Time Blocking for ADHD: Why Tiles Work Better Than Apps

Most of us with ADHD have likely tried blocking at some point. We’ve drawn assigned tasks to the neat little rectangles in our planners, color-coded our calendars, set our intentions to respond to email from 9-10 on Thursday, and then watched the whole thing fall apart by 9:17.

For a lot of ADHD brains, time blocking makes sense intellectually. We can understand why it works on paper, but the felt sense just isn’t there. Time feels slippery and abstract, and staring at a calendar full of labeled boxes rarely conveys what the day actually holds.

That’s the gap I’ve been exploring with a system called Bravestorming: a tile-based, magnetic, physical planning system that takes everything we know about planning with ADHD and makes it something you can actually hold in your hands. In this post, I’m sharing my honest three-week review, sharing what it is, how I’ve been using it, what’s working, and who I think it’s a real fit for.

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZSXcVJcdnQ

In Episode 359, we’re exploring:

• What Bravestorming is and how their tile-based planning system works
• The full product line and what each piece is designed to do
• How I’ve been using it three weeks in (including how I planned this very episode on it)
• Why physical, movable time blocks can shift how ADHD brains relate to time
• Who this is and isn’t a good fit for

What Is Bravestorming?

Bravestorming is a tile-based planning system built around little rectangular and square magnet tiles that double as tiny whiteboards. You write your tasks on the tiles and move them across a magnetic planning board. The boards come with various planning templates — time-blocking spreads, priority grids, monthly overviews, and the tiles slide right across them.

Something took longer than expected? Slide the tile. Got done early? Slide the tile. It’s that simple to adjust.

I learned about Bravestorming through someone in my group program who posted about it in our community Slack a few weeks ago.

I went down the rabbit hole, because of course I did, **and then reached out to the company directly. They sent me their materials, I’ve been testing them out, and what you’re getting today is my honest, initial take. What I’m trying, what’s working, what I like, and if there’s anything I don’t love.

The Bravestorming Product Line

There are quite a few options in the lineup, and they each serve a different purpose. Here’s a quick rundown.

P.S. The links below are affiliate links. Enter the code AWESOME20 at checkout and get 20% off your entire first order.

• The Thinker Board is an easel-style board with a kickstand on the back, so it stands up like a laptop screen tilted open in front of you. It’s designed for brainstorming, idea mapping, and thinking through projects rather than day-to-day scheduling. More on how I’ve been using this one in a minute.
• The MoveNote is the large A4 size — roughly 12 by 9 inches, slightly bigger — and it’s great for planning out your week. It folds up and can hold a full-size 8.5 by 11 sheet of paper, so it also functions as a kind of folder for important documents you want to keep close.
• The MoverBook is the smaller version — about nine and three quarters inches high by seven and three quarters wide. Same job as the MoveNote, just in a more compact format.
• The MoverPad has a day-planning layout on one side and a two-by-two priority grid on the flip side. If you have a big list of things to do and want to work through what’s actually most important — whether you use urgent/important, high-impact/low-effort, or whatever four-quadrant framework is your go-to — this is a really useful tool for that.
• The Tri-fold is a four-months-at-a-glance overview. I love this one for big-picture thinking and looking ahead.

One more thing worth knowing: you can swap out any of the provided templates with your own. I actually use my own weekly planning template in the MoverBook. I had to do a little adjusting in Canva to get the sizing right, but once I figured it out, it slipped right in and the tiles work perfectly with it. So if you already have a planning template you love, you don’t have to give it up to use this system.

Three Weeks In: How I’m Actually Using It

Let me start with the Thinker Board, because I used it in a pretty meta way: I literally planned out this podcast episode on it. I did a mind map of everything I wanted to cover, moved the tiles around to organize my thoughts, and that’s essentially what you’re seeing play out right now. If you want proof that it works for thinking through ideas — here we are.

Beyond that, I’ve been going back and forth between the MoveNote and the MoverBook for my weekly planning. I set both of them in the easel so they’re standing upright, and I can see exactly what’s coming up throughout the week. I literally have one sitting right here on my desk right now — I can just look over and see that yes, I’m prepping and recording a podcast, right on track for Monday.

For the Tri-fold, I’ve filled in my top priorities for May, June, and July. I tend to have two business-related objectives and one personal one per month — sometimes the reverse. Since I do quarterly planning, I fill in what I know and leave the rest for later. August right now has exactly one thing: family vacation up north. I’ll plan the business side when I do my Q2 planning retreat at the beginning of June.

For the MoverPad, I’ve found it most useful on Mondays and Tuesdays when I’m focused on content creation, and on weekends when I have more open space and more options for how to structure my day. Wednesdays and Thursdays are client-heavy — most of my working hours are coaching calls — so I don’t really need the daily layout on those days.

My overall workflow: I open Todoist, look at what’s coming up for the week, and write my tasks on the tiles. I start with appointments first — coaching calls, anything personal, whatever’s already locked in — then fill in tasks and projects around those.

Why Physical Time Blocking Works Differently for ADHD Brains

This is the part I want to dig into, because there’s something happening here that I think is useful regardless of whether you ever use this specific system.

The thing I love and kind of love to hate about the tile system is that it keeps me honest. The small tiles represent one hour. The medium ones are two hours. The slightly larger ones are three hours. The longest ones are around four to five hours depending on your template. And I cannot just squish more onto the board and slip into fantasy-land thinking I’m somehow going to get everything done. Each tile is a fixed unit of time. Once your tiles are full, they’re full.

What’s happened over the past couple of weeks is that I’ve started thinking in tiles. I’ll look at my week and my brain starts to calculate: okay, that’s about a three-tile task, this one is one tile, this one is two. That shift has genuinely changed how I relate to time.

Time blindness is real. Time feels slippery and abstract for so many of us. And even when we time block on paper or in a digital calendar, it can still just feel like words on a screen, numbers in boxes. It doesn’t always land the way we need it to.

When you can actually hold a tile — when you can physically pick up “two hours” and place it on the board and watch it take up that space — something shifts. Your brain starts to build a felt sense of what different amounts of time actually look like. And that is the real takeaway here: finding a way to make time visible and tangible, in whatever format works for you.

Maybe for you that’s these tile magnets. Maybe it’s sticky notes on a whiteboard, where a small sticky is one hour and a larger one is two. Maybe it’s color-coding your digital calendar blocks by length, so a one-hour block is one color and a three-hour block is another, and over time your brain starts to recognize those at a glance. The specific tool matters a lot less than the principle: give different lengths of time a consistent, recognizable visual form, and your brain will start to internalize it.

The other thing I love is the flexibility to slide things around. If I don’t get to my podcast edit before a coaching call, I can just move the tile to after I get back from the vet or whatever. I can see where my lunch is. I can see that I’ve intentionally left Friday open — I don’t plan Fridays, because whatever I inevitably under-plan has somewhere to go. Having those visual gaps is really useful, and being able to pick things up and move them without erasing or retyping anything makes a real difference.

A quick note on the pens: I was sent two sizes, a one millimeter and a fine point 0.5 millimeter. I reach for the 0.5 almost every time. It writes easily even on the small one-hour tiles. The larger pen works better on the bigger tiles or if I’m writing a reminder on one of the post-it-size ones.

Who This Is (and Isn’t) a Good Fit For

Before I get into who I think this is a great fit for, I want to say something first.

A lot of us with ADHD who’ve struggled with planning have this tendency to keep looking for the next system. The next app, the next planner, the next approach that is finally going to fix our procrastination or our overcommitting or our difficulty just getting things done. I say this as someone who has her own planner graveyard — full of systems I’ve purchased, tried, spent real time and energy switching over to, and ultimately moved on from. The switching cost alone is significant.

A planning system is a tool. Certain tools work better for certain brains. This system is not going to make your brain stop struggling with time blindness, or suddenly stop overcommitting or make you feel neurotypical. I know that sounds obvious when I say it out loud, but a lot of us myself included at times, carry this quiet hope that the right system will fix all of that. It won’t. And that’s okay.

What I do think is that for people who have historically struggled with traditional planners because they feel too rigid or too abstract, because they don’t account for the reality that your day shifts, or because staring at a page full of time slots just doesn’t click in your brain, this visual, movable tile system can be a really great option to explore.

So here’s who I think this is genuinely a good fit for:

• Visual planners who want to see the big picture and how everything fits together.
• People who feel time-blind and want a more tangible relationship with their time.
• Non-linear thinkers whose brains want to see the whole week laid out at once.
• People whose schedules shift — whether because their days are flexible, unpredictable, or they just need to be able to adapt without starting over from scratch.
• People who prefer a looser or more moderate level of structure. I’m a tight-structure person — I like knowing what I’m doing each hour — but a lot of people want to know the one or two big things they’re doing in the morning and leave the afternoon more open. This system meets you wherever you are, because you can put in as many or as few tiles as you want.

It also works really well alongside your existing digital task management tools. For me, it’s a complement to Todoist rather than a replacement. I still manage all my tasks there. The tiles are how I translate that list into a visual, physical schedule for the week. The two work really well together.

The one person I’d gently steer away from this is someone who is fully committed to digital planning and has no interest in anything analog. If that’s you, you’ve probably already checked out, and fair enough.

Want to Try Bravestorming?

I’ve been using it for a couple of weeks now, and I’m going to keep going, not because I feel like I have to, but because I think it’s actually helping me. Especially with understanding how long things take, and with seeing time more clearly in these blocks.

If you’re interested in trying it, I have a code for you: AWESOME20 for 20% off your entire first order.

• Bravestorming — the full product lineup
• Thinker Board — easel-style board for brainstorming and mind mapping
• MoveNote — A4 folio for weekly planning (no tiles included)
• MoverBook — compact planning folio with tiles included
• MoverPad — daily planning pad with a priority grid on the flip side, with tiles
• Tri-fold — four-months-at-a-glance planning overview
• Mover Tiles — additional tile set to expand your system

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