Hey everyone, its Erica here. So in today's chat about time management, I'm going to talk about how to plan an ADHD friendly day in which you avoid that stressful lateness cascade that often happens at the end of the day. I was thinking of this recently because I got a confirmation note for doctor appointment. And it said, "Dr. Shelley starts her appointments on time." And it kind of made me laugh, because, it made me reminded that it's an unusual thing for doctors to actually start their appointments on time. And I have even a couple of doctors where I absolutely know that if I go in the afternoon, it's going to be 30 minutes past when I'm supposed to start the appointment. And I find that a similar thing can be true for a lot of ADHDers. And it's so unfortunate because often it comes from a place of wanting to do so many things, especially things for other people and having that time blindness and optimism. And it's also a shame because so often, you know, this end of day stressful lateness cascade ends up really getting in the way of the fun stuff of the stuff that makes life wonderful. You know, you find that you're meeting your friends for drink after work, and you're consistently not just running late, but you get there flustered and stressed out and you know that after you leave, you're going to have to sit back at your desk and do a couple hours of catch up in order to get everything done that night. So the good news is that setting up some new habits can make a very positive difference in this. So I'm going to share just a few of them here and tell you a couple stories about my clients. One of the most important things I find that I do as a coach is helping people with ADHD, get comfortable doing less. And that's a real theme of these habits and strategies. So I'll be chatting about ideas like: setting no more than three priorities for your day, adding in transition time and unstructured time into your daily schedule, and setting up some "I'm running late" contingency plans in advance.Starting off with the theme of setting no more than three priorities for your day. And then finding a way to set up your daily schedule so that you keep those things really visible to you. Three foundational things to help you do this are: to have a calendar that you use in your life, something that you can consistently use, having a to do list where you add tasks as they come up and having a list of your priorities in life right now. With those things in place, the habits that have made a difference for so many of my clients are setting aside time each week, and setting aside time each night to look ahead at the calendar, review it and adjust things so that you can line up your day in a way where you're going to be able to put time towards what matters most. Almost everyone I know, thinks they can get more done in a day than is humanly possible or at least humanly possible for them. So a habit that can be helpful is to have this discipline of writing down each night, the three, and no more than three, most important things that are your priorities for the following day. So those three things might include a couple of tasks that are essential, but it also could include something from your life priorities list, you know, say your your relationship is really a priority for you right now. So it might be that a priority for the day is to end the day with the mental bandwidth to be able to have a conversation where you're really present with your wife, and you're able to be a good listener, as she debriefs her day. It takes some discipline to limit it to three. So one of the tips that I recommend is to have a post it where you use a sharpie pen, and you write your three on that because you actually can rarely fit any more than three on a small post it with a sharpie pen.And then the next thing is to find a way to keep those three things really visually present for you throughout the day. So that you're not having to check anything so that you're always reminded, that could look like having that post it stuck on your computer monitor if you're at your desk for most of the day. But it can also look like taking a picture of the post it and putting it as your lock screen on your phone or sticking that post it to the front cover of your planning book or maybe doing all three of these things. Having those three things written out can help ADHDers get into reality about how to plan out a day so that it's reasonable and you can make sure you get those things done. And if you have it with you all day long, it can really help you to curb the impulsivity. You know, one of the great tips I learned is proximity is not priority. The way it comes up for me is you know, I'll be driving past the used record store and I have an important presentation the next day but suddenly I'll think "oh my gosh, I've been wanting to drop in and get some used records for my father in law because he just got a record player and I'm right here". Right here doesn't mean that it's the most important thing to do. But sometimes for me having those priorities written down is the kind of thing that helps me to decide, I'm not going to stop at that record store.Once you know what's most important, you can structure your day around it. And so some things that that might look like are: cancelling some of them or changing a lunch that would end up taking an hour and a half into a 15 minute coffee, right in your office. And then using the hour that you saved, to book an appointment with yourself to be at your desk doing one of those really important tasks. I have a client who's an executive who found that almost every night he was having to do a workshop from 7pm to 10pm. So that he could get done all of the stuff that came up during the day that he had to do, and that he didn't have time for in his meeting to meeting life. And a huge transition for him was to realise that even though he wanted to have a calendar that was open to his team, where people who reported to him could book time with him throughout the day, the more important thing was to set times where the appointment was with himself, so that if he had something like needing to adjust payroll that would go out the next day, he had time to do it, and didn't have to do it at eight o'clock every night. I see this with so many of my clients.Another important habit to creating reasonable days is to add in those invisible transition times. So worst case scenario, amount of time, it might take you to get across town, or doing this time experiments to figure out how long it actually takes you to walk to lunch and walk back and making those invisible transitions visible so that you block them onto your calendar and you don't find that having forgotten that that takes time means that you're suddenly behind schedule for the rest of the day. And related to this is the idea of making sure there's white space in your day. Great graphic designers know that a beautifully designed page has whitespace in it, so that when you look at it, you can breathe and when you look at it, you can see what's most important. And I think you can apply a similar thing to your day. This is especially true if your day to day life, the reality of it, means that you need to hold a lot of open time for the things that come up during the day. I have a client who's a school principal, and more than half her day is dealing with the discipline issues and the parent issues that come up during the day. So for her shifting to a planning mode in which she kept all that white space kept her from having to do those super late night weekend work sessions in order to catch up. And for ADHDers, it's especially important to leave time for creativity leave time for daydreaming, leave time for it taking you a little longer to transition and set shift between one activity and another. It's all part of setting yourself up to have just a beautiful reasonable day.And the last tip is to recognise those moments in a day or in a week when you're often late, and set up a contingency plan, a backup plan that is either so easy to activate or doesn't even have to get activated. For example, that might look like your business partner knowing that if you're not there at the beginning of a client meeting, to just start without you to just give a diplomatic reason why you're going to be arriving late to the meeting and go ahead and start, or set up a system with a couple of other parents in your kids class that, if any of you aren't there for pickup, you'll grab each other's kids and just text that you've got them. So in closing, I hope you might get some inspiration from some of these little life hacks for ways that you can shift your own days so that they're just a little bit less stressful and you don't let lateness and the lateness cascade get in the way of you doing what you really, really want to do. Till next time.