I’ve written about a lot of big concepts lately. It’s time for a break. This month, I want to give you a few posts about the nitty-gritty of living with ADHD.
First up: habits. Adults with ADHD slip into unhealthy ones too easily and struggle to maintain good ones. Healthy habits require the sort of tedious daily effort ADHD makes particularly difficult. This means no matter what, any good results are usually temporary.
I combat this not by getting down on myself or forcing myself to try harder, but by lowering my daily expectations. If I’m going to make progress in the long term, I need to create a system that makes it easy to recover from failure. I need my goals to feel achievable even on the worst day.
Enter my habit hearts. For the past year or so, I’ve used crayons and heart doodles to keep myself on track. This may sound silly, but it works. In fact, it may work precisely because it’s silly. Today I’ll share with you a system for turning big, intimidating goals and aspirations — like writing a novel or learning to code — into silly-easy daily habits.
Long-term planning and goal-setting is hard with ADHD
I’ve always struggled with long-term goals. Don’t get me wrong, I’m great at setting up a flashy roadmap and impressing friends and family with my ambition. It’s just that a week later, I’ve forgotten the roadmap exists.
Sustained work toward a long-term goal asks a lot of the parts of our brains most affected by ADHD. People with ADHD often change interests before finishing a project or achieving any real progress in a new pursuit. We also struggle to grasp the true amount of time and effort it will take to reach our goals. If a project needs to be broken into multiple steps, we have trouble thinking of all the steps together and prioritizing them effectively. Not only that, we often don’t know what a reasonable goal looks like. It’s easy to overshoot because we want our goals to feel big and exciting.
Unfortunately, there’s nothing big or exciting about most major achievements. Those achievements usually happen as a result of mundane daily habits — a notorious weak point for people with ADHD. I’ve achieved more by tossing out big goals in favor of unimpressive daily actions than I ever did by aiming high.
It all started with Mini Habits
I owe this paradigm shift to Stephen Guise, author of Mini Habits: Smaller Habits, Bigger Results. If you haven’t read this book, I highly recommend it. I won’t do too much summary here because I’ve reviewed it in a previous post. Suffice it to say Mini Habits changed my entire mindset around setting and achieving goals.
I’ve always pushed myself hard and set ambitious goals. This sounds like an asset, and sometimes it is. However, lofty goals can also put up a wall of resistance in our brains. If we don’t think we have time or energy to succeed, we don’t want to try. This resistance can feel even more crippling for people with ADHD.
Mini Habits gave me permission to set embarrassingly low goals. Rather than asking myself to spend 20 minutes cleaning my house every day, I decided to pick up one thing and put it away. The magic of Mini Habits is inertia: I often kept going after the one thing because, why not? I was already here. Since reading Mini Habits, I’ve accomplished several things that previously seemed impossible.
How I track my daily habits
Because I’m a tactile person, I need to rely on something more than my phone’s calendar app to keep me organized. That’s why I copy my calendar into my Bullet Journal at the start of every week. The act of hand-writing my schedule helps me think it through and encode it into my memory.
I also use this time to define my habit goals for the week. I ask myself:
- What’s possible this week? Will I be traveling? Super busy?
- What’s my focus right now? Is there any area where I’m struggling, or feeling ashamed of my slow progress?
- Do I feel overwhelmed by any big projects? Is anything making me feel too intimidated to get started?
Previous daily habits have included touching a piece of sandpaper to the dining room wall (when a painting project had stalled), putting away one piece of clutter in my office, or doing a single yoga pose. I usually pick three or four habits per week.
I call these activities my habit hearts. I assign each one a color and draw a key in my Bullet Journal’s Daily Log. Then I draw a set of empty hearts on each day. As I complete each habit, I color a heart in the corresponding color.
Yes, that’s right. I’m a grown adult, and my most important habits are represented by heart-shaped doodles I color in with crayons. That’s very intentional, and I’ll talk about my reasons later.
What are my habits right now?
In case you’re wondering about the power of my crayon-colored hearts, I’m going to share my current habits — and the results of each so far.
- Strum the guitar (yes, just once).
- Results:
- I’ve seen more skill growth in the past few months than in all the 20 years since my first guitar lesson.
- I’ve borrowed guitars while traveling and inspired others to spend a few minutes making music, too.
- My constant background feelings of regret over not making enough music haved eased slightly.
- Results:
- Write 100 words of new fiction.
- Results:
- I’m about 20,000 words into a novel I started writing just under 3 months ago.
- The other day, I sat down and effortlessly wrote over 800 words.
- Results:
- Write 50 words for each of my three blogs.
- Results:
- When I traveled for 8 days last month and hardly got any writing done, I had a big enough backlog to keep up my publication schedules.
- I usually post every other week here, but I’ve had enough content to post weekly this fall.
- Results:
- Do one programming task (previously one online programming lesson, but I’ve loosened the requirements over time. I wanted time to practice my skills, not just keep learning new ones every day).
- Results:
- I’ve started learning to code many times, starting in college. This is the first time I’ve gotten past the basics and learned about design patterns and object-oriented programming.
- I’m enjoying a lot of success and having a lot of fun doing something I’ve always told myself I couldn’t do.
- Learning a new and different skill, I can almost feel my brain rewiring itself. It’s great.
- I’ve started working on an app that I’ll actually be able to use in the future.
- Results:
Habit hearts help me achieve the impossible
The list of results above looks impressive, like something born of more than crayons and a promise to pick up my guitar and strum it a single time each day. That’s the beauty of my habit hearts. Of course I miss days, but I come back to my habits much more easily knowing the cost of entry is so low. If I find myself floundering, I don’t try harder. I lower my goals.
My habit hearts exemplify the danger of telling ourselves we need to try harder. Trying harder doesn’t help us do better. What helps me do better is giving myself credit for coming to the table. For showing up every day, even if I don’t feel I have much to offer. Showing up — not working my hardest or making huge strides every day — has helped me achieve more than I ever thought possible.
I used to feel embarrassed about my habit hearts and my absurdly low goals. Not anymore. If coloring in hearts with color-coded crayons helps me maintain the habits I care about the most, so be it. I’m all about doing what works.
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