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This post is written from the perspective of my personal ADHD experience and should not be taken as medical advice. It is for informational and educational purposes only.
I started using the Panda Planner from Rocketbook in December of 2021 and have really loved it! There are sections to plan long-term goals and ways to break them up into smaller chunks, like quarterly, monthly, and weekly goals.
Ever since being diagnosed with ADHD at 30, I've spent the last 9 years learning how my brain works. The more I learn about the traits associated with ADHD, such as executive dysfunction and trouble starting overwhelming projects, the more I began finding ways of coping. In the beginning it was medication and I think that gave me a good handle on what my brain was capable of without all the extra noise.
When I went off medication when I was pregnant with my son, I began exploring other modalities to help my neurodivergent brain do the things I wanted to do.
One major breakthrough I had was when I began to explore the difference between projects and tasks. David Allen's GTD method (from the book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity) was my introduction to this.
The difference as I've come to realize when it comes to my ADHD brain is that a project is the idea of an overall end product, while a task is the step that needs to be taken as part of creating that project. A project is a series of tasks put together.
When I'm writing my to-do list, I have to be careful not to write down projects as tasks — those end up being the items on the list that I have the most trouble starting.
Often times when I find I've been procrastinating what I think is a task, I'll realize that I've had trouble starting it because it was actually a project and I need to break it down into smaller, more manageable-sized tasks so it doesn’t overwhelm my brain when I see it.
My to-do lists when I was first leaning into this idea looked chaotic and one friend even called it "rigid-looking" — at the time, I was furious with her for saying that because she has no idea what looked like "rigid" to her was in fact my way of coping with the fact I’ve never fully felt like I could ever be disciplined enough or organized enough to get the things done I wanted to.
What I've come to realize is many neurotypical folks don't necessarily need every project broken down for them in the same way or even at all sometimes.
They may not know what it's like to wake up and have everything that has to get accomplished whack you in the face with its gravity and feel like an insurmountable brick wall of overwhelm.
Medication helped with this and then when I got off of it, doing things like morning brain dumps/morning pages and regularly setting aside time for planning my week has helped that wall seem more like a series of manageable steps most days.
After years of this, I don't need to be as meticulous — there's finally a bit of muscle memory to doing my tasks, and habit stacking has helped with things like regular home cleaning and maintenance. I've even gone from notebooks that began piling up and never looked at again to using Google Docs and my Rocketbook reusable planner (check out my Instagram Highlight to learn more about Rocketbook planners). Going digital has also helped when I want to go back to an idea and I can do a simple search for it, rather than digging through several notebooks to find an idea from months ago.
The more I learn about ADHD and make these tiny little adjustments over time, the more I find the world a little easier to live in every day and my to-do list becoming more manageable. And then I enjoy writing about those experiences to share it with others who may benefit 🙂
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