186: New Year – New Way to Plan for ADHD Brains

Planning According to Your Why: My Simplified System for 2024

Every new year, our brains get excited about the fresh chance to finally get it together, and I’ve built several planning systems over the years to try to meet that excitement in a way that actually sticks. This year, I’ve simplified everything down to one core idea: know your why.

A quick planner history

I’ve done several planner episodes over the past couple years (14, 63, 64, 66, and 69, if you want to dig through my back catalog on listennotes.com, which lets you search inside a single podcast’s episodes). My planning approach has always been what I call intentionally flexible: a basic monthly calendar for hard dates like school and sports, paired with a blank, bullet-journal-style space rather than a rigid preset planner, because life as a mom of four with a husband whose schedule shifts constantly means everything needs to be written in pencil. I’ve used the acronym IF ONLY (one and done’s, needs, long-term projects, and you) and later WHAT IF (want to, have to, aspirations, tackled). Both worked, but I kept finding them getting more complicated than they needed to be. This year, I’ve moved to something simpler: knowing your why.

Start with who, what, when, and where

Borrowing from my old journalism training, before you get to your why, get specific about who, what, when, and where. Your who has to be you and your family, not some version of yourself you’re chasing from social media. This isn’t about following my system or anyone else’s system perfectly, it’s about making your own brain work to its best potential. Your what is the actual goal underneath the goal: more peace, less chaos, more focus on joy and less on noise. Your when is realistic: this is a yearlong journey, not an overnight fix. And your where I’d encourage you to narrow down to your own home and your own life, one small space at a time, letting that space grow into the next one as the year goes on.

The Y-H-Y framework

Once you’ve got those specifics in mind, here’s the three-step system itself.

The first W is something you want to do. This is the dream task, the bedroom you’ve been wanting to paint, the project you’ve been excited about. I put this first on purpose, for two reasons: you’ll genuinely never get to it if you wait until everything you have to do is finished, because dishes and laundry and bathrooms never stay finished, and secondly, forcing yourself to start with the hardest, most obligatory task first rarely works for our brains. But when you’re excited about something you want to do, that excitement creates real motion, and moving furniture out of the way to paint often naturally turns into decluttering, tossing things, or reorganizing along the way. The want-to primes the pump for everything else.

The H used to stand for something you have to do, but I got tired of how heavy that word feels, so now it stands for something that would be helpful. What would be helpful to your house or your family right now, not because anyone’s asking, but because you know it matters? This is also a great phrase to teach kids of any age: “Is there anything I could do that would be helpful right now?” Everybody, including teenagers, wants to feel useful and needed. Asking for help this way, in the moment, specifically, and praising it when you see it, tends to land far better than frustrated demands ever will.

The Y is you. I’m not usually one for self-care language, but ADHD brains are especially prone to neglecting even the basics, washing your face, sleeping enough, stretching, getting outside for a few minutes. Keeping this step in the plan matters because sometimes you genuinely need the recharge.

Making it fit into real time constraints

If a full hour feels unrealistic, try a 3-2-1 approach: thirty minutes on your want-to, twenty minutes on something helpful, ten minutes on yourself. If even that’s too much, scale it further: fifteen minutes want-to, ten minutes helpful, five minutes you. Five minutes is still enough to wash your face, do a minute of stretching in child’s pose, or read a few pages of a book you’ve been meaning to start.

Your practical, actionable step

Pick one thing you genuinely want to do this week, something with zero obligation attached to it, and give it real time first, before the have-to’s. Notice whether that small burst of motion naturally pulls you into tackling something helpful afterward, and close out with a few minutes on something just for you.

Until next time, continue to choose joy.