120: Break this Organizing Rule if You Have ADHD – If You Fail to Plan, You Plan to Fail

Break the Rule: Treating Instagram Squares as Actual Advice

Every tenth episode, I break or bend a rule I think doesn’t serve ADHD brains. This one’s a bit more general than usual: stop treating a pithy quote or an Instagram square as real advice. That’s not advice, that’s just a nice-sounding statement.

Where this came from

While researching inspiration for this milestone episode, I went looking online and found a flood of “start your year right” content, articles listing 15 things you need to track in your planner, or 18 things every organized home does. If you’re already overwhelmed, or genuinely trying to make this the year you get it together, being handed 15 to 18 generic action items, “always pick up after yourself,” “always put things in their home”, isn’t a starting place. It’s not actual advice, it’s just noise dressed up as guidance.

The dog analogy

Picture someone mentioning they’re having trouble with their new dog, and before they can finish the sentence, everyone jumps in: walk it more, send it to a trainer, buy more toys, maybe it’s bored. What they were actually about to say was that they’d discovered they’re allergic to the dog. No amount of walking, training, or toys fixes an allergy, and if the family already loves the dog and isn’t giving it up, the real challenge requires a completely different kind of solution.

The same thing happens with home organization advice. You’re not allergic to your home, you love it, but the difficulty runs deeper than “just consistently wash the dishes” can address. That kind of advice, when it’s the only thing offered, comes across as patronizing, as if the real issue is that you simply never thought to pick up after yourself. That was never the actual problem.

Be skeptical of quotes framed as strategy

One example I ran across: “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” Do you, though? Plenty of excellent planners still have bad days. Things happen that no plan accounts for. For every motivational quote, there’s an equally true counter-quote, “the best laid plans oft go astray.” Treat these as inspiration if they resonate, not as literal strategy.

Judge the week, not the day

This episode itself is proof of the point: I normally publish on Mondays, but this one dropped on a Thursday because Monday was a genuinely bad day for me. Tuesday, I was productive on all kinds of things unrelated to the podcast. Wednesday was solid too. If I judged myself by Monday alone, I’d have written off the whole week as a failure. Instead, look at the week as a whole and ask whether you’re generally moving forward, rather than measuring worth by any single day.

Your practical, actionable step

The next time you come across a tidy list of “18 things every organized home does” or a motivational quote framed as strategy, pause before adopting it as your plan. Ask whether it addresses your actual struggle, or whether it’s just generic noise. And instead of judging today in isolation, zoom out and look at your whole week before deciding whether you’re making progress.

Until next time, continue to choose joy.