Maya makes a few key points about ADHD project planning in her ADHD Success Club blog this week. In fact, I hollered ‘YES!” a couple of times as I read Maya’s report. Project planning with ADHD doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It goes hand in hand with completing projects. Especially stopping before the last step, making things too complicated, and falling for distractions. Hurrah for Maya!  – dr

When given a novel idea or task, I love to plan, yet I find myself bored and distracted with routine tasks. Take laundry, for instance. I often start a load that would never make it to the dryer without my husband’s help. Clearly, doing laundry has a clear beginning, middle, and end that takes laundry from the hamper back to the closet and drawers. How often, though, do my clothes remain hanging in the laundry closet or folded in a baskets in the children’s room?

While I have the capacity to plan and have learned how to plan, consistently executing a plan to completion is a struggle for me. This week Dana explained how so often people with ADHD begin projects, yet stop before they are done.

This week’s module focus is on practical ADHD project planning, a module whose mere title pushes my  ADHD brain into panic mode:

• PRACTICAL— what’s that even mean? As a visionary, being practical is not natural to me. For most of my life, I have counted on the strengths of others to keep me practical and grounded when completing tasks.  

• PROJECT— what begins with shiny and new excitement often leads to eventual abandonment. The beginning is exciting. The middle is boring, and I often don’t get to the end.

• PLANNING— My plans often look great on paper, but I so often don’t follow up and achieve what I set out to achieve.

This year, for the first time in many years, I plan my teaching lessons on my own because I am the only one at my middle school teaching 9th grade English. Being on my own has been freeing for me because I have autonomy, I can see the big picture, and I don’t have to fit myself into someone else’s mold. That being said, what is freeing for me can create challenges because I have to cross my own t’s and dot my own i’s.

Now I alone  am responsible for monthly, weekly, and daily planning. Working on my own requires me to keep myself in check, keep myself organized, recognize the bright and shiny distractions, and make sure I create a clear trajectory for learning.

After listening to this ADHD Success Club module, I know exactly where I need to focus my energy, and that is on streamlining my planning process to create a clear beginning, middle, and end to what I do to prepare for each week.

On Tuesday’s call, Dana explained how we like the fancy things: colors and bells and whistles and that it’s so easy to wander off into the land of magical thinking. Immediately I began to think of the bells and whistles that get in my way of task completion when I plan–obsessively researching to find the best way to do something, excitement with a new pedagogy, interest in deepening content, and seeking ways to creatively engage and use technology. While the bells and whistles and bright and shiny can make instruction better, they can also get in the way of the practical planning that needs to be done.

On Thursday’s call, I listened to Dana walk a Success Club member through the process of ADHD project planning. As he explained his obsession with irrelevant details, his difficulty making decisions, and his problem with adding more but doing nothing, I could hear my own struggles. While he was breaking things down to minutia, he was losing sight of the practical process. This, too, is what gets in my way of practical project planning. To make project planning practical, Dana encouraged him to look at his goals for the project, what the project would look like when done, and the steps necessary to complete the project.

My goal with lesson planning is to create a  “rinse and repeat” structure/checklist that I can follow that will help me be more streamlined and efficient in a way that guides me towards completion.

What I’m going to do now is:

1. Plan the beginning, middle, and end with each step broken down into 3 to 4 smaller steps.

2. Then, I’m going to put these tasks on my task list (the one I haven’t been keeping up with consistently). I’m going to be sure I have both a print and digital version of this as I begin this process.

3. Finally, I’m going to run through my new process as I plan later today to see if this process gives me more clarity and streamlines my process in a way that I can finally “rinse and repeat” in order to save time. I’m going to also note what distracts me on the way in a way that I can figure out if I need to modify the path or make a list of things to consider or do after planning and before/during teaching.

When I work with other teachers and help plan curriculum for my district, I struggle with the process because I have a difficult time following others’ thinking and sometimes find tasks too big and/or too ambiguous. Breaking things down into smaller steps is essential in ADHD project planning. Making things better for my future self will provide me a clear path for my journey to living successfully with ADHD.

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