How Planning could actually be valuable for your neurodiverse brain

Welcome to the Overgivers Anonymous podcast. My name is Angela Mondor, also known as the Geeky Girl. In this podcast, we're going to be talking about some amazing things to help you get over overgiving. Hi there. Today I want to talk to you about how planning can actually be valuable for your neurodiverse brain. This is an interesting topic, and depending on your neurodiversity, this can be somewhat triggering, I suppose. Planning Either comes naturally to you or it doesn't, or you have to work really hard to get it, or some other piece of that. Planning didn't always come easy to me, that's for sure. I wasn't always a good planner, and I certainly have had a lot of time blindness in my life. It is through learning and growing that I have been able to come to a place where I am today. I'm still not perfect. I still have lots of things that I can learn, lots of things that I would like to change or grow into. And but what I do What I do know is that planning does help me. Ultimately, not just the planning portion, but the action steps that are taken. I remember years ago, I had actually asked my husband, I said, can we get some things done around the house this weekend? He's like, sure, what would you like to get done? Hang on, I'm grabbing a piece of paper and a pen. Sound familiar? Yeah. I wanted to write down all the things that we had a to-do list and we could check them off as we go. And I started writing the list down and my husband looked at the list, he looked at me and he looked at the list. This is, um, do you— we can't get all this done. I'm like, well, why not? I've listed it out. We know what we need to get done. Why can't we get it all done? And he said simply, we just don't have enough time. I was floored by the comment. I thought, what do you mean that you can't get it all done? I put it all down on the piece of paper. What do you mean we don't have time? I don't understand. It wasn't until after we had put in the work and the time that we wanted to get these things done and went through the list that I could see what he meant, that I could understand what he was saying. That was my first moment of time blindness awareness. I realized that there was something about my inability to see how long things would take and my inability to get the things done I wanted to get done. This was my first shot at that conversation. I have also had times when I have goals or aspirations that never got completed and couldn't understand why. I'd put the goals down, I decided what I wanted to do, but at the end of the time period, they weren't done. That didn't make sense to me either. I couldn't— I would get overwhelmed because I would be finishing things last minute instead of getting them done ahead of time, all those kinds of things. So all this to say is that over the years, I have learned some skills. And I have taken the time to figure out what works really well for me, what doesn't work for me, and I'm honest with myself. What works for me today might not be what works for me later, but I'm able to take this one step to myself to say, hey, just because it's working or just because it's not working now doesn't mean to say I'm failing. It just means I need to change the way I do things. So, if you are feeling that way, if you're often overwhelmed or uncertain about how to tackle your tasks or you're struggling with how to make decisions and prioritizing your workloads and stuff, don't worry, you're not alone. A lot of us, and especially those of us with neurodiverse brains, can struggle with these challenges. Sometimes we even struggle to the point where we plan them out so in so much detail that it's too detailed, and then we can't even get started. So there's kind of a flip side here. Either we don't plan enough and we're overwhelmed by all the things that need to get done and we are always behind, or we're trying to plan out far too many details and that causes the overwhelm because there's too many things to get— it's just a nightmare. So instead, it's important to think about your own brain, what works best for you. And if you don't know what the answer is, that's fine. Just start somewhere. Somewhere is a good place to start. Choose one thing and try it out. So that's what's important. So when you're looking at trying to reduce the— reduce your overwhelm on these kinds of things, when you're— especially when you're looking at this long list of tasks, you're like, I have to get all these things done, but there's no parameters around it. How do you know what's important? How do you know it's urgent? When I was working corporately, of course, I know I've talked about this a lot, but Stephen Covey and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People has been very, very valuable to me and to my brain throughout my journey through working, not just corporately, but also in my personal life. And he has a quadrant system that's urgent, not important. There's just, there's 4 quadrants and basically everything we do fits into one of these quadrants. So if you haven't heard of the Quadrant Method, you might want to go check that out. That is certainly one way that you can look at what's urgent or what's not important, basically to tell you whether it's really important. Like urgent is like my house is on fire, Q1, my house is on fire. But Q4, which is not urgent and not important, is like watching TV, right? So it allows you to sort of see things in a different way to be able to put things into different quadrants. That's one way to look at what's important and what's not important. So it doesn't matter what your neurodiversity is, what your diagnosis is. At the end of the day, a diagnosis is only what it is. The way that we use— the way that we interact with the world is what's important. So I've been diagnosed with ADHD and OCPD, but maybe I have autism. Who knows? Didn't get the diagnosis for it, but sometimes I hear things and I think, well, that kind of fits. To me, it doesn't matter what my diagnosis is. All I know is that I don't have a neurotypical brain and Instead of trying to worry about what kinds of things I should be doing or how I should be behaving, I want to look at what works for me and what doesn't work for me. And then from there, I can decide what I'm going to try in order to make it better. So the time blindness thing, when I was looking at time blindness, I, I was starting to plan my day. So, okay, we're all talking about planning and how planning is valuable. Okay. I would plan my day and in pencil I would say, I'm going to do these things and I would Give them timeframes. That allowed me 2 things. First of all, it allowed me to see how many things I could actually get done because I could look at the calendar and say, oh, if that takes an hour and this one takes half an hour and this one takes 2 hours, I can literally see on the calendar how many hours worth of work I could put in there. And then after each task was done, I would write over in marker in a fun color or pen and say how many hours or how much time it actually took. So then I could see What I thought it was going to be and what it actually was. That allowed me to get some understanding over my time blindness so that I could see what it looked like. Then I took that one step further. I would plan to do those activities at different times during the day to see whether or not that impacted. So, it's like a great big science experiment. So, I was writing blog posts in the afternoon, and then I moved it to the morning and found out that when I wrote them in the morning, it took me less time than if I was writing them in the afternoon. Oh, okay. That tells me that if I want to do it quicker, I should probably do it in the morning. My brain probably works better at that, that activity in the morning. From now on, I'm only going to do them in the morning. When you start to look at your time that way, when you start to actively see where things fit, it gives you a better idea. Creating a plan becomes easier when you break it down into smaller pieces and more achievable steps. So if you're worried about creating a plan for your business, worrying about your time blindness, worrying about a long to-do list, if you're trying to do it all at once, it's going to be overwhelming again. So take one thing at a time. What is the one thing that's maybe irritating you the most or causing you the most trouble? Take that one thing first and then figure out what can I do to change this one thing? Okay, so it can provide you with some structure and some routine when you're planning, whether you're planning your year, your quarter, your month, or your week. There's lots of different ways that you can use these planning techniques to provide that structure for you so that you can also make sure to build some really great habits for yourself. A really great book is The Atomic Habit, The Atomic Habit, or Atomic Habits. Anyway, that book is fantastic. It talks about habit stacking, which is really, really good, especially if you have some habits that are working for you and you're trying to build new ones. So, you might want to check that out if you're looking at the habit piece. of creating a plan. But, you know, you also want to think about what is it that I need to help with reducing this overwhelm. And planning can also help to improve your time management skills, like I talked about. You can help with allocating time for certain things, where you do it most effectively, all of those kinds of things. But putting time constraints on your deadlines— and let's be honest, if you're somebody who puts a deadline as this, this thing needs to be handed back to the client on this date, and you put that as your due date. If you're the kind of person who works overnight to make it happen, maybe you need to trick your brain a little bit and give yourself a grace of a couple days. And instead of putting the due date on the date that the client needs it, put the due date a few days ahead of when you need it. And then maybe that can trick your brain into helping you to get things done earlier rather than being stressed and trying to get it done overnight. Doesn't usually work for my brain because my brain's like, yeah, I know I got 3 extra days, but it works for some people, so you can give it a shot, right? You never know what's going to work unless you give it a try, unless you try it out yourself and figure out what works for you. I know that handwriting on a piece of paper for an essay or for paperwork isn't what works for my brain because it's not as easy to change as it is if I'm typing. I can move the mouse and type somewhere else, or I can, you know, highlight things and move them or delete them and that kind of thing. So For me, my brain doesn't like the connection between my hand and the paper. But I like using papers, which of course I don't have. I don't use paper as much anymore unless it's my planner. But I do have a reMarkable that I write in, and I absolutely love my reMarkable for being able to take notes. But I wouldn't want to use it to write out a blog post or something. So again, it's about what works for you and your brain and how can you make it work for you so that you can make time on your side. Okay. So when you're looking at that, time management is a huge piece to all of the things that we— when we have an overwhelm, it's usually because we're behind or we have too many things on our plate. There's too much to get done and not enough time to make it happen. So time management, I guess that's why I'm spending so much time on it, literally time, because it is such a huge piece right now. When we check off items off of a to-do list, we have the fantastic little dopamine hit. It's like, yes, I did that. That's awesome. But at the same point, if you have so many things on the list and you can't cross them all off and you have to keep moving them from week to week to week, you're taking away from the positive of the dopamine hit because you're constantly going, ah, here's that task again. Oh, here's that task again. So understanding how much time you have and how much you can put into that time is really important so you don't overwhelm yourself. That doesn't mean to say you can't get a lot done because we can get a lot done. In fact, with my particular brain, I have a really great ability to hyperfocus. I can actually push myself into a hyperfocus mode, which is more likely to happen to me in the afternoon than it is in the morning. Know what works for you and how your brain functions, not just from, you know, how your brain works, but what you do and how you can make your brain work the way you need it to. So certain medications, right? That's important. Are you on medications or not? And how do they work for you? Food. Food is a medication. Let's just be honest. What kinds of food are you eating and how does it impact the way that your brain works and that you function. And there's so many pieces to this. And again, pick the one thing, right? So planning out your meals might be really important to you, planning out your schedule and how you move through the day. I have a Google Home behind me that I love. It actually will fire every hour during the day and tell me something different. So sometimes it says it's time to get up and stretch. Sometimes it tells me to go get some water. Sometimes it tells me a joke. It's important for me to have that going on in my background because it helps me To keep track of the time throughout the day. If it's not going off, I can really lose time and not realize how much time is passing. Okay, so whatever works for you— setting alarms on your phones, setting alarms on your mobile devices, your watches, whatever— play with a few different things. Again, one thing at a time. Okay, so this is all the things I've done over the years, so it's not something that I do like All at one time. But planning can help you. It's a, it's a valuable tool for memory and organization, especially if you struggle with those kinds of skills. So you can create a plan by writing down important information, and sometimes writing will help you to recall the details of something. So it's not just coming in through your eyes, but you're also physically writing it down. It can, it can help you with that brain connections that things stick a little longer. One thing that I like to do is actually use a physical planner to write things down. I also have it as a digital copy in my reMarkable, but for me, I really like the physical copy of the book better than I do the reMarkable version. Again, personal choice, but I like the idea of writing down the physical things that are happening inside the business. And of course, then I take those things, I put them into ClickUp because ClickUp's my brain. So that's another way that you can help to do those kinds of things. But making sure you take the big items and break them down into smaller pieces and break them down even smaller, it's really important. That when you look at a task that you have to get done, that it doesn't go, how do I get that? Your brain should never go, how do I get that done? Or how do I get that started? Because the minute you go into how do I start that, your brain goes, oh, let me, let me find the answer for that. Whoa, rabbit hole. But if I look at a task and I can see the task and I know exactly what I need to do, I can take action right away. So everybody's going to have a little bit of a different idea of what that looks like for you. Some people, they can have write a blog post on XYZ and they'd be like, okay, no problem. Off they go. Other people might need it to be broken down in write the outline for that blog. Now write the blog post. Like whatever works for you in your brain in terms of getting to a point where you're not asking yourself, how do I start? Okay, the same thing with your with your goals. You break down those goals. You plan out all of the things that you need for the goals and break those down into smaller and smaller tasks so that you don't have to go, how am I going to make it to that goal that I have at the end of the year? You don't need to worry about how you're making it to the end of the year goal because you're working on the smaller goals that are bits and pieces of that, right? Your yearly goal, your quarterly breaks down into quarterlies, your quarterlies break down to monthly, your monthly goal breaks down into weekly. As long as you're working on those little pebbles and the bits of sand, it's all going to roll back up into that great big boulder at the top. Okay, that's very helpful because now you're not focused on that massive goal that can be overwhelming or that can be too hard to think about how to even get to that point. You're just looking at the little pieces that you're going to get there. Okay, that can improve so much in your life. But writing it down and getting it down on paper is going to help you with your memory recall, and it's going to prevent, you know, missing important dates and things slipping through the cracks. It's really important. Again, like ClickUp is for me, it's my brain. So those things go in there as well. So I don't have to worry about, oh, that thing that I wanted to do in June or July or August this year, it's in there. It'll come up when it needs to, and I don't need to constantly be thinking about it. The more things we have that we are having in our brain that we're trying to remember, we're trying to hold on to, the less room we have for the other things that we really need to spend the energy on. So it's important for you creating a centralized location for important information, understanding what that looks like for you, keeping it all in one place. That's really, really important and not inside your head. The more things we keep in our head, the less room we have for creativity, the less room that we have for our families and the connection that we want to have with human beings as well, right? So it can be over— planning overall, let me tell you, although I wasn't really good at it before, I'm really good at it now. It has made a positive impact in my life and it has improved my memory for things. I don't— I no longer double-book myself. I don't have to worry about things that are falling through the cracks or breaking down communication because I have a central location and an organized space for all of the things that need to get done. And, you know, the other piece that planning does is really— it helps a ton with decision-making skills. If you've ever had— think about going to a restaurant. Maybe you've gone to a brand new restaurant and you open the menu and you're like, oh, there's so many really good things on this menu, and it's the first time I've been there, and I could try so many things. I could try this, or I could try that, or what do I do? You know, you can only eat so much, right? Yeah. As you're sitting down at dinner, you're only— you, at the very most, I mean, we can have an appetizer, you can have the main meal, You can have a dessert, maybe you have 2 appetizers. But really, I mean, there's only so much you can fit inside the stomach that you have brought with you. The same thing is when we're trying to make decisions in terms of our life and our business. There's only so much we can do at any one particular time, which is why breaking things down from yearlies to quarterlies to monthlies makes a difference. Because now I can say, I want to do all these things this year, but I'm going to do some in Q1 and some in Q2 and some in Q3 and some in Q4. I can move them around. I can still get a bunch of things. It's like going to the restaurant multiple times. Okay, so maybe you struggle with making some decisions, and you know, a lot of people do. Even, even neurotypical people may have some trouble with making some decisions sometimes. And often, if you go to the sales world, if you've ever had any sales training, they'll tell you, don't ask your clients, when do you want to meet next? Instead, you say, would you like to meet Tuesday or Wednesday? Oh, Wednesday? Fantastic. Morning or afternoon? You never give anybody more than 2 choices. Okay, that is the— it's like a golden rule in the sales world. Just give somebody 2 choices because people have a hard time making decisions. So don't feel bad if you're somebody who makes— who has troubles with making decisions. You probably have too many options available to you. But when you are planning, you are able to sort of take the decisions and make them easier. Now, instead of saying, I want to do all these 500 things, now you can say, when do I want to do these 500 things? Do they fit into this month or that month or this quarter or that quarter? Okay. And we always say use pencils when you're making plans. Okay. Because we can use erasers to erase the things or change them when we need to. And then in the end, we can use our pens for what actually happened. Okay. Same things I was talking about with time management. Always write your plans in pencil so that you can adjust them or change them as you require. And then once it's over, you can use pen to record the actual outcomes or the results of. Okay, so providing a structured framework when it comes to making decisions in planning is important. So if I plan my year, my quarters, all right, and I decide what I'm going to accomplish, if I have a brand new opportunity come into the business and somebody says, hey, we want to work with you, or would you partner with us? Or maybe here's an opportunity for you to speak at a convention or whatever the case may be. Something comes up inside your business. You have the ability to go, hmm, does that fit my plan? Okay, now you're not saying, do I want to do it or don't want to do it? It's just, does it fit my plan? This one thing could have saved me $10,000 one year. I'm not kidding. I'm not, I'm not exaggerating. It's the truth. I didn't have a plan for my year, and I had this opportunity come across my desk to join this group program. It sounded awesome. It sounded fun. It sounded like it would be kind of cool. And I signed up for it and I joined it. In the end of the day, it wasn't what I needed. It wasn't what I required to grow the business in the direction that I wanted to go. The course was taking one path, and I wanted to take another. And had I taken the time to say, does this fit with where I want to go? I would have probably said no to the course. Now, lots to be learned on that. Okay, first of all, met some amazing people, amazing human beings in that group program. Love, love, love the human beings that I've met, some lifelong friends there. However, I paid a lot for those friendships because it didn't help my business. In fact, it hindered my business and really, really took my business back quite a few steps. So good friends, bad business decisions. But let's say if I had already done my plan, which I do now, it was, it was one of the biggest lessons. And I had decided what direction I went in, I would be able to ask much better questions even to the person who was offering the program. I could have said, is this going to do this? Is this going to do that? I'm looking at doing this in my business. Is it going to help me do those things? The person would have said, oh no, that's not what we're working on this year. I would have had my answer, but I didn't have that plan going ahead. So it just seemed like it was going to be a good idea. So I jumped. Now that happens a lot, and I encourage you to think about this concept of planning. I know that it can be stressful and it can be overwhelming, even just planning. I do have a fantastic program to help you with that. If that's what you're looking for, you definitely can send me a message because I can hook you up. But at the end of the day, planning doesn't have to be overwhelming. In fact, planning can actually keep you from being overwhelmed. Now, when an opportunity shows up across my desk, whether it's to join a program or whether it's to speak at a conference, or if it's to partner with somebody or partner with a software company, I can look at the opportunity and say, does this fit my plan? And if the answer is no, it doesn't fit the plan, that doesn't necessarily mean no, this is not the right option for me. It could be no, not now. It could be, hey, maybe this isn't right for this quarter, but maybe I can do it in Q3 or Q4. Maybe it is, this is a great fit for me, but it's not where I'm headed right now. Then I can evaluate it. If I made the change to my plan, because remember we use pencil, if I change my plan so that I included this new opportunity into the mix, would it take me back and give me more opportunity to hit whatever financial goal I was looking for in the business? Or maybe it's a different metric that I'm looking to hit. Those are reasons to make changes to the overall plan and change your trajectory. It's totally okay to change even in the middle of the year. We all had to make changes when 2020 hit. It wasn't business as usual. There was things that needed to change and it was totally okay. We started, we finished that year right at the end of that quarter and the brand new quarter, second quarter, we went, okay, brand new business, let's get rocking. So it doesn't matter when you make changes in the business, but the point is, is when you use pencil, you can always erase it and rewrite it down in pencil if you need be. But without the ability to have that plan, without that framework to bounce things into and through, It's harder to make decisions. Now I can look at the plan and really quickly go, oh, that either fits or it doesn't fit. Okay, it doesn't fit. Is it a value for me to change? Do I— am I going to have whatever metric I'm working towards? Is it going to help me with that metric? No. Okay, then the decision is made. Done. No. Way easier to make decisions than if it's like, oh, should I or shouldn't I? It feels good. I want to. No, there's some definite things I can, I can bounce into. So that framework for evaluating these options and these possible opportunities is a really great way to ease that decision-making stuff. Okay, you also give— planning can also give you a sense of control. I mean, if you get these opportunities, they're coming into your existence and you're not sure if you should take them or shouldn't take them, you may feel out of control because maybe you're now having people that are talking to you and they're trying to convince you and they're, they're saying you should, you should, you should, and you're thinking, I don't know. But by having those boundaries and having your decisions and your, your plan in order, it does give you more control and a feeling of control over what's happening. So you feel more confident in your decisions as well, which is really good. The confidence is really important, which of course leads to being more comfortable and happy with the work that you're doing, reducing your stress, giving you overall good feeling of well-being. I mean, There's nothing wrong. There's nothing bad about these things. So getting over the thought of how do I plan and move into planning is important to me and it can make a huge difference in my life. That can really make a huge difference in your overall well-being in your life and your business and your mental health as well. Okay, so that structured framework that I talked about, really important. It allows you to be able to prioritize your work. Prioritize what's important to you rather than prioritizing what other people say. Somebody can come along and say, you really should have a newsletter. And maybe you have 2 people on your newsletter list and you've never really made any sales there because of course you don't have any sales there and you're making all your sales on Instagram. So you should have a sales newsletter. And you're like, but all my, all my sales are coming through Instagram and I'm doing all right. So I don't understand. You should, you should. But if you're like, hey, this is my plan. I'm using Instagram. Here's how I'm doing it here. My outcomes are good. I'm happy with it. I don't need your newsletter. Thank you so much. Have a good day. That's empowering. It feels good, right? And you get the sense of control of your business and you feel really good about it. So it is a good way to reduce stress and burnout. It's an easy way for you to sort of filter out the noise of other people saying what you should be doing. So having that concept, using planning in those ways, definitely gives you less stress and a hell of a lot more success. I hope you have a fantastic week. I'll talk to you next week. Thank you so much for listening to the Overgivers Anonymous podcast. Your support means the world to me. You can find show notes for this episode and other goodies at overgiversanonymous.ca. And if you enjoyed this episode or you enjoyed the podcast in general, why not join us in the Overgivers Anonymous Facebook group where you can connect with overgivers from all over the world? Head on over to geekygirl.ca/group.