How to time-block when you have ADHD

time blocking let's talk about it [Music] if you take tasks off your to-do list and put them onto your calendar and then you task like they're now appointments Who falls for this stuff not me um then there's no way you're not gonna do them right wrong [Music] you probably know you need some kind of structure right I do I also hate any kind of rigid structure that is like standing in the way of spontaneity hampering my creative impulses right okay and when I tell you this one tiny little tweak to the way that I use Google Calendar change my time blocking and kind of like low-key change my life okay and I genuinely believe that somebody else out there will also feel the way that I feel hopefully it's you I'm Danielle by the way okay so here is the juice we've got to stop creating all these multi-colored calendars for all these different areas of our life you know what I mean work personal social travel right the kids workouts okay you get it no more of that and what I want you to do instead is use the multi-calendar function and therefore the colors associated with each calendar to represent sorry I have to read this tears of time flexibility relative to your priorities yet sensitive to your moods and energy levels big no to millions of calendars for all the different million areas of your life uh Gone by big yes to a few calendars whose colors like signal to your brain a like how important something is and don't worry I'll get into it but also B how much like flexibility you have to move it around your calendar without your whole life catching on fire I'm calling it The Time Flex tier technique or tx3 for short all right now we're gonna make this concrete [Music] hello it's many months later also you're in my kitchen I'm in a bathrobe sorry okay so one of the last things I said was that you needed to create calendars to represent tiers of flexibility and probably like what the hell does that even mean how many tears are there how do you decide what goes in each tier are they labeled by numbers like right okay I hear you I got you but to teach you how to do it we're gonna have to go back to grade school I'll show you what I mean so this is a good time to open Google Calendar if you want to follow along I've watched so many time blocking videos and when I look at other people's little area down on this thing they'll have I've seen five calendars but I've also seen like 20. something that I ran into when I used to calendar block that way was like okay I'm taking a trip to New York City to hang out with one of my girlfriends does that go on my social calendar does that go on the uh travel calendar is but I plan to Vlog it is that gonna be on my like content like it was just it was too confusing for me personally now Google Calendar automatically gives you one calendar it's usually like named your name and then there's um like a tasks a reminders Wayne is aside from all those calendars that Google Calendar already gives you we are going to create five of our own and this is what I mean by grade school I want you to remember the grades you got on your report card a b c d and f a stands for appointments only things that cannot be reasonably with go on this calendar that's obviously things like doctor's appointments hairdresser appointments meetings flights right so it doesn't have to be like Health appointments it just means things that are like tied to a time and if you change the time you're either like really inconveniencing someone else or really screwing over yourself these are solid and I would just say inflexible Now using myself as an example let me unclick my appointments calendar or let me click on my appointments calendar this particular week we were in the thick of like moving and settling in so I really only had one thing this week that was like tied to a time it was an appointment to get this lasered but like let's say you know Saturday 7 P.M is your friend's birthday dinner right it's from seven to eight obviously this is like not something that like you can really move around or like let's say you work at a coffee shop from seven to I don't know 11. or let's say on Wednesday you have a flight right okay that's obviously not gonna be 15 minutes long but you get the point right and this is why I make appointments bright red that red signals to my brain they are the things with the least amount of flexibility b stands for bottlenecks this calendar I feel is slightly more intuitive than the appointments calendar right because bottlenecks is less about something being tied to a specific time and more about how important that task or event is because it's something it's a it's a precursor to something else I've deemed important all right so let's toggle on my bottlenecks calendar for me personally you might not feel this way but like my weekly plan it's obviously not an appointment I don't have to do it and 5 PM every Sunday but for me it's something that like if I don't do it the whole rest of the week I just won't know what I'm doing so it kind of like holds everything up I to be honest I don't even think that's the best example but I I'm trying to be more consistent on YouTube a bottleneck would be something like filming a video right film this week's video right and you know that'll probably take me two hours hypothetically speaking right now I've made it another bright color it's not quite as like as the red but I've made it another bright color because I want it to signal to my brain like hey if something comes up on Monday let's say the hairdresser that I can never get an appointment with us like hey I've got an opening could I wait a few hours could I easily like shift this down a little bit or even maybe move it to the next day I could but just know you are holding other things up by not doing this grade C stands for critical let's say that my two priorities in life right now are being consistent on this YouTube channel and um you know let me just toggle on the critical calendar and then I can show you what I mean by this at the time that I made this schedule for myself my husband was deployed and one of my biggest focuses in life was like trying to be like hot hot by the time he got home from deployment right I put it on my critical calendar that every morning I do a hot girl walk and like a little bit of Pilates and then I also was doing these cavitation treatments it's a machine that melts your fat basically and then also just like other little beauty things so all these things are not appointments they're not bottlenecks but they were critical to my success caveat to this calendar it probably doesn't need to just be to like whatever your two main priorities are I have trash day written down here as critical where we were living at the time like we needed to put the trash out on Monday night so obviously that's critical to just keeping my home in working order it's not tied to a time but it's like something like I need to do that day I want to like really get in depth with these but I also don't want to beat a dead horse if you have any questions just like leave them in the comments and I will explain daily routine is I think pretty self-explanatory it's the stuff that you need to do every day let's toggle on my calendar you notice a lot more stuff pops up Pops in especially around the morning and around the evening so for me daily I have my little morning routine here which I've represented by these emojis which is basically like wake up brush your teeth scrape your tongue drink some water drink your coffee make your bed right showering doing my hair uh reviewing my calendar for the day sometimes I think it could be tempting to put something you do every day on your daily routine even though it's critical I made the distinction to put like Hawker walks and pilates on my critical calendar because it wasn't really like habitual like getting up and making coffee and like making my bed it takes up time so I put it in the calendar but making my bed isn't really critical in the great grand scheme of things to my goals whereas like doing Pilates every day was the thing that's different about the daily routine blogs though is because they happen every day they can't really roll over like you could probably delay them in the day for example like let's say I wake up on Monday morning and for some reason I just can't get out of bed and then I realize oh crap I've got like pilates class I gotta get to so I gotta get going and I don't have time to make my bed I could roll it down and like move it make it later you know when I get home and I'm just like oh let me make my bed so that it's not bothering me all day but you're not gonna make your bed twice in one day so these daily routine things don't really roll over they just kind of get like deleted like let's say the whole day goes and I didn't make my bed whatever didn't happen if I end up not freaking showering today I'm not gonna shower twice tomorrow to make up for it all right I'm just gonna be like whoops Goblin girl moment it was one of those days you know what I like to do is I have things on my schedule and then when I would do them I would turn them gray so like let's say I woke up at 6am great I would gray it out I get up and I have a successful quick morning routine like I have ADHD I've learned to stop asking so much of myself I used to have these like ridiculous morning routines but I could never follow through with them or keep up with them for very long if I wake up and I brush my teeth and scrape my tongue before I have coffee it's a good day and I reward Myself by this is my version of like ticking off the box I turn it gray right click this event is now Gray and like let's say I'm having just I'm on a roll I'm having a perfect day and I did my hawk or walk in the morning I'd come back to my walk and I'm like did that and I would turn it gray and then after that I did my Pilates turn that into gray and then oh I uh showered I deleted that earlier but like let's say I did that I would turn it gray and then let's say I'm like feeling a little bit lazy and I get sucked into my phone or I don't something else comes up blow dry my hair just let it air dry whatever now I would just delete it I would say oh that didn't happen and I'm not gonna style my hair twice tomorrow to make up for it whatever and I would just do this all day long and let me tell you it feels so good there is nothing more satisfying than like Sunday night coming around and it'd be time for my weekly planner review and I'm looking back at this week and being like man like I really did all that or it doesn't then you just delete it and you see blank space in your calendar and you can kind of reflect on like what did or didn't happen [Music] these are things that like my dream self would do with everything were to go according to plan but it's also the kind of thing that like if I delete it or it doesn't get done you know what I mean for example my ideal self is someone who like Cuts yourself together and does her makeup every day but like if it didn't happen nobody cares don't like follow my example like some of the stuff that's negotiable to me is not negotiable to other people like vacuuming my bedroom ideally I would have done that once a week but honestly sometimes I skipped it to some people that's probably but now you can kind of use this two ways like the way I use this is like oh it's either something that can like just be deleted if I can't do it if me and my girlfriend like can't make sure we have our like weekly phone call like whatever we just talked about it delete it whatever but it's just nice to kind of see these things as little reminders of like how you want to live and I wouldn't call my friend if I hadn't filmed the video this week you know what I mean I've reserved Sundays as like days to get groceries and meal prep for the week but like if I decide I want to do that Saturday instead you know I'm not hurting anyone if I see a big Blank Space wide open let's talk about some extra credit calendars I'll call it the a plus calendar alerts and awareness it's just a vague catch-all for notes of like what you actually did or like what's other things I put on there people's birthdays right that's like not a task if I were to hop to this week you would see like oh Gabe in class like during these times because it's just good for me to like know like oh that would be a good time to film because he's not here now for the calendar everybody got with their name on it when they first set up their Google account this I use as like a quick capture function say I just go to create an event it automatically defaults to this calendar so you don't have to fiddle with like what calendar it goes on but like let's say I just remembered I need to mail my mother-in-law's birthday card tomorrow I would just put I wouldn't worry about how long it's gonna take exactly when I just put it on the thing the black for some reason to my brain says oh this hasn't been processed deal with this deal with this deal I think it's important to remember that like you still have ADHD even though to this day I still don't do like everything I said I was gonna do exactly when I said I was gonna do it this calendar has helped me Pace myself more

Channel: Danielle Colada

Views: 342,870

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Id: 8G4Q5dw3aQo

Length: 13min 31sec (811 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 11 2023