167: Setting Up Realistic Goals for Your ADHD Brain with 100 Days Left in the Year

There Are 100 Days Left in the Year: How to Use Them Without Psyching Yourself Out

I love an arbitrary deadline, and hitting the hundred-days-left mark before the year ends is exactly the kind of oddly specific milestone that gets me excited. But I know this kind of countdown can hit ADHD brains two completely different ways. Either you get a rush of energy imagining everything you could accomplish in a hundred days, or you immediately spiral into counting Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas against you and decide there’s no point starting anything at all. Let’s find the middle ground that actually works for a fish brain.

Don’t fight your own natural energy

Instead of forcing yourself into a rigid time slot, like committing to do something first thing every morning when mornings tend to fall apart on you, figure out when you’re genuinely most focused and let the activity live there instead. If you’re more of a night-owl brain that gets into a groove in the evening, work with that instead of against it.

Build in a real loophole for missed days

Avoid framing a hundred-day goal as something you have to do every single day, since missing even one day can feel like the whole thing collapsed, and you can’t exactly work out twice in a day to make up for a skipped one. Instead, try this: write down a hundred small tasks, one per slip of paper, drop them all in a bowl, and pull one out each day. Miss a day or three? Just pull that many extra next time. The goal becomes emptying the bowl by the end of the hundred days, not a perfect daily streak. You don’t even need a hundred tasks in there. Fifty is still a genuinely huge accomplishment across a hundred days.

Don’t let the whole stretch feel like one undifferentiated slog

Rather than staring down a hundred days as one unbroken commitment, break it into smaller chunks. Try five separate ten-day challenges, timed around the natural gaps between major events on your calendar. Or go even more flexible: ten separate five-day challenges that don’t have to be consecutive days, if it takes eight days to complete five tasks, that’s completely fine. Chunking it this way turns an overwhelming hundred-day repeat into a series of short, contained sprints that are much easier to stay engaged with.

Make it visual and satisfying to track

I put together a couple of worksheets for this: one laid out as five-day challenge blocks where you decide the tasks as you go, and another styled as a hundred-spot coloring sheet shaped like leaves, since each leaf is two-sided, you can color in one side per task for a hundred-day version, or a full leaf per task for a fifty-day version. One built-in example on the sheet: tally marks for something like scrubbing around doorknobs or light switches, tasks that nag at you but never feel worth a whole dedicated cleaning day. Turning something like that into a small, repeatable, trackable habit over the hundred days makes it feel achievable instead of perpetually postponed.

Your practical, actionable step

Sit down this evening and brainstorm a list of small tasks, aim for fifty to a hundred, cut them into individual slips, and put them in a bowl. Each day (or every few days, however it goes), pull one out and do it, letting missed days simply mean pulling extra next time rather than starting over.

Until next time, continue to choose joy.