219: Kickstart Your New Year with ADHD-Friendly Strategies

Already Broke Your Resolution? Here’s How to Actually Keep Going

It’s early January. Have you already busted your New Year’s resolution and now feel defeated, like it’s a new year but the same old you? Let’s safeguard against that all-or-nothing tendency and shift toward strategies that actually work for ADHD brains.

The problem with “this is my year”

There’s a specific kind of energy at the start of a new year, a feeling that this time it’s really going to be different. Then something goes sideways, and it collapses into “here we go again, I always mess it up.” Life is complicated and full of twists. What we need to get better at is treating a hiccup as just a hiccup, not evidence the whole year is already ruined. And practically speaking, whatever day you’re hearing this, there are still hundreds of days left in the year. January 1st is an arbitrary date. You can restart on any day you choose, over and over, for as long as you need to.

The real shift is this: stop striving for consistency, which is genuinely our kryptonite, and start working with urgency and even procrastination, since both are already part of how our brains operate anyway. Here are three ways to do that, plus a bonus.

Set goals that expire weekly or monthly, not annually

A goal like “declutter my whole house this year” or “get through every room by December” is too large and too distant for our brains to actually latch onto. Break it down into something that resets on a much shorter clock: remove five items from my home every week, for instance. You probably won’t do it evenly across the week. More likely it’ll happen in a rush on Friday or Saturday as the deadline closes in, and that’s fine. The point is giving your brain a deadline close enough to actually generate urgency.

Build in loopholes on purpose

Make sure your short-term goals have flexibility baked in, so one missed week doesn’t feel like total failure. If your target is five items a week or twenty a month, and you have a slow stretch until the 20th, then suddenly clear out 25 things in one burst, let that count. Retroactively, that’s still five a week on average. Give yourself credit for a big push covering multiple weeks at once instead of deciding you already failed because you didn’t spread it out evenly. The loophole is the safeguard against giving up entirely.

Make the evidence visible

You need to actually see proof that you’re hitting these goals. That could be a hash mark in each day’s box on a fresh monthly calendar, one mark for every item you get rid of, so you can watch the count climb toward your target, or clearly see it’s the 27th and you haven’t made a single mark yet, which itself creates urgency to act today.

Sometimes removing something is more motivating than adding to a tally. Try drawing twenty circles on a whiteboard at the start of the month and erasing one for each item you declutter, or putting twenty thumbtacks on a corkboard and pulling them down as you go. If you run out of thumbtacks because you got rid of more than twenty, put more back up and just note the real total at month’s end. Whatever version is tactile and visual for your brain is the version that will actually work.

Bonus tip: borrow some accountability

Find a friend to check in with regularly, someone you’re answering to, and offer to be their accountability partner in return. If you don’t have that person yet, that’s exactly what community is for, whether that’s a free group or a paid membership with scheduled body-doubling sessions. Having somewhere to report your progress matters more than it sounds like it should.

Your practical, actionable step

Take whatever goal you set for this year and shrink it down to what it equals per week. Then set up one visual way to track it, hash marks, a dwindling row of circles, thumbtacks, whatever fits your brain, so you can actually see the progress instead of just hoping you’re making it.

Until next time, continue to choose joy.