Pete Wright:
Hello, everybody, and welcome to Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast on TruStory FM. I’m Pete Wright, and I’m here with Nikki Kinzer.

Nikki Kinzer:
Hello, everyone. Hello, Pete Wright.

Pete Wright:
Okay, Nikki, we’re continuing the conversation that we started last week, and now it’s — oh my god — schedules.

Nikki Kinzer:
Yes.

Pete Wright:
There’s so much drama in schedules. We need like a Real Housewives about scheduling.

Nikki Kinzer:
So much drama. Well, they just go out to lunch all the time, so their schedules are easy.

Pete Wright:
Yeah, that’s true. Can you tell I’ve never watched Real Housewives?

Nikki Kinzer:
And you can tell that I have.

Pete Wright:
Yeah, right.

We are talking about schedules. Before we get into today’s show, we just need to talk to you about Patreon real quick. Just real quick. Patreon.com/theadhdpodcast — that’s where you can go if you’re a regular listener and you want more. Members get early, ad-free access to every episode, access to members-only channels in our Discord server, and you get to jump into the livestream and watch the recording of the show as it happens. Sometimes both Nikki and I are moving. Sometimes my video is completely frozen for reasons that we do not understand, but we’re okay with it. As long as you can hear it, it’s okay. You can also ask us questions in that livestream. You can ask us and our guests — which is fantastic — while we’re recording. The public doesn’t get that.

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Nikki, tell me about my schedule.

Nikki Kinzer:
It can bend without breaking.

Pete Wright:
Oh, that’s good.

Nikki Kinzer:
I know. I love that title.

Pete Wright:
That’s good. Yeah, that’s pretty good.

Nikki Kinzer:
I really do. I think it’s a good one.

All right. Before we dive in, I want to define three terms that get used a lot in the planning world. I use them all the time and sometimes I use them interchangeably, but I want to make sure that we’re all on the same page. Because even though I use them sort of in the same way, they still are a little bit different. And it’s all about scheduling.

So, intentional planning. We’ve talked about that a lot. Intentional planning — that is planning with purpose. Deciding in advance. You’re looking at your calendar and you’re thinking, okay, this is what matters most, these are the things I have to get done today, and I am going to make a conscious choice that I’m going to use this block of time to do it. So, for us today, we are recording on a Tuesday, and we started at 2 o’clock. That’s an appointment that I have with you. But that’s me also intentionally planning, because I have to do this podcast, and this is when we’ve decided to do it. So we can do that with a podcast, but we can also do it with work. I have a presentation that I need to start prepping for — I can intentionally plan for that. So it’s not about filling every hour. It’s about really being deliberate about what hours you have and how you’re going to use them. That’s intentional planning.

Then we also talk about time blocking. And I probably use those two too interchangeably too often. Because time blocking is a specific strategy within intentional planning. You look at your task list, you decide what’s important, and you block out time on your calendar to work on those things. But here’s what’s really important about time blocking: you’re not required to estimate how long a task will take. All you’re doing is saving the time to do the work. So it doesn’t mean that you have to get it done in this block of time. You can always schedule another time block if you need to. They kind of — I mean, they’re the same — but I think time blocking sometimes can be a little less intentional, where intentional planning is really putting a lot of purpose around it. Does that make sense?

Pete Wright:
Yes. I do want to bring up a fourth, though. Maybe you should do your third before we talk about the fourth.

Nikki Kinzer:
Okay.

Pete Wright:
Okay.

Nikki Kinzer:
So then, this other term that has come up recently for me in my world is flexible scheduling. And this is how we can make time blocking work for ADHD brains. Because it’s time blocking, but it’s built in with a lot of room to breathe. It gives you space to adjust what you’ve put on the calendar, to shift it, to pivot, to respond to what’s actually happening in that moment. One of the members of GPS calls time blocking a placeholder. And that’s kind of how I see flexible scheduling — it’s this placeholder. You’re saying that this feels like a good time to do something. But if I get there, it’s okay — I can build that permission to change it and know that I didn’t fail and this strategy hasn’t failed.

Pete Wright:
Why do we need a new term? Everything you’ve just described with flexible scheduling is exactly how we’ve written about time blocking for years.

Nikki Kinzer:
I know. But for some reason, people will always tell me that time blocking doesn’t work for them.

Pete Wright:
But flexible scheduling does.

Nikki Kinzer:
I’m trying to get them to think that.

Pete Wright:
That’s the trick.

Nikki Kinzer:
Yes.

Pete Wright:
Okay. I just want to make sure we understand that time blocking has always been permissive and flexible. It has always been. There’s nothing different about these two concepts. Those are interchangeable.

Nikki Kinzer:
Yes. It’s just wording, because this is where words matter. It matters that I can know that I can go into something and it be flexible. For some reason, it gives me permission to say, I’ve changed my mind. But if I’ve time blocked something or intentionally planned something and I changed my mind — well, I have failed.

Pete Wright:
Okay, well, I’m going to coin a new word called block flexibility. And time scheduling. Those two.

Nikki Kinzer:
I like that.

Pete Wright:
And they are also the same. So we have lots of new words.

Whatever works. I do understand that blocking does have kind of a sharp edge to it. I get that.

Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.

Pete Wright:
And flexible scheduling is soft.

Nikki Kinzer:
Isn’t it?

Pete Wright:
The one I want to encourage people — that is very different — is something that people often mistake time blocking for. And that is hyperscheduling.

Nikki Kinzer:
Yes. Talk about that. What is hyperscheduling?

Pete Wright:
That is — and there are people who do it. I think as an exercise, I know there are people who do it just as a lifestyle. I think it’s bonkers. Like, my brain just does not understand it. The entire concept is every minute is blocked in some way, shape, or form, is identified for a thing. Everything you do — you block sleep, you block breakfast, you block everything. And that is hyperscheduling.

Hyperscheduling has a real home in time-based professions too. If you’re a doctor, you get eight minutes with a patient, and that is how they line up their schedule. It’s hyperscheduled. Attorneys are very familiar with hyperscheduling on, what, 15-minute cycles? If your livelihood is related to billing, you are very comfortable with hyperscheduling your calendar, because that’s your livelihood. Most of us do not need to hyperschedule. That is, I would suggest, inflexible.

Nikki Kinzer:
It is.

Pete Wright:
Everything else is flexible.

Nikki Kinzer:
Right.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Nikki Kinzer:
And it can go so wrong so fast.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Nikki Kinzer:
Because as soon as an hour slot or half-hour slot doesn’t go the way that you expect it to —

Pete Wright:
It’s not a good thing.

Nikki Kinzer:
— then your whole day has to be adjusted somehow. And yeah, it’s not a great strategy, I don’t think, for the ADHDer. Now, some people might say, I love it, and that’s great.

Pete Wright:
Right. Totally.

Nikki Kinzer:
It’s not one that I would recommend right away.

Pete Wright:
Totally. I’ve never been able to wrap my head around it. I can maintain it for, you know, like a week, and then it just falls completely off the rails.

Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.

So, time blocking, intentional planning, flexible scheduling — whatever you want to call it. I’m going to call it flexible scheduling, because I like that.

Pete Wright:
That’s great.

Nikki Kinzer:
Why does it not work? So I have three main reasons that I think it doesn’t work. And this is from the experience of working with lots of ADHDers in GPS, and also one-on-one when we’re talking about their planning.

The first one is that it’s too rigid. And this is exactly what you’re talking about with the hyperscheduling — that when you are time blocking, you’re assuming that your day is going to go exactly as planned. You’re trying to predict the future. And that is very difficult to do, especially when you have ADHD. You don’t know what interruptions are going to happen. You don’t know what distractions are going to come your way. ADHD brains don’t live in this straight linear line of a day and time. Tasks take longer than what you expect. Energy crashes without a warning. You could have a great morning, and then all of a sudden you go and have lunch, and you’re just like, oh my gosh, I want to go to sleep.

Pete Wright:
Yeah, right.

Nikki Kinzer:
A rigid schedule, a hyperschedule, has no room for any of that. It gives you absolutely no buffer time to let your ADHD into your life.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Nikki Kinzer:
You are planning like you don’t have it. And that’s going to be a problem.

Reason number two: it ignores time blindness. So I referenced this a little bit. Traditional time blocking asks you, again, to predict how long a task is going to take you. That’s what people think. This is kind of a myth. “I can’t time block because I don’t know how long something’s going to take me.”

Pete Wright:
How do we debunk this myth, Nikki? Oh my god, you’re triggering me right now. I’m getting fired up.

Nikki Kinzer:
I’m so sorry. And maybe I’m not. Maybe this is good. Get fired up.

Pete Wright:
We’re in violent agreement.

Nikki Kinzer:
Yes. Because ADHD brains struggle with time blindness and to sense time accurately. We don’t know how long something is going to take you until you’re in the task. You may think that something’s going to take 20 minutes — it takes an hour. You’re hyperfocused on something — whoa, you just lost three hours and you didn’t even notice.

Pete Wright:
Yeah. Feels like twenty minutes went by.

Nikki Kinzer:
Exactly. And so this goes back to what I was talking about before. You don’t have to know how long something’s going to take you to save time to work on it. So that’s where we are not ignoring time blindness. We are saying: I’m not going to try to estimate how long this is going to take me. What I am saying is, I’m committed to work on it from two to three. And whatever happens after three, I will decide if I need to reschedule another time block, or is it good enough. Whatever. I’ll make the decision then. So it doesn’t ignore it.

Pete Wright:
Right.

Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.

Pete Wright:
That’s great. Flexibility is built into the system.

Nikki Kinzer:
Yes, absolutely.

Pete Wright:
And it is only when we characterize our blocks of time as inflexible that time blocking breaks down. But you know who’s in control? We are.

Nikki Kinzer:
Yes.

Pete Wright:
We are in control. We get to make the rules about the way we use our time.

Nikki Kinzer:
Right. We’re driving the bus.

Pete Wright:
That’s right. We’re driving the bus.

Nikki Kinzer:
We’re driving the bus.

Pete Wright:
We’re the captain now.

Nikki Kinzer:
We are.

All right. Reason number three: it ignores energy. So I was just having a conversation about this the other day — the spoon theory. Remember how we used to talk about the spoon theory?

Pete Wright:
Oh, do I ever know spoons? Yeah.

Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah. And we were talking about the spoon theory, and how does that relate to what I do in GPS? The way that I kind of transferred that theory into what we talk about with planning is, it’s all about your energy. And you have a beautiful piece in our book — I don’t remember exactly the chapter or anything, but you say not all hours are equal for ADHD brains.

Pete Wright:
Yes.

Nikki Kinzer:
We all have 24, but they’re not equal.

Pete Wright:
Right.

Nikki Kinzer:
You want to expand a little bit on that? Because I think it’s just so true.

Pete Wright:
Well, the entire concept is how our relationship with time is flexible. That implies that what we see as time passing is flexible. It does not mean the same thing consistently. Time will appear to slow down when we are — it’s the same feeling that you’ll remember from high school, where you’re sitting there and you just — it’s the end of the day on Friday and you just want to go home. And it feels like time has slowed to sludge as you’re watching the hour hand pass on the clock above the whiteboard, chalkboard, whatever.

Nikki Kinzer:
Mm-hmm.

Pete Wright:
That’s the experience of ADHD in time, but all the time. It is unpredictable. I can say with confidence that a high school student every Friday in the last class during the spring term, when it’s sunny outside and beautiful, time will slow down as they’re waiting to come out. That is predictable to me. I feel like that’s even money. But with the ADHD brain, you cannot predict any hour to the next how you are going to relate with the time and task ahead of you. And that’s what we’re talking about with time flexibility.

Nikki Kinzer:
Absolutely. And the harder the task, the more recovery time we need to have too. And we don’t ever take that into account.

Pete Wright:
Right.

Nikki Kinzer:
And that’s why that hyperscheduling doesn’t work — unless you are putting recovery time in your hyperschedule. That’s something that’s very important to think about. When you’re scheduling your hardest work and you’re thinking, I just, this is the only time I have to do it, but you know that it’s not a good time for you — this isn’t a discipline problem. You can’t discipline it into you. It’s a scheduling problem.

Pete Wright:
Yeah. Right.

Nikki Kinzer:
Somebody was telling me not too long ago that the evenings are not good for them. They don’t have a lot of energy, they’re tired, and they’re just not going to get a lot done. And I’m like, yeah, I don’t either. I don’t expect myself to get a lot done at the end of the day.

Pete Wright:
Right. But we often don’t have a choice between how we feel about the expectations of ourselves at the end of the day.

Nikki Kinzer:
Yes.

Pete Wright:
At the end of the day, I feel bad. And I haven’t often gone through the exercise of letting myself off the hook.

Nikki Kinzer:
Right. Because, are your expectations reasonable?

Pete Wright:
I just feel like — yeah — I didn’t finish, and therefore I need to have my laptop open until I lose consciousness.

Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.

Pete Wright:
Or else I haven’t met my expectations.

Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah. Or you haven’t done well. You haven’t done good enough.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Nikki Kinzer:
Well, we’ll be talking about productivity here in the next couple of weeks too. So that’s going to be good stuff.

All right, so we want to reframe some of this stuff. Like, what does this actually look like? We know where it can fail, but what can it look like? The reframe is just using the kinder word. Flexible scheduling. It’s not about having no structure. It’s not about giving up on your plan every time something gets hard. But it’s about creating a structure that still gives you room to be human, and to breathe, and to show up. And when life shows up, you’re able to pivot. Like Ross, as Ross, you know, takes the couch up the staircase.

Pete Wright:
Pivot, pivot, pivot, pivot, yes.

Nikki Kinzer:
We have to learn how to pivot. So reframing it — it helps us to have that plan, but we can also pivot when we need to.

I think it also starts with permission. Permission to change your mind, permission to take breaks, permission to recognize when your energy doesn’t match your plan, and — as we were just talking about — respond with care instead of guilt. Very difficult to do when you have spent years believing that sticking to the plan is the only way that you have defined success, which is not true.

Pete Wright:
Right. Because you’ve just spent a lifetime letting people down, including yourself, but probably your parents. I think that’s the vision you have of yourself — as a person who lets people down because of the ADHD. Which is inaccurate characterization.

Nikki Kinzer:
It is so inaccurate. Because we look at everything that didn’t get done, but we’re not looking at all the stuff that got done. We’re not seeing that piece of it.

I keep repeating myself on this, but I think it’s a really important piece, especially with your ADHD brain: schedule around your energy and not just your time. If you don’t know when you work your best, track it. Track your time. Track what you’re doing and how you feel about it — not just what you’re doing, but how do you feel? Are you energized? Are you not? Is the work energizing you, or does it deplete you in some way? Really learning more about yourself and your patterns can make a huge difference on how you plan your day. Because the more you know how you respond to things, then you can be a little bit more accurate when you’re planning.

Pete Wright:
Yeah. And it’s hard. It’s really hard to track. Not just the act of tracking, finding whatever tool works for you, but of seeing the truth. It is hard. It’s a choker. It’s tough.

Nikki Kinzer:
It is. And then I also want to say, on the flip side of that, I’ve seen more times where people are surprised by how much they really do.

Pete Wright:
Yeah. Oh, for sure.

Nikki Kinzer:
And are pleasantly surprised.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Nikki Kinzer:
So, going into it with no judgment but just curiosity, and all you’re doing is you’re learning about yourself. What can I learn about myself?

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Nikki Kinzer:
We have to build in buffer time when you have ADHD. White space in your calendar is not a bad thing, because transitions are so difficult. And it doesn’t matter how big or small they are — going from appointment to appointment, you need to have some transition time. You need to have some time, because you know meetings are going to take longer than you expect. Tasks are going to run over. You may think that you’re doing really well, and then you get a phone call that, you know, you’ve got to go pick up your sick kid. Any of these things can happen. So building in that recovery time is so important.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Nikki Kinzer:
And I —

Pete Wright:
There’s a tool they don’t use anymore in YNAB, and I wish they did. We actually talked to Ben and Ernie about it from YNAB. They said that people didn’t quite understand the concept, but it was the concept of age of money.

Nikki Kinzer:
Mm. Yeah, and I remember seeing it in the tool too.

Pete Wright:
Yeah. And it would tell you, like, when you have a bill to pay, how old is the money in your account that you’re using to pay that bill?

Nikki Kinzer:
Right.

Pete Wright:
Which actually tells you essentially how long your safety net is going to last. If it’s, you know, 60 days, then you know, I am spending money on something that I earned 60 days ago. So I’ll have essentially 60 days ahead of me until I run out of money.

I have been really thinking about the age of time in the same way. This is kind of a new thing.

Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.

Pete Wright:
Can I — so in the context of margin —

Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah, please.

Pete Wright:
Of which, right now, this is why it’s on the brain, because I have very little margin right now.

Nikki Kinzer:
Mm-hmm.

Pete Wright:
Right now, my margin is very thin.

Nikki Kinzer:
Very thin.

Pete Wright:
As a result, the age of my time is very short. That means the projects I’m working on today are generally due tomorrow or the next day. The podcasts I edit today are going live this week.

Nikki Kinzer:
Right.

Pete Wright:
I don’t care to live like that. We have a two-week window on this show, which is lovely, because we record, and then I have a week to get it ready for the members and another week to get it ready for the public. So the age of my time is two weeks on that particular project. If I could get to that point with everything that comes into my inboxes, it would be great. And I’ve been there before. That means when a new project gets dumped in my lap that may take 15 minutes, I feel really good about saying, yeah, I can knock this out, because the age of time is two weeks or three weeks down the road — my age of time is ahead. So I can take 15 minutes and I can take care of it. It’s easy for me to bend without breaking. See what I did there?

Nikki Kinzer:
Oh my god, I love it. I love what you just did there.

Pete Wright:
Age of time is actually a really important metaphor for me right now, because when I look at my task list in Todoist, I can see the projects that are the next projects I’m working on are two weeks out, three weeks out — which is awesome. That’s margin.

Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.

Pete Wright:
Right?

Nikki Kinzer:
I love that.

Pete Wright:
So, age of time. I’m still massaging it. Might end up doing an episode on it sometime down the road.

Nikki Kinzer:
I like it.

Pete Wright:
But it’s becoming more important in the way I think about my time.

Nikki Kinzer:
It’s sort of the, are you being proactive or reactive? And we like being in that boat of proactive, because then we have that buffer time built in. We have that time to come to us.

And that’s really the last thing I would say, which goes into exactly what you’re saying: you protect your time without overscheduling it. We’re trying to be realistic with our expectations, and that’s also a very difficult thing to do.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Nikki Kinzer:
So the question isn’t, how much can I fit into today. The question is, what matters most, and have I protected my time for it. And that kind of goes back to one of the books that inspired me when we were writing our book — the Four Thousand Weeks book.

Pete Wright:
Yes. Mm-hmm.

Nikki Kinzer:
And that — I think that could have been his quote. I don’t know, but it could have been in the book. Because it’s not about feeling it. It’s about: are you doing what matters most, and are you protecting that? And that’s key.

Pete Wright:
Yeah. That is key.

Nikki Kinzer:
There you have it.

Pete Wright:
That’s it. That was a nice little double feature we just knocked out there.

Nikki Kinzer:
Yes. But guess what? We have another download.

Pete Wright:
Oh my gosh, are you kidding me with the downloads?

Nikki Kinzer:
I know.

Pete Wright:
We’re crushing it with downloads. All right, what’s this one?

Nikki Kinzer:
I know. So this one is called Your ADHD Schedule Starter. How do you like that?

Pete Wright:
It is — sometimes the simplest is the most elegant.

Nikki Kinzer:
Right. So it’s a short, practical guide that helps you build your first flexible schedule, step by step, without the overwhelm. And there’s also a reflection section there to help you evaluate how it went, so that you can keep adjusting it. And you’re going to find it in our show notes.

Pete Wright:
When I post it, can I just put a red marker over “flexible schedule” and just write “time blocking” in crayon? Is that okay? Is that approved?

Nikki Kinzer:
No, no, no, no.

Pete Wright:
No? Okay. I was just checking. Just checking.

Thank you, everybody. Check out those show notes. Thanks for hanging out with us. We sure appreciate you listening to this show. Thanks for your time and your attention. Don’t forget, if you have something to contribute to the conversation, we’re heading over to the Show Talk channel on our Discord server, and you can join us right there by becoming a supporting member at the Deluxe level or better: patreon.com/theadhdpodcast. On behalf of Nikki Kinzer, I’m Pete Wright. We’ll see you right back here next week on Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast.