Heads up: While I don’t work for any of the companies listed and would never suggest anything I wouldn’t use myself, this article does contain affiliate links.
If you don’t feel like reading all this, you can also watch the YouTube video I made demonstrating all this here.
Obviously, I’ve made no secret of the fact that I have ADHD. In fact, if you’ve been following along, I don’t really make secrets of much. A huge part of this is because I love telling stories, but I also don’t want anyone floating around without information like I did. Which is why I want to share with you how I make things a bit easier on my brain and my conscience. This may work for you, it may not, but it’s worth a shot, right? Right.
Ok. Here goes.
Before I get started, I want to give you a little background. I’ve started becoming obsessed with calendar and project management software, software integrations, and calendar optimization, all in the name of getting the most that I can out of my day.
“Why, Arianna?” You may ask. “What is your problem?”
Besides the obvious you mean? Simple: my energy is finite.
Since having children, I’ve been tired all the time. Like, wake-up-after-9-hours-of-sleep-and-still-need-a-nap-after-two-hours-awake tired. I’ve asked for tests on my blood, my thyroid, and anything else I could think of, and nothing could be found. It just sort of seemed like a switch was flipped after my second child’s birth. What, I don’t know. All I know is, my energy is precious because there ain’t much to use to begin with.
Having no energy and ADHD is hard, because my brain wants to forever be doing things. It always wants to be working on projects, or creating something, or getting shit done, which is kinda difficult when my meds wear off or I’m on my period and I suddenly feel like my blood has turned to maple syrup.
On top of this, I’m kind of a moron and I live like I HAVEN’T had ongoing energy problems for the last five or so years. That is to say, I’m always starting new projects, or setting big goals, or promising myself and others deadlines that’ll kill me. And one day, I just realized that needed to change. So I started obsessively watching video after video about how to make the most of my peak hours. And I think I’ve finally –finally– figured something out.
I will warn you of one last thing: My way isn’t free. I do work to cover the costs. That said, at the end of this article, I’ll try to suggest some free options for you in the event that you want to follow my method, but you don’t want to spend money. Okay? Okay. Let’s do this. Starting with the tools I use:
ClickUp (Project Management Software)
“But Arianna!” You say, kicking your kids away from your breakfast for the ninth time. “I don’t manage projects.”
Yes you do. If you’re a parent, your kids are projects. If you don’t have kids, you’re a project. If you work for someone else, you still have personal projects. Literally everything is a project. And for people with ADHD (and maybe even some people without), any project just seems like a swirling cloud of tasks with the same looming deadline. You need something to help you put all of that into smaller, prioritized tasks, or you’ll lose your mind.
To-do lists and planners are very popular in a lot of ADHD time-management articles, specifically ones wherein you feel as if you’re writing with a pen and paper, and I did have a massive problem with constantly buying them and discarding planners and calendars for the longest time. There’s just something that feels so good about starting a new planner. Like, the whole month is open for you to make it colorful and pretty and filled with your ideas, like “fuck yeah I’m about to manage the shit out of some time.”
But my problems with paper planners and to-do lists are thus:
- Paper planners aren’t ever-present. If you don’t remember to take yours with you, you won’t be able to write down what you need to remember, and if you’re like me you need to be able to write things down, because if it ain’t on your calendar, you’re gonna forget. And
- I, personally, feel more pressure at the beginning of the day when I pre-make to-do lists. Especially since my energy tends to be different from day to day, I don’t react well to writing a list of three things that I may wind up not finishing. I have no idea how long things take, so it all just sounds long. Plus, this brings me back to the whole I-can’t-carry-this-with-me thing. Post-its often wind up just left in my pocket to get ruined by the washing machine.
So, because I have so many projects going anyway, I started looking into software that I could easily use. I needed it to integrate with my phone (iOS iPhone XS), and it needed to sync easily. I also needed to be able to add tasks if I was offline.
Ultimately, I wound up with ClickUp, which I adore with all of my little, shriveled heart.
ClickUp seeks to be the one-stop-shop for project management. It allows you to integrate with Google Drive, Dropbox, and Zoom, as well as with other PM softwares like Asana. It’s incredibly easy to add spaces for each project and lists for each part of the project, and you can break everything down into however small pieces you need. You have the option to add dependencies so that you don’t move forward on something without finishing something important, and probably my favorite part: You can look at your progress in whatever views you like, so that your brain is stimulated however it needs to be that day. For example, if you need to see a calendar view, you can, but if you do better with a Gantt view or a Kanban view, you can do that as well.
I can literally use this program for both business and personal (though I prefer to mainly use it for my projects), and it does an amazing job of both helping a brain like mine keep track of everything I have to do, and giving me tons of pretty colors and different changes to keep things interesting.
ClickUp is still fairly new, so there are a few things that I don’t like (the embedded document view is awkward, and the personal dashboard leaves a bit to be desired), but otherwise I find it easier and more pleasing to use than anything else in its market.
It does have a free plan that you can very easily use for yourself, but I pay $5 a month. You can check them out for yourself here.
Clickup does have a mobile app, but the functionality is really limited. So, in order to make it work better for me on the go, I use:
Google Calendar
I won’t spend too much time on this, because I feel like this app needs no introduction, but I will say that I’ve realized I’m not using it to its full potential. It really is the best calendar app in the world, especially for its $0 price tag. The interface is helpful and intuitive, it’s easy to make events, and it’s just as easy to update it all. You can even, to a limited degree, add things you need to add when not connected to wi-fi. And, best of all, it integrates with sooooo many things. This will be important in a sec.
Motion (Time Management Software)
Motion is very new, and I don’t remember how I found them, but I’m so glad I did.
Motion integrates with your Google Calendar in order to help you not only keep track of all you have to do, but to also help you prioritize and make time for all that you have on your plate.
The way Motion works is super simple, once you figure out how to work with it. Essentially what happens is, as you enter tasks and estimate how much time you need for each, Motion looks at your day and the things you already have planned, and it moves tasks around to give you the time you need to work based on priority, deadline, and how long you estimate it takes. If you start late, it recalculates. If you finish early, it recalculates. If you don’t finish everything, you just tell it to reschedule the things you didn’t finish, and then it does just that. I’ve gotten a lot more done with Motion, because it time blocks FOR me, and it also helps my “I didn’t get shit done” guilt by reminding me that deadlines can be malleable, and that it can just move what I haven’t done to another day. No prob.
If you own a business, Motion also has a built-in meeting scheduler that automatically presents people with the best times to meet with you, and then imports those meetings into your calendar.
Because Motion is so new, though, it does have some functions it needs to add (the ability to add in things that can’t be moved around, for example), but it’s been a game-changer and a real help with stress. It is the most expensive tool I have at $19/month billed annually, but it’s worth every penny in my opinion. I can get you 4 months free with Motion, but right now referrals are by invite only. No problem though; just message me with your email address and I’ll get you in (that’s literally the only thing I’d need it for). If you’d like to look into them yourselves, you can check them out here.
Now, to the main attraction:
How I Combine these Into a Portable, Total ADHD-Friendly Scheduling System.
Remember when I said that Google Calendar integrates with practically everything? Well…this is where that makes all the difference. To make this a bit easier, I’ll be putting this in a little numbered list for you:
- First, I set up. I did this by setting up my ClickUp workspace upfront. . I make spaces for each project, break those down into smaller steps in folders, and then I break those folders into even smaller steps via tasks and subtasks. I make sure everything has tags, set deadlines, and the look I want. This took a little bit of extra time, but it was the worth the couple days that I spent time to sit down and get it situated. Once that was done, I integrated ClickUp with Google Calendar. This is super easy, but one thing no one told me that I’m warning you about: you will want to integrate Clickup so that it sends info to Google Calendar, not the other way around.
- (cont.) When you do this, ensure that each project has it’s own calendar section, because if you suddenly decide that you do not want a specific project on your Google calendar and you delete the project in ClickUp, the tasks stay on Google Calendar. Which means you’re wasting time manually going through and deleting tasks. And that’s a straight pain in the ass.
Once my ClickUp is all set and integrated, I go into Google Calendar, and I set that up. I add inflexible and non-negotiable schedule items and meetings, and I set my days the way I’d like them to be. A YouTuber I watched brought up the brilliant idea of splitting days by theme, so I do that (I have a writing day, a podcast day, a chore day, and so on). This really helps the ol’ brain feel less overwhelmed because I’m only focusing on one theme at a time, instead of trying to track progress on all of them.
Like so.
Once Google Calendar was setup, I integrated it with Motion. This is super simple to do because that’s literally all Motion is for. Just a warning that if you choose to integrate with any family members’ calendars, it can mess with what Motion reads as your personal availability. So I have my husband’s work calendar available in Google Cal, but not in Motion. - Next, now that everything is set up, I simply run my day by opening my Google Calendar first to see what my day looks like. I usually do this just to see what my focus for the day is, and to ensure I don’t have any meetings or other engagements.
- Then, I head on over to Motion, and I add any other tasks that I feel I might need for the day, and I let it move my tasks and whatnot around to show me what my time blocking will look like. I return to Motion throughout the day to check things off, to indicate start and end times, and to watch the little boxes move around because I am a simple creature who is easily amused. I only return to ClickUp to add project steps that I think of, or to update project statuses as I finish things.
- Finally, At the end of every day, whatever I haven’t finished gets rescheduled in Motion to the next day, where I’ll check on it when I start over again the next day.
This becomes super helpful to me because it not only helps me time block more efficiently, but it also forces me to take into account how much time something may take. It forces me to prioritize, to keep deadlines in mind, and it somewhat gameifies the idea of getting shit done. It keeps things interesting and feeds into the whole novelty thing that ADHD brains are legit obsessed with by allowing me to add colors and focus on different things each day. And….it simplifies it by putting it all in one central place for when I want a quick look. I do believe some legend years ago would call that “winning.”
If you want to try this, but you can’t spend the money:
Aiight so here’s what you do:
You can set up a similar system to mine by still using Clickup’s free plan and Google Calendar. You also can use Asana or Monday.com and get super similar results. The only thing that I can’t find anything similar to is Motion, at least not with the same capabilites. You can get close, though, with:
- Clockwise – This app is totally free and performs the same “calendar assistant” functions that Motion does, so it will get the job done in regards to helping you keep your calendar well-timed. The only caveat I have is that Clockwise doesn’t work with personal Google accounts. You have to sign up with a GSuite or other professional account. If you have one of those, though, and the calendar for that account is your main Google calendar, you’re golden.
Over all, daily schedules are going to work differently for different people, so if mine doesn’t work for you, don’t be discouraged; mine was made of little pieces of others’ schedules, and I think it’s worth it to sew your own working processes together from all the different little things you’ve found that work for you. In the meantime, if you take nothing else from this whole article, take this: your day is “successful” if you get one thing done. It’s “successful” if you decide to take a day off for yourself. The success is in pushing past your own blocks, in allowing yourself to adjust, and in working with what you can. You don’t have to dominate your to-do list to be successful.
If you try any of these, let me know what you think! I’m interested in how much this helps my fellow ADHD-ers.
‘Til next time!
Oh, and if you want to check out more videos by any of the geniuses who I’ve recently been learning from, you can check them out below:
Anyusha (ANY of her ClickUp/Google Calendar videos are gold, but this one is my favorite): https://youtu.be/dMAFJRmI4Oo
Natalie Barbu: https://youtu.be/mxnukqJyJEY
Jules Acree: https://youtu.be/YGf_ACW3S-I
Ready to work together to get something going that works for you specifically? Get on my calendar for some 1:1 coaching, and let’s get you satisfied with your days.
