How to plan your day when you have ADHD

I have tried almost every guide to planning a day, and they nearly all start in the same place: get up earlier, block out your hours, follow the blocks. It worked beautifully for me until the first thing ran long, and then the whole grid was wrong and there was nothing to do but abandon it before lunch.

What follows is what I do instead, and it assumes the opposite: that the day will go sideways, that I will have less in me than I expected, and that I will not want to look at the plan by two o'clock. It takes about five minutes and it is mostly subtraction.

Start from the hours you actually have

Not the hours between waking and sleeping. The hours left after the meetings, the commute, the meal you have to make, and the thing that always comes up. On an ordinary day mine comes out at three or four, which was a genuinely unpleasant number to see written down the first time. Yours will be its own number, and writing it first is the whole trick, because everything after it has to fit inside it.

3-4 hrswhat is left of my own day once the fixed parts come out

This is the step I skipped for years, and skipping it is why my plans failed before they began. A list written against eight imaginary hours is not an ambitious plan. It is a plan for somebody else's day.

Pick three things, and mean it

I landed on three by running out of patience with every other number. Five was a list I stopped reading by Wednesday; one felt like giving up. Three is the largest number I can hold in my head without opening anything, and that turned out to be the property that mattered. Test it on yourself for a week rather than taking my word for it.

There is also a decent reason to expect a short list to beat a long one, and it has nothing to do with attention spans. It is one of the most replicated findings in the psychology of choice.

The long display attracted more people and converted almost none of them. That is my to-do list, drawn by somebody else in a grocery store: the more it holds, the better it looks and the less comes off it.

• Write down the three that would make today count. Not the three that are loudest.
• Put a rough number of minutes against each one. Rough is fine. It only has to exist.
• Add the minutes up. If they do not fit the hours you wrote down, something comes off now rather than at six in the evening.
• Everything else goes on a separate list you are allowed to ignore until tomorrow.

A plan you have to be in a good mood to follow is not a plan. It is a wish with timestamps.

Tag each one with what it will take out of you

Time is only half of what a task costs. The other half is how much of you it needs, and no list I ever used tracked it. A two-hour job I could do half asleep is completely available on a flat afternoon. A fifteen-minute phone call I am dreading is not.

So put one more mark against each of your three: heavy, medium or light. When the afternoon arrives and you have less than you planned for, you do not have to re-plan anything. You just do the light one, and the day still moves.

Let the leftovers stay where they are

The thing that broke planning for me over weeks was never the days that went wrong. It was what the app or the notebook did the next morning. If everything I missed was sitting in tomorrow on top of tomorrow's own work, then two bad days in a row produced a list nobody could finish, and the list stopped being useful long before I stopped believing in it.

So I decided once that unfinished things do not move themselves. They stay on the pile they came from, and tomorrow gets planned from scratch against tomorrow's hours. It felt careless the first time I did it. It is the reason I still have a system in month three.

If you only take one thing from this

Write the number of real hours at the top before you write anything else. Everything above follows from that one number, and every plan of mine that collapsed collapsed because I had not written it.

Actto does this part for you: it holds the day to three priorities, adds up the minutes you put on them against the hours you said you had, and offers only the tasks that fit the energy you have when you actually get there. Nothing you miss moves itself into tomorrow.