the months ahead that's still something that's very stressful for me and i'm looking for ways to do it in a systematic organized way that i could always come back to and that wouldn't feel overwhelming and that wouldn't be too much uh if that makes sense so definitely stick around on my channel if you want to see another video on how i managed to include those month yearly time management thingy um i hope you really enjoyed this video uh it was a bit of a more casual one than the other ones but i really hope i get to make another one when i have found some more techniques and i have actually rounded up this whole system and made it something very clear there's still room for improvement a lot of improvement actually but i think it's good that i found this basis for managing my time and i hope this helps i hope you can get something out of it maybe try the o waves app or try time blocking i would highly recommend even if you're not a student maybe you get this book actually it's better if you're at university because it can give you a lot of tips but um even if you're not then there's the whole chapter on time blocking and i think it's really well explained in a really simple way that's it for this video thank you so much for watching i hope again that you enjoyed if you did don't forget to click the like button below subscribe to the channel if you want to see more and click on the bell notifications so you don't miss any of my upcoming videos also if you liked the video don't forget to share it with your family and friends who could benefit from it maybe people with adhd who struggle to get organized and if you want to check out a video with tips for your hd brain i just released a video last week about adhd and how exercise affects your adhd brain in a positive way so you can go check that out thank you so much for watching and i'll see you in the next one bye [Music] you

Channel: yourADHDgirl

Views: 49,519

Keywords: adhd brain, neurodivergent, productivity, get things done, getting things done, adhd tips, tips and tricks, mental health, how to manage your time, time management, time management skills, adhd time blindness, adhd time management, women with adhd, adhd women, how to be productive, how to get organized, notion, best time management apps, adhd brain vs normal brain, adult adhd, adhd, adult adhd symptoms, adhd in adults, adhd symptoms, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder

Id: f7GyveYL-Jg

Length: 14min 3sec (843 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 01 2021