257: 3 ADHD Tips to Get Back on Track When You Can’t Stick to Your Plans

When Your Plans Fall Apart: 3 Mindset Shifts to Get You Through

Here’s the irony of nearly every piece of content you’ve consumed this year: it’s been about systems, routines, habits, and how to stay consistent. And by now, life has probably already blown a hole straight through your best-laid plans.

A winter storm knocked out power and canceled trips across huge parts of the country recently. A flu outbreak has been making its way through plenty of households too. None of the shiny new planners or “just stay consistent” advice we hear every January accounts for any of that. Real life interrupts. The question isn’t how to avoid the interruption — it’s how to cope with it in a way that doesn’t wreck your whole mindset.

For those of us with ADHD, project, or “fish” brains, all-or-nothing thinking tends to make this so much worse. One missed day and it’s suddenly, well, that’s over, I failed, guess I’ll try again next year — even if it’s still only January 30th. Here are three different ways to reframe a derailment instead of writing the whole thing off.

1. Zoom Out to the Big Picture

When a new plan is fresh, it’s easy to get hyper-focused on the daily version of it: today’s steps, today’s workout, keeping the sink clear today, vacuuming on schedule. That kind of close-up focus works fine until something knocks you off it — and then all you can see is the failure of today, which spirals into frustration at yourself, your family, your whole situation.

That’s the moment to zoom back out. Ask yourself what the actual, bigger goal was in the first place. If the real point of your home was never a specific routine but the happiness and health of the people living in it, then in a hard stretch, the goal might simply become: does everyone feel taken care of? Is everyone hydrated, rested, looked after? If that’s all that’s happening in this window — comforting someone who feels lousy, sitting with them, making sure basic needs are covered — that’s not failure. That’s the actual big-picture goal, fully intact.

This is just a blip. It has a finite end. Let yourself lean into whatever season you’re actually in instead of measuring it against a plan that was never built to survive real disruption.

2. Treat It Like an Ad Break

Remember commercial breaks? They used to be a built-in cue to shift focus for a minute — refill a water glass, load the dishwasher, use the bathroom — before snapping back to the show. We’ve mostly lost that intentional pause now that everything streams and auto-plays.

Try borrowing that structure on purpose. When your plans get derailed, think of it as your ad break: your main show is paused, but that doesn’t mean nothing useful can happen in the meantime. Stuck home with kids who were supposed to be back at school? Maybe that’s your unplanned window to have everyone try on their summer clothes early — a sneaky, low-stress way to figure out what’s outgrown and what needs handing down, months ahead of when you’d normally get to it. Stuck sitting still next to a sick kid on the couch? Maybe that’s the moment to finally plow through a backlog of email.

None of that was the plan. That’s exactly the point. When the ad break ends and life settles back down, you can decide whether to return to the original plan — but the interruption doesn’t have to be wasted time.

3. Maybe It’s Time to Find a New Show

Sometimes a season you loved just doesn’t hold up once you’re back in it — a show that was great in its first season and has clearly lost the thread by the second, or a movie you keep watching out of obligation even though you stopped enjoying it twenty minutes ago. At a certain point, it’s fine to change the channel instead of forcing yourself through to the end.

The same is true for a routine or plan that got interrupted. Starting something new comes with a rush of novelty and momentum that our brains love — that’s what gets projects moving in the first place. But restarting something that’s already lost its spark, something your brain now finds familiar instead of exciting, often feels like pure drudgery. That’s not a personal failure. That’s just how novelty-seeking brains work.

So instead of forcing yourself back into a plan that’s gone flat, it’s worth asking whether it’s time to swipe to something new. This showed up clearly in my own membership group, where we rotate topics monthly — some people genuinely loved a particular month and felt reluctant to move on. But loving that month doesn’t mean it has to continue forever. The longer we stay on the same thing, the more the dopamine fades and the more we start craving a shift. There’s no failure in closing out something that was good and getting excited about the next thing instead.

One More Thing: Check Your Sleep First

Before applying any of these three shifts, take stock of one thing: are you sleep deprived? Whether it’s a newborn, a teething toddler, a sick kid up all night, or — in my case lately — two dogs going through health issues that are keeping the whole house up, exhaustion changes everything. It makes every problem feel bigger and every perspective feel gloomier.

So start there. Sleep, hydration, basic self-care, a little movement to clear your head — then come back to whichever of these three reframes actually fits your situation. Sleep is a gift that’s very easy to underappreciate until you’re deep in a stretch without it.

Whatever knocked you off track this month — weather, illness, or just life — you don’t have to abandon the whole year over it. Zoom out, take your ad break, or find your next show. All three get you through the blip.

Until next time, continue to choose joy.