Personal Retreat Guide for ADHD: Reflecting and Planning in Quarters

How often do you find yourself keeping busy, working on all the things, going non-stop, yet you have this feeling of unease or even disappointment at the end of the day because you have no idea what all this busyness added up to. Like, you’re moving and not sure where.

If you have an ADHD brain like mine, you probably know that feeling well. We can get so deep into the day-to-day of doing things that we completely forget to zoom out and ask whether what we’re doing actually moves the needle. Are these actions bringing us toward our bigger-picture priorities and goals? It’s hard to know because we struggle to see the forest for the trees.

That’s what this personal retreat guide for ADHD is all about. I’ve been doing a quarterly personal retreat for over a year and a half now, and it has shifted how I show up in my work and my life. Here I’m sharing exactly how I do it (including the brain drama that almost derailed the whole thing), so you can create a version that works for you, too.

Listen to the episode above or stream it on your favorite podcasting app. Prefer to read? No problem. Keep scrolling for a summary of key takeaways.

In Episode 360 we’re exploring:

• What a personal quarterly retreat actually is (and what it doesn’t have to be)
• How to structure your retreat, including the exact reflection questions and planning process
• The brain drama that showed up in my first four retreats and the simple fix that changed everything
• What five retreats over a year and a half have taught me about ADHD, big-picture planning, and defining enough

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What Is a Personal Retreat, and Why Does It Help ADHD Brains?

A quarterly retreat is essentially protected time for a look back and a look forward. I look back in reflection on the past three months and look ahead with planning for the next three months. It’s a chance to step back and get that 30,000-foot view of your life. That old idea of stepping back so you can see the forest and not just the individual trees.

I was first inspired to try this when I was thinking about my business at the end of 2024. As a solopreneur, it’s incredibly easy to focus solely on the day-to-day of working in your business: scheduling emails, creating social media posts, writing newsletters, editing the podcast, coaching clients, sending out session notes. All the things. And it’s especially easy for me to stay in this space because, aside from things like scheduling out emails, I love what I do. I look forward to the work each day.

At the same time, as the CEO of my own business, I also need space to step back from working in the business and work on the business. Thinking about the big picture, mapping out launches, considering whether I want to introduce new offers.

And what I didn’t fully anticipate when I started: the quarterly retreat does the exact same thing for my personal life, too. Honestly, that part has been equally impactful.

The idea came to me from a podcast called Mac Power Users, which tells you a lot about how I like to spend my free time. One of the hosts, David Sparks, talked about this practice, and I was immediately intrigued.

My first retreat coincided with my 40th birthday at the end of Q1 2025. I invited my friend Jenn, got a beautiful Airbnb for a long weekend, and went all out. Since then, I have not been that extravagant, because my first retreat paired with my 40th, it felt fitting. But that first one gave me a lot of insight into what’s helpful, what’s unnecessary, and, very importantly, how my brain loves to tell me I did it wrong. More on that in a bit.

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Making This Work for Your Life

Before I share my specific process, I want to pause here, because I’m aware that what I just described is a real privilege. I don’t have kids. I can take a couple of days and get a hotel room and mostly just bring my dog. I know that’s not everyone’s reality, and I want to say that directly.

There are so many different ways we can create a retreat experience.

If you can swing getting out of your familiar space (even just for a few hours), that’s powerful. Especially for those of us who work from home, because it is far too easy to slip into “let me just quick” mode, and then suddenly you’ve worked all day instead of doing the reflection you actually wanted to do.

You could take a personal day while your kids are at school or camp, go to the library in the morning for your reflection, grab lunch at your favorite sandwich spot, and spend the afternoon looking ahead with planning.

Maybe a full day feels like too much right now. Maybe a morning is the right scope. If you have a partner, you could tag-team it: you step away for the morning, they take the kids, you go to the coffee shop or the library or the community center. Then you swap, and they get the afternoon.

I’m pointing this out before we get to my specific approach because for many of us ADHD brains, all-or-nothing thinking tends to show up fast with something like this. The brain offers some version of, “Well, it must be nice. There’s no way I could take two days. I have too many people depending on me, too many things to handle.”

I understand that. I also want to offer this: if it’s possible in this season to have a morning, or an afternoon, or maybe even a full day where you could get to the library or your favorite coffee shop, that is worth doing. You can define what this is and what “done” looks like for your version. That’s actually one of the most important parts of the whole thing.

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How to Structure Your ADHD Quarterly Retreat

Okay, let’s get into the actual process. I’m going to share the three parts of my retreat and the exact questions I explore. I’m going into this level of detail because this is where a lot of us get stuck. We hear “quarterly retreat” and think it has to be this massive, elaborate undertaking. It really doesn’t.

Part 1: Reflection on the Last 90 Days

I break the reflection into three buckets: relationships, work, and personal life.

For each one, I move through the same set of ADHD reflection questions:

• What went well?
• What was challenging?
• What did I learn?
• What do I want to start doing?
• What do I want to stop doing?
• What do I want to keep doing?
• Is this role or approach or task still working for me?

That last question is one I’ve come to appreciate more with each retreat. Because sometimes the honest answer is no, and it’s useful to know that.

So I ask that list of questions for each of my three buckets: my close relationships, my work, and my personal growth and wellness.

Part 2: Looking Forward and Choosing Priorities for the Next 90 Days

This starts with a brain dump. I often write at the top of the page: what’s on my mind… and then I write down everything that’s pulling at my attention. And I mean everything: work, personal, the thing I’ve been meaning to do for six months, all of it.

Then from there, I narrow it down to two or three real priorities, both work and personal. And for each one, I define what “done” looks like. And yes, this takes practice, time, and a whole lot of decision-making. If I have a giant list of things I want to do and I need to narrow it down to two or three, that’s a lot. Which is exactly why I like to give myself a lot of time to do it.

Part 3: Unstructured and Creative Time

Unstructured and creative time is intentionally built into the retreat.

It’s so important to weave in non-deep-focus time, too. This might look like reading, crocheting, going for a walk, working on a puzzle, having lunch. Or it might involve going down a rabbit hole I’ve been excited about in my business, like watching videos for a course I’m taking, implementing some new automations, or mapping out new systems. I know that sounds a little strange to some people, but those things are fun for me, and I rarely have the spaciousness to dig into them in my regular workdays.

The rest and creative time is built into the retreat on purpose, and it counts as part of the real work.

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The Brain Drama and What Finally Fixed It

Okay. Now let’s talk about some of the takeaways from having done this for over a year.

Across my first four retreats, there was a recurring theme I absolutely must mention, because it’s possible it will show up for you, too.

I’d be in the retreat. I’d be doing the things. And then the retreat would end, and my brain would decide I did it wrong.

I wasted my time. I should have gotten more done. I didn’t have enough takeaways. I didn’t accomplish what I set out to accomplish.

Now, this is a pretty familiar pattern for my brain in general. In my day-to-day, I’ve gotten better at catching it. I track my time, so I can usually look at the actual record and gently correct the story my brain is offering. “Here’s what we actually did today. You’re busy being awesome.”

But with the retreats, I didn’t have the practice. I hadn’t built in the same kind of evidence, and so in those first few retreats, I felt really discouraged. I kept thinking, I’m not doing this right. I’m messing this up and not getting enough out of the time. And I believed my brain when it offered all these thoughts.

In fact, during my very first retreat, I was sharing all of this with my friend Jenn, telling her that I’m not doing it right and I feel like I should be making more of the retreat time. And she looked at me, confused, and said:

“How could you possibly do your own personal retreat wrong? You made it up, right?”

As a side note, I just love having those people in your life. The outside observer who helps you see when your brain is being just completely over-the-top critical. Truly, thank goodness for them. Because she was right. Of course I wasn’t messing it up. My brain was just looking for things to critique because I was doing something new. When I actually paused to see what I’d uncovered in reflection and the decisions I made going forward, I could immediately see the benefits.

So I kept doing the retreats, but after each one I’d see a similar pattern. Once I got home and settled back in and looked at my notes, I’d be able to see all the takeaways and plans and I’d feel really good about it. But that transition moment, wrapping up the retreat and heading back home, tended to be uncomfortable. My brain had a lot of opinions.

I was talking about this with my coach, Kelly, at the end of 2025, and I realized I wanted to put in some supports to navigate this. So that’s what I did. And the scaffolding I put in to help provide that support was the missing link for me. For anyone who has worked with me, you’ll likely notice that it puts into practice exactly what I teach in my coaching containers.

The reason this matters so much is due to my working memory. My brain would forget what I’d done and why I’d done it, and that forgetting led directly to my brain saying, “you wasted your time.” Because I literally couldn’t remember how I spent it.

By writing down specifically what I did, what I learned, and why I’m glad I did it, I give my brain something to return to. When it starts asking, “What did you even do this morning?”, I can look back and see: I reflected on these things. Here’s a key takeaway. I’m glad I understand this now.

It makes the whole experience so much stickier. And for my Q1 2026 retreat, it made a real difference. I walked away actually feeling good about the experience as a whole, not just a few days later once I’d had time to settle in. The effect was immediate.

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Five Retreats In: What I’ve Learned About ADHD and Big-Picture Planning

After five retreats over the past year and a half, some themes have become really clear. Things I might not have noticed week-to-week, but that are pretty unmistakable when I look across multiple quarters. Here are three of those.

1. Defining “Enough” Changed Everything

This is true at the retreat level and at the quarter-planning level. In the early retreats, I was approaching it from the angle of “how do I do more and do it better?” Over time, that question has shifted to “how do I define enough, get to that point, and trust that it’s enough without pushing more?” That’s a completely different question. And sitting with it has been one of the most important parts of the whole practice.

2. Rest and Play Belong Inside the Retreat

This took a few rounds to really learn. When I didn’t schedule downtime, the retreat started to feel like another work marathon. Once I built in the play and rest by design, something shifted. Some of my clearest thinking happened after I’d stepped away and let my brain wander for a while. Which isn’t surprising when you actually pause and think about it. Brains work better when they’ve had downtime. But it became undeniable when I could see the impact so clearly.

3. The Retreat Creates a Living Record of Your Growth

This one surprised me the most. Because each retreat builds on the last one, you end up with this incredible record of where you’ve been. You can see yourself growing. You can see decisions you made that paid off. You can see patterns you’ve finally broken. It’s the kind of perspective you just can’t get in the day-to-day. And I find it incredibly meaningful to be able to look back across five quarters and see the arc of it.

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What Has Actually Changed Because of These Retreats

The biggest changes have been in clarity and follow-through. Before I started doing this, I had a lot of vague feelings. “I’m overworking.” “I want more balance.” “I don’t know how to delegate.” “I’m not doing enough.” The retreat turned those vague thoughts into something more concrete, helping me identify the specific friction points and make decisions to help smooth them out over the coming quarter. Bringing on a VA. Defining office hours. Eliminating things in the business I didn’t enjoy or that weren’t serving me anymore, like spending time on Instagram. I just kept forgetting that platform exists, and I finally let it be okay. Those were all retreat decisions.

The retreats have also given me permission to recognize when I’ve done enough. To look back at the past quarter and say, “What I’m doing is actually working. What if I don’t have to do more? Instead, how do I protect and sustain this experience that I truly love?”

And maybe the most meaningful part: the retreat keeps bringing me back to what actually matters. Each quarter, when I step back and reflect, I come back to the same truth, but at a slightly deeper level or different angle. What matters most to me is that I want to be present and engaged with the people I love. I want to make a real contribution and do good work that supports ADHD brains in living the full life they want. And I want enough spaciousness in my life so I can do the same.

The retreat is where I remember that. And then I get to design the next 90 days to ensure it keeps happening, by deciding what I want to stop doing, what I want to start doing, and what I want to keep doing.

If you want a deeper look at planning approaches that work well for ADHD brains, the Four Quarters Method is a great complement to the retreat process.

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Your Invitation to Try It

A retreat can be a personal day off of work spent at the library when your kids are at soccer camp. It could be a Sunday morning at a coffee shop before anyone else is up. Or it could be a full weekend away at a nearby hotel on travel points.

Wherever you are, whatever season you’re in, there is some version of this available to you.

And if it sounds like something you want to try, here’s where I invite you to start:

• Define what you want out of the process. What do you want to walk away knowing? What does “done” look like for you?
• Use some version of the questions I shared, or make up your own. Give yourself that time for reflection.
• When your timer goes off, give yourself permission to stop. What you did was enough. Write down a few sentences about why you’re glad you did it.

That’s the retreat. And it might just be one of the most impactful things you do this quarter.

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