3 Overlooked ADHD Time Management Strategies

If you have ADHD, chances are time management is not at the top of your “favorite things” list.  Am I right? Don’t worry; you’re not alone. Today I’m sharing my favorite ADHD time management strategies to help you manage your time more efficiently.

Many of us with ADHD brains or ADHD tendencies find managing ourselves within time to be super challenging.

Here’s the good news; episode 188 explores how to simplify this experience by considering three key components of the time management process: pre-planning, creating structure, and optimizing tech. 

We’ll investigate some uncommon strategies and help you determine the most supportive for you.

You can start by tuning into the episode above or stream it on your favorite podcasting app here.   

Prefer to read? No problem! Keep scrolling for the entire podcast transcript. 

In Episode #188 You Will Discover

• The way time blindness impacts so many ADHD brains.
• Three uncommon areas to strengthen your time management
• How to find the best ADHD time management strategies for you

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Episode #188: 3 Overlooked ADHD Time Management Strategies (Transcript) 

Today we are talking about time and how we manage ourselves in time. Time is one of the most common topics that I explore with my clients. It’s also one of the things that I work on the most myself, too.

As people with ADHD, many of us navigate a variety of obstacles when it comes to time, so the topic tends to present itself in many different situations.

I want to approach this topic of time and time management through a different lens and explore three often overlooked ways we can support our time management regularly.

As I talk through the different approaches, your brain may think, I already know this. I’ve heard this before.

If you notice this happening, check in and notice if you’re tending to all of the steps I suggest or if you might skip over some. If it’s the latter – if you might skip over a few of the steps – you may be missing one of the crucial components in helping you use your time in the way that you want to.

If the ADHD time management strategies or concepts are entirely new to you, that’s great! I encourage you to notice what stands out to you and try implementing one of them this week to see what you find.

ADHDers navigate obstacles when it comes to time management

Those of us with ADHD brains or ADHD tendencies tend to navigate obstacles when it comes to time management.

I’ve talked about time blindness quite often on the podcast.

What is Time Blindness?

Time blindness is the inability to accurately estimate how much time a task might require to complete, or it might be challenging to anticipate how long it might take you to follow a certain routine or wrap up the last details of a project.

This can happen on both the big and the small scale.

For example: It might sound like me telling my husband it’ll take me 10 minutes to finish something up, and I genuinely believe that’s true, but it ends up taking 47 minutes instead. Or it might look like allowing two hours to declutter and organize your bedroom and bathroom when in reality, you needed at least six.

Another way that time blindness can show up is in our lack of awareness of passing time. We might think that 5 minutes have passed, but really 50 minutes or three hours have gone by. Or maybe we’re working on something that we think is super tedious or boring, and we’re certain we’ve been working for at least two hours, but it’s only been about 30 minutes.

If any of these examples sound familiar, you likely know how this time blindness can impact our ability to stick with plans and schedules.

Time blindness can lead to:

• Taking on too much and burning yourself out
• Significant delays or missed deadlines
• Waiting to get started on big projects or deadlines like preparing our taxes or the annual budget review because we think we have plenty of time to get it done. But in reality, when we break down all the steps and put them in the right order, it’s often a different story.

So today we’re going to talk about different strategies that we can implement to help us create more awareness of our time.

I am doing this by looking through three key components…

1. Pre-planning
2. Creating structure
3. Optimizing tech

Let’s dive in.

1. ADHD Time Management strategies for Pre-Planning

Let’s start with a look at preplanning. What do I mean here?

What I have found to be true for many people is that we resist planning because we don’t think it helps. We don’t see the point of it because we never stick with the plan anyway. I think one of the reasons many of us struggle with sticking to a plan is that we don’t have the information we need to set ourselves up for success.

We don’t have the information we need to create an actual plan.

We might do some of the steps – a thought download or a brain dump of all the different things we want to complete that week, and we may even put them on different days of the week in our planner. However, because so many of us are time blind and often struggle with estimating the amount of time we need, these plans simply aren’t accurate.

And because our brains tend toward all or nothing, if we try creating a plan once, we don’t stick to it, the brain wants to jump to some version of the thought, “planning just doesn’t work for me.”

But the thing is, that’s just not true.

What’s actually true is that you took the first very important steps of identifying things you want to complete and maybe even space them out on your calendar. But without any additional information or data points, it’s not possible to assess whether the planning approach “worked” or not.

We are missing that critical component of knowing – with some degree of accuracy – how much time we need to complete the tasks. Otherwise, it’s like me saying, “I created a plan to drive to Michigan, and I even broke down all the steps – the turn-by-turn instructions – between Boston and Ann Arbor. I think I’ll get started on that earlier in the afternoon so I can end work early and get Bruno out for a walk.

Now for those of you not familiar with the location of these two cities, this example is ridiculous. I just typed driving from Boston to Ann Arbor, MI in Google, and without traffic, it looks like it takes about 11 hours and 18 minutes. It’s 757.6 miles. There’s no way I could start that early in the afternoon and finish it up so I can get Bruno out for a walk before the sun sets at 5:30.

Now when I give this example, it literally doesn’t make sense. Of course, we wouldn’t expect ourselves to be able to make an 11-12 hour drive in 3 hours. But so many of us do this to ourselves when it comes to creating a schedule.

This is where the idea of pre-planning comes in.

By pre-planning, we take the different projects on our list and we break them down into smaller pieces, estimating the time for each one and if it feels supportive for you, creating deadlines for each.

Now as I mentioned before, if you’re already in the habit of doing a thought at the start of your week or your day to identify the different things you want to complete, that’s amazing. Keep that up. The good news is that you already have a powerful habit that will support you in the planning process. Now we get to build on it.

Break Down The Steps

So with each project that you identify on your list, we want to break it down into smaller tasks.

I highly encourage writing out the steps, not just thinking them in your mind.

A question I love to ask myself to help ensure that I’ve broken down the steps enough is,

“Could I hand this list of small steps to a friend and they’d be able to complete the project without asking me additional questions?”

If the answer is yes, then it’s probably broken down enough.

Estimate The Time For Each Step

Once we have those steps broken down, then we want to estimate the time for each of those required steps.

Your brain will tell you, “I don’t know.” that’s OK. Take a guess. Any guess is better than completely ignoring it, as when we ignore the step or lump it together with another, we essentially allow zero time for that step. It disappears in our time blindness.

As you estimate a time for each step, I also recommend that you double or even triple it.

I know this sounds ridiculous, and your brain will want to go into complete and total rebellion at the idea of needing to use that much time to complete the task. That’s OK. You’re right on track.

This ADHD time management strategy will help determine how long things actually take so we can create schedules that support us.

Evaluate The Steps

The final key component of the pre-planning process is evaluation.

With pre-planning, this is often the final step that most people skip, yet this is the step that’s so very critical.

As you go about your day acting out the plan, keep tabs on how long the projects take you.

This will provide information for your brain on how much time you actually need the next time you do a similar project. If your guess is way off – maybe you need six times as long as you initially thought, or maybe you need half the time that you anticipated-that’s not a problem. That’s actually great news because now you know. Now you have that data for next time as you create a more accurate schedule for yourself.

Doing this allows you to manage your time and prioritize what’s most important to you.

2. ADHD Time Management strategies For Structuring Your Day

Now let’s talk about strategy #2, which focuses on structuring your day.

More specifically, I want to look at how you can structure your day depending on your energy and focus levels.

Once you have your projects for the day figured out, divide them throughout the day based on when you work best. Decide when your energy levels, focus levels, and your general chronotype are most supportive for you.

So let’s start with this idea of chronotype.

What in the world is a chronotype?

Actually, as I say this out loud, I’m thinking this might be a topic worth doing an entire episode on. If, after learning a little more about what it means today, you find you’re interested in knowing more, would you let me know? Pop over to Instagram, I’m @imbusybeingawesome, and you can let me know either in the comments of the post for this episode or just send me a DM. If there’s enough interest in learning more, I can put an episode together.

Let’s start with a general overview and a couple of things to consider. And because you know I love a good definition, let’s look at that first.

Merriam-webster defines chronotype as “the internal circadian rhythm or body clock of an individual that influences the cycle of sleep and activity in a 24-hour period.”

To Determine Your Chronotype Ask Yourself…

• When does your body naturally want to sleep?
• When does it want to be awake?
• How does this information inform when you are the most focused versus when you’re most creative versus when you’re most active?

Daniel Pink wrote a fascinating book about this called, “When: the scientific secrets of perfect timing.”

In it, he talks about some general categories for people – larks, night owls, and third birds.

• A lark is someone who’s naturally more energetic, active, and productive in the morning hours. They are often early risers, typically waking up earlier than most.
• A night owl is someone who is naturally more energetic and productive in the evening and night hours. They are typically late risers and will stay up later than others. A night owl might stay up until two in the morning working on a project and find that they are most creative during that time.
• The third bird is essentially found in the middle of these two ends of the spectrum.

By digging in and knowing this information, it can really help you begin tuning into your energy and focus levels, which in turn, helps you plan for your peak hours of focus and productivity versus when you’re the most creative versus when you could support yourself with downtime or arrest.

Each of these different chronotypes has different stages of lower and higher energy.

When you get to know these stages and can predict them with some regularity. It allows you to start scheduling your projects accordingly so that you’re working with your brain and your energy levels rather than against them.

Plus, I think establishing your chronotype and working within your own personal rhythms is also really freeing. When you stop forcing yourself into a box of when you think you “should” work on your most challenging tasks, you have a much better shot at working effectively.

For example, if you are a night owl…

Trying to force yourself into a 5:00 AM morning routine may not be the most effective use of your time or brain space. So, what would it look like if you allowed yourself to embrace your best hours in the evening?

By scheduling your day – and in turn, managing your time- with your energy levels in mind, helps you both increase your effectiveness and efficiency overall while ultimately saving time.

3. Embracing Technology To Improve time management

The final area that I want to look at today is how we can embrace technology and optimize it in a way that helps us manage our time as effectively as possible.

Set Reminders & Alarms

Perhaps the most familiar piece of advice when it comes to tech and ADHD is to use some version of a reminder or alarm on your phone or computer or tablet, or whatever other devices you use, in order to help you stay on track throughout the day.

You might use these types of reminders and notifications to help you recognize the passage of time.

For example, maybe you have your phone at chime every hour so that your brain is aware of the time passing. Or you could do it in smaller increments, like every 15 minutes.

You might also set reminders or alarms to go off 15 minutes before switching to the next task so that you’re giving your brain a little bit of transition time rather than forcing it to shift immediately from one thing to the next.

Or you might use a timer in the very traditional sense where you set a timer and work until it’s done.

For example, maybe you use the Pomodoro technique of working for 25 minutes with a 5-minute break, and you set your timer accordingly.

In the I’m Busy Being Awesome Facebook community, somebody mentioned using a specific pomodoro app that they really like, so you may even have specific apps that are uniquely designed for this purpose. And by the way, if you want to join us in the free Facebook community, I’d love to have you in there. It’s a great place to share strategies and ask questions and connect with other busy awesome brains. I will link to it in the show notes if you’d like to join us.

Time Management Apps – Perfect For Adults with ADHD

There are lots of apps for creating to-do lists and identifying priorities, which both help you keep the most important things front and center. Here are some popular ones:

• TikTik – To get organized and get reminders
• Remember the Milk – An app to remind you of things on your to-do list
• Priority Matrix – helps manage multiple projects and prioritize the different actions by urgency or importance

And then, of course, there is the tried and true calendar app. And I know for many people, having a main calendar app can be really useful to share with either your partner or your family so that everybody’s on the same page about what’s coming up and when.

Similarly, having some sort of scheduling app or way of scheduling meetings with people without needing to deal with the nightmare that is the constant back and forth of emails while playing calendar Tetris Is a super efficient way to say view time and speed up communication.

Voice To Text

Perhaps my favorite way to use technology is the voice-to-text application.

That’s literally what I’m using right now as I map out this podcast. I love to use Microsoft Word with the dictation button. Google Docs also offers this option, and they do work.

If you have access to Microsoft Word or something like dragon dictate, I think you may find the user experience better. I say this as a lot of apps like Google Docs or simply using the talk to text on your iPhone for example, turn off after about a minute.

I found this to be quite frustrating because when I work on the podcast, I often pause and think about ideas for a while or process through some thoughts before saying the thing out loud. But in the meantime, the microphone happened to turn off. So I’d talk through the entire idea, only to realize that the mic didn’t catch any of it. But with Microsoft Word or other apps like dragon dictate specifically designed for talk-to-text, the microphone stays on much longer.

Automated Workflows

Another powerful way to make technology work for you is to set up workflows or streamline different processes.

You can do this with different apps like Zapier or If This Then That.

Having something like this really removes a lot of the headache around administrative tasks.

For example, if somebody schedules a call with me on my calendar link, they open up the calendar and select a time, and then once they submit it, that automatically triggers a workflow.

• I get an e-mail
• They get a confirmation e-mail
• Zoom automatically creates a link that goes in that confirmation to both of us
• It also puts that appointment on both my calendar and their calendar
• It begins a sequence that sends a reminder e-mail to that person one day before and the day of

I don’t have to do anything except show up for the call. So all of that administrative work is taken care of through this automated workflow.

More examples for If This Then That…

Let’s say you wanted to track how many days you go to the gym. You could send a text message to If This Then That, and you could set it up to add a new line to a spreadsheet in your Google Drive.

Or if you often lose your phone, you could set it up so that you could send an e-mail to If This Then That, and it will call your phone to help you find it.

If you want to have all of your orders and receipts in one place from your online orders, you might create an If This Then That where all the receipts in your Gmail are saved in a folder in Dropbox.

These are just random examples, but hopefully, it gets your brain thinking about all of the different ways you might be able to streamline or automate some of the more nagging administrative tasks that you do on a daily basis.

Alexa or Siri or your Google Home

Building on this, we then move into the next category, which is, admittedly, another version of these workflows, but I want to separate it a bit. And this involves using something like Alexa or Siri or your Google Home.

By using These Apps, you can…

• Have Alexa or Siri add an event to your calendar
• You can use Siri or sync your Alexa with your reminders app so that anytime you tell one of them to add something to your shopping list, it shows up on your phone.
• If you rushed out of the house because you were running late, you make sure that you turned off the lights or closed your garage door.
• You can even set up your house so that your morning routine gets started and nudges you along.

For example, you might set it up so that your lights turn on, your house warms up, and your coffee begins brewing, ultimately making it that much easier to get out of bed and grab that cup of coffee that’s waiting for you to start your morning.

Many of my clients use Alexa to set up reminders that go off throughout the day to remind them of all the different things they want to tend to on a regular basis. Taking their meds, flipping laundry, picking up the kids from school, putting dinner in the oven, taking dinner out of the oven, etc.

By using technology in these innovative ways, you help offload the demand on your executive functions to technology so that you can focus on other things that matter most.

If you have specific workflows with Alexa or Siri or other applications out there that you can’t live without, I would LOVE to hear about them.

In fact, I think it could be really fun to spotlight some of these time-savers on the podcast. Perhaps I could share a new one every episode in the spotlight a listener of the week. I love hearing about how creative each of you are in finding ways to support your brain, and I think it’d be really fun to share that with the community as well.

So if you have any strategies or tips or things that make navigating ADHD or working with your brain a little bit easier each day, send them my way. You can pop over to my Instagram, or you can send me an e-mail, I’m paula@imbusybeingawesome. I’d love to start spotlighting listeners of the week and sharing your tips with everyone.

ADHD Time Management Strategies: Recap

So with that, let’s do a quick recap of these three categories or areas to explore when it comes to managing your time.

First, make space for pre-planning.

Allow yourself to break down the steps of the project, estimate time for each step, and evaluate what you find. Don’t skip that last step, as it informs so much in your next iteration of planning. It’s going to help you become an even more effective planner.

Second, start paying attention to your energy levels.

• When are you most focused?
• When do you feel like you’re dragging a bit?
• When do you feel most creative?
• When are you most active? Do you align more with the morning lark or the night owl, or are you somewhere in between?

As a side note, if you’d like to learn more about chronotypes and working according to your energy rhythms, let me know. If there’s enough interest, we can dive deep into that.

finally, get creative about how you can use technology to support your brain.

Whether you use timers, reminders, and calendars, or you use programs like talk-to-text that allow you to get your ideas out of your head and onto paper in a way that works well for verbal processors, or whether you start playing around with workflows and digital assistants to take care of some administrative work, all of these different approaches can help you start using your time and energy more effectively.

This enables you to do the things you want to do with the time that you have.

Again, if you have any other ADHD time management strategies, tips, apps, or hacks that make it easier to work with your brain, Please reach out. Send me a DM on my Instagram, and then you can listen for a special shoutout on a future episode.