93: Monday Morning Motivation for Moms with ADHD

Your Five-Minute Morning

Motivation is one of the most common frustrations shared inside this podcast community, and it’s a tricky thing because most of us treat it like it should just strike on its own. In reality, motivation is almost always contrived, sparked by a reward you’ve built in ahead of time, the pressure of a real deadline, or some form of accountability. This comes back to something like Newton’s first law, a body at rest stays at rest until something moves it, and once we’re actually in motion, it becomes much easier to keep rolling.

Why elaborate morning routines don’t work for us

Miracle-morning style routines, with all their steps and rituals, sound great in theory but tend to be exhausting just to think about, let alone maintain consistently. What actually helps is something short, simple, and low-stakes enough that you can approach it with a “let’s just see what happens” attitude rather than a rigid promise to yourself.

The five-minute morning experiment

Here’s what I tried: start a stopwatch and a five-minute timer at the same time. Before that, have your top three things picked out, ideally the night before, the tasks that, if you got them done, would genuinely jumpstart your day. For me those were making the bed, starting a load of laundry, and doing a quick brain dump of everything on my mind. Race through them without checking the clock as you go.

Why both a timer and a stopwatch

The timer gives you something to push against, but it comes with a real risk: the moment it goes off, you have a built-in excuse to stop and go static again. Running a stopwatch alongside it lets you push through that moment instead, finishing your third task even if it takes a bit longer, and then seeing exactly how far past five minutes you actually landed. For me, the whole thing took six minutes and sixteen seconds instead of five, which felt like useful information rather than a failure.

Using the results to learn about yourself

This exercise doubles as a quick self-evaluation. If one task ate up way more time than expected, laundry taking twenty-seven minutes because the pile felt overwhelming, for example, that’s a signal worth paying attention to, maybe that task needs a different approach, or maybe it doesn’t belong in your morning three at all. Over several mornings, you’ll start to notice which tasks genuinely deserve a spot in your five minutes and which ones should get swapped out, especially as your circumstances change, older kids taking over their own laundry, for instance, might free up a slot for something else entirely.

There’s no universal template

You don’t need to copy anyone else’s version of a morning routine, including mine. The point of the timer and stopwatch isn’t to lock in a permanent list, it’s simply to get yourself moving, then let the rest of the day unfold from there.

Your practical, actionable step

Tomorrow morning, pick your own top three tasks the night before, start a stopwatch and a five-minute timer together, and race through them without watching the clock. See how long it actually takes you, and use what you learn to adjust which three tasks make the cut next time.

Until next time, continue to choose joy.