223: Aiming for Success: It is Not Too Late to Redefine Your ADHD Friendly Goals in 2025

Aims, Not Goals: A Kinder Way to Restart When January Fell Apart

If you made big plans for this year and it’s already starting to feel like the same old thing happening again, this one’s for you. There’s a smarter way to think about this, and it’s not too late to start today, whatever today happens to be.

Why “aim” beats “goal” for brains like ours

I first heard the word “aims” used this way from Gretchen Rubin of the Happier podcast, and it reframed something for me. A goal is binary: you hit it or you didn’t, succeeded or failed. That yes-or-no framing is rough for all-or-nothing brains. An aim works more like a target. You’re aiming for the bullseye, but landing in the ring just outside it, or the one outside that, still feels good. You’re close, and you can adjust and get closer. Nobody’s calling that a failure.

The 25 for 25 bingo board

Here’s how my group has been practicing this for the year. Grab any bingo board, ours happens to be a 25-square one since it’s ’25, and write a finite, one-off, did-it-or-didn’t-do-it task in every square. These can be as big as painted my bedroom or as small as found a new pair of jeans I love. The key is that each one is a single completable task, not something requiring daily consistency like running five miles every day this year.

The beauty of aiming for 25 of these is that the board works no matter when you pick it up. If you stumble onto it on December 1st having done nothing, you can still knock one off a day and cross off the 25th on Christmas. Or you might rediscover the list in June and realize you’ve already quietly done 17 of them without ever consciously working the board. Either way, you get that little lift of realizing you’re closer to the bullseye than you thought, the same lift you get remembering 23 of the 25 items on a grocery list you left at home.

The monthly pending list

On a smaller scale, I do a version of this every month. I use a planner that’s just a monthly calendar with a blank notes column, nothing dated that can make me feel guilty for “falling behind” on pages I never filled in. In that notes column goes what I call my pending list.

At the start of each month, brain dump everything swirling in your head onto that list, no prioritizing required. An eye doctor appointment and a note to buy slippers can sit side by side with equal weight. Then, at the start of the next month, look back at the previous list. You’ll find things you did, things you partially did, things you no longer care about, and things whose deadline quietly passed because they turned out not to matter. Realizing you decided not to do something is still tackling it.

I only track two states: pending or tackled. I cross something out if it’s no longer important, mark a small squiggle (borrowed from the bullet journal method) if it’s in progress, and leave it blank if I’m still deciding whether it matters, in which case it gets rewritten fresh onto the new month’s list.

Right before recording this, I looked at my January list. Thirty items. I’d tackled 24 of them, without picking the list up once after writing it. Three were flatly no longer worth doing, which itself was useful information about why I’d written them down in the first place. Three were still in progress. Getting it out of my head at the start of the month was what let all of that happen quietly in the background.

Give yourself grace and start today

If the system you tried in January wasn’t the right fit, that’s fine, and there’s no rule against tearing out that page and starting fresh in February, or March, or June. You don’t need a planner at all. A plain notebook works, or better yet, gather every stray Post-it, receipt scribble, and torn envelope note you’ve got, and dump them all onto one running list. Getting rid of the little scraps feels good on its own.

Your practical, actionable step

Write down everything pending in your head right now onto one list, no prioritizing needed. Then pick one thing you can tackle today, even a small one, and let the rest just sit there as pending until you’re ready.

Until next time, continue to choose joy.