My Miracle Scheduling

As someone with (undiagnosed) ADHD, I was told on many many occasions, "just make a schedule for yourself!" as if that will solve all my problems. Believe me, I tried. I tried making regular schedules for myself. I made whole time tables, hyperfocused on making sure they were perfect. But then they proceeded to only last a week before I would miss a point in the schedule, and everything got thrown off the rails, and yet another schedule proceeded to be abandoned.

I often felt a lot of imposter syndrome in regards to autism because of this lack of scheduling. I'd take each day as it came and it was fine, yet from what I'd heard, so many autistic people rely heavily on schedules to keep them sane and happy. But that wasn't the case for me, and so it made me question myself a lot. But now I think this is just the result of how my autism and ADHD intertwine.

I've come to realise, I like to have a rough plan of what I'm going to do in a day. I do in fact like knowing what is going to happen. And that is the pure reason why a lot of autistics like schedules and routines. They like knowing what will happen.

But the ADHD in me doesn't want to keep the same old routines and schedules every day, every week, on repeat. Its boring, and my brain just begs for something new to mix things up and keep things interesting so I don't die of boredom.

And this is where my miracle scheduling comes in.

On the last day of April, I decided to try and start a new method of organising myself. I knew that Uni deadlines were fast approaching and executive dysfunction was making it hard for me to keep up. I needed to have a visual of how long I had in a day, and how long I had until all of my deadlines. So I wrote out my deadlines on the calendar, which helped to give a visual representation of just how long I had until the work had to be handed in.

One thing that a lot of people with ADHD struggle with is time blindness. While you could tell a neurotypical person that something will happen in 30 minutes time and they'd be able to understand how long that will be in their own internal body clock, if you say the same to someone with ADHD and time blindness, we'll just shrug our shoulders, because there's no way for us to process and visualise in our minds how long that will be. I remember after my first week at University, while facetiming my mother, she asked me how long it took me to walk to the University. I had no clue how to answer that question because I just had no concept of that length of time. A lot of the time when it comes to things like this, I rely on looking at the time when I leave and then when I arrive, and also, perhaps more interesting, I often rely on using songs as a metric of time. I always listen to music whenever I walk anywhere, and so I measure the time from A to B by how many songs I listened to in that time. I guess its an interesting way of thinking about time. But anyway, back to the point

For those of us with time blindness, having this visual representation of time, laid out in front of our eyes is the best way for us to be able to understand and process it. So when I constructed this scheduling method, I (unknowingly) utilised this to my advantage.

So, here is the first day i used this scheduling method, May 1st:

I know it might be a little confusing, so just ignore the words for now. Lets just focus on the layout.

So I drew a vertical timeline, from 9am to 10pm, where each dot represents half an hour. This gave me a visual representation of roughly how much time I have in the day, from when I wake up (usually around 9am) to when I go to bed, (around 10 or 11pm... or at least that's when I get into bed. I don't fall asleep until past midnight most nights.) I wrote in the basic things that I know I need to do like, you know... eat. So I wrote in lunch and dinner at around the time I usually eat, and then after that I had this visual of just how much time I had left in the day.

So, I made decisions as to what uni work I will do and when, putting them on the timeline. On that day I tried to do a bit of all the work I had to do, but as time went on, I had days where I didn't do certain work to prioritise whichever was due in first. So anyway, after writing these onto the timeline I could then see how much down time I had, to relax (I use that term lightly...) and have my own time to myself, since that is very important to me. I burn out quickly if I don't have time to just sit and do whatever I want for a while. But by seeing this visual, I felt comfort that I would definitely have plenty of time to relax.

Then on the right hand side of the page, is the tick boxes. I decided to break it down for myself to make each task more easily digestible. Rather than just saying "write the essay" or whatever, which is a very vague command, I (somewhat) broke it down into chunks. The - means it is the task that I must prioritise. The ~ meant that if I finish the priority task and still have time or want to do more, then I can do that. I found this quite useful, as it meant I wasn't putting pressure on myself to do everything and therefore overwhelming myself. I was gave myself one thing to prioritise, and one thing I could do if I happened to be in a productive mood and wanted to get more done.

Also a fundamental reason for the success of this scheduling system is, I believe, the fact that I wasn't strict on myself. The times I had written out to do things were rough. I didn't think "I have to do this work at 5 o'clock on the dot." I just new that at some time between 5 and 6 I would do that work. By having this flexibility it meant I didn't fall apart when I dared miss it by one minute, like I would do before.

I also found the tick box thing useful too, since being able to tick something off and say "I have finished that and its done", gives me that little dopamine hit that my brain needs. And also having those tasks that aren't priority but are optional is also useful as it puts less pressure on me.

The most miraculous thing about this, is that I've managed to keep this up for so long. It is currently the 21s as of writing this. I managed to keep this up for 21 days and counting. When before I would fail at a schedule after just a couple of days. I struggled endlessly, doing everything I could to get myself to work. It got to a point where I set several alarms on my phone all at different time slots, telling me to work, but alas, even that didn't work. After a week, if that, I started just turning the alarms off and ignoring them. It became such a familiar part of my daily environment that I just ignored them.

This is also why things like "put sticky notes in places you look often" is not a good technique for us ADHD minds. We notice it for a while, but it very quickly moulds into the rest of our environment and we forget it exists until we notice it again months later, when its no longer useful.

Anyway, feel free to give this a try yourself and see if it works for you. All minds are different, so you might not be able to stick to it at all, its a very individual thing. But this is working for me pretty well so far, even if just to organise my day just a little bit.