Bonus Episode 18: Runway Week – Part 4 – Start Your Year Right by doing FIRST if you have ADHD

Runway Week, Part Four: Reframing the Word “Schedule”

We’re on day four of Runway Week, our start-the-year-right series. So far we’ve covered focus, intentions through a yearly list, and a realistic baseline for hard days. Today’s letter is S, for schedule, a word I used to genuinely dislike, the same way I dislike “consistent.” I’ve had to reframe it, because life really does operate on dates and time frames whether we love that or not.

Layer one: a plain monthly calendar

Start with just a monthly calendar, no weeks, no days, just months, big enough boxes to write in. At the start of the year, or honestly whenever you get around to it, pull up your kids’ school websites and pencil in their academic calendars, days off, days in session, key events. Use pencil, since life changes constantly, or color-code by kid if that helps you track at a glance. This first layer is just getting the fixed events down.

Layer two: block off what matters to you

Go back through and pencil in vacation time, even if it’s just a recurring visit to grandma’s once a quarter, block it off so nothing else accidentally gets scheduled on top of it. Add health appointments too, pediatrician visits, dental checkups, your own annual exams, mammograms, anything you know needs to happen. This calendar isn’t a to-do list, it’s a guide of what’s locked in because it happens on a specific date. Everything else stays off it.

Layer three: a weekly spread, divided into thirds

Once the monthly calendar is set, move to a weekly spread, vertical days work well, Monday through Friday as individual columns with Saturday and Sunday grouped together as one weekend chunk. Draw a horizontal line about a third of the way down each day. The top third is for anything time-sensitive transferred over from the monthly calendar, no school Monday and Tuesday, a car drop-off at 10am Thursday, a client meeting Friday. If you meal plan, or want to track meals retroactively out of curiosity, that can live at the very bottom edge.

The real shift: think in weeks, not days

No two days ever feel the same for me. Energy and productivity swing wildly, some days off the charts, some days nothing purposeful happens at all. Instead of measuring failure or success day by day, I only look at tasks by the week. Since time-sensitive things are already locked into the top third, everything else gets tackled whenever energy, motivation, or urgency lines up, rather than forcing three tasks a day evenly. Some days you’ll do twelve things, other days genuinely nothing, and that’s fine, because the week is the actual unit of measurement, not the day.

The bottom two-thirds: O, N, L, Y

This is where an intentionally flexible planning approach comes in, using the acronym ONLY. O is for one-and-dones, tasks that happen once and are finished, a phone call, a scheduling change, prepping something for a trip, not part of any recurring routine. N is for needs, your baseline items, things you track simply because doing them makes you feel good, not because they’re a rigid checklist, something like tracking whether the bed got made or the sink got cleared, with a simple mark for however many times it happened that week, once or five times, no judgment either way. L is for your long-term project, the aspirational thing you’re chipping away at, browsing paint colors, building a mood board, anything that moves a bigger goal forward even slightly. Y is for you, the thing you do purely for yourself, a walk, a bath, reading, whatever tends to get pushed to last and forgotten. Write at least one Y-category item down each week and give yourself permission to actually do it.

A sticky note trick for the rough weeks

Keep a small sticky note nearby for a temporary pending list pulled from a brain dump. If the week goes well, cross items off as they happen. If it’s a rough week, just move the sticky to the next week and try again, or crumple it up entirely and start fresh, no guilt required either way.

Flip the whole planner concept upside down

The old way of using a planner, writing down everything you need to do and feeling defeated when items get transferred forward day after day, is discouraging by design. This approach flips it: everything written down anywhere in your ONLY sections represents something completed. At the end of the day or week, if your sticky note feels empty, ask what you actually did instead, you’ll often find seven things you accomplished that were never even on the list, write those down as wins too. Flipping back through the planner at the end of the month becomes a record of everything you did, not a running tally of what you didn’t.

Your practical, actionable step

Set up a monthly calendar with just fixed dates and a weekly spread split into top-third time-sensitive items and bottom-two-thirds ONLY sections. This week, jot down one one-and-done, one baseline need, one small step toward a long-term goal, and one thing purely for you, and give yourself credit for whatever gets done, in whatever order it happens.

Until next time, continue to choose joy.