Strategic Planning with ADHD

It’s the time of the year when the current calendar is dwindling at an alarming rate, and at the same time, next year’s calendar is speeding toward you at an alarming rate. If you are like me, that means you are trying to achieve all the goals set for this quarter and year AND looking ahead to next year, all at the same time.?

And when I say, “All at the same time,” I mean it quite literally. As a person with self-diagnosed ADHD, my brain tries to do many things all at the same time.?

Before I continue, let me put in a little disclosure and disclaimer. I have not been diagnosed by a doctor with ADHD, but I have zero doubt that I would be. I was treated for ADHD as a very young child, but in the 1960s the medicines were essentially sedatives, and my parents vowed to never go down that road again. So, we didn’t, and I haven’t as an adult.?

And please do not interpret anything I am saying as discouraging people from getting treatment. I am absolutely an advocate of seeking medical and mental health treatment. I have considered it for ADHD, and I may yet, but at 58, I’ve also developed a lot of coping skills that help me navigate it. I didn’t even realize these things I was doing were coping skills until I started researching ADHD.??

I won’t bore you with lots of details about what makes brains with ADHD different, but I will share the best description I have ever heard that fits my brain perfectly. An ADHD brain is filled with thousands of tiny trampolines and there are always hundreds or thousands of things bouncing around between them. That’s exactly what it is like. Always. Some you can ignore, some try to hijack your attention, and some completely distract you.??

I thought it might be interesting to try and keep up with how many things bounced around while I wrote this article, but I lost track – and was too distracted – by the second paragraph.?

So, how does this make strategic planning interesting? With thousands of tiny trampolines bouncing thoughts around, there is no shortage of ideas. The challenge is to keep from getting lost following all the bouncy things. You cannot possibly follow all the ideas, or you won’t ever accomplish anything. You will just spend a lot of time daydreaming!?

According to some of the reading I’ve recently been doing on this topic, there is also some brilliance that comes along with having an ADHD brain. It allows you to see connections between things that others may not easily see. That’s always been one of my strengths and why I love strategy so much.??

I cannot begin to explain why this works or how it happens. It’s just one of those things that happens for me. I think we all have those skills in our life (art, music, dance) that we are good at, and there isn’t an explanation – it just is. And for me, seeing connections between things and new ideas has just always been a thing.??

As a result, I would much rather spend time thinking about what’s next and how to maximize where we are than digging into the day-to-day. I’ve always been a person who starts projects and struggles to finish them. That means to be successful I must always surround myself with people who are excellent implementers. Thankfully, at Gifted Travel Network , I am incredibly blessed to have people with amazing skills who can operationalize tasks far better than I could ever hope to.?

Over time I have learned two coping skills that have helped me tremendously. First, if I am just listening, I struggle to retain information. I think this is because a common issue with ADHD brains is very poor working (short-term) memory. As a result, I need to take notes. I may never look at them again, but the act of writing makes the idea “stickier” in my brain. I have used an electronic notetaker (SuperNote) and pen and paper; both work for me and have advantages and disadvantages. I can also type on a laptop but find that’s distracting to people in a meeting. So you will usually see me being a notetaker in a meeting.??

I am a visual learner and processer, so my second coping skill is that I have to be able to see things to put them together. When you are talking about ideas and not things, that usually means writing things out so I can see them and process them. Sometimes, it means creating a bunch of sticky notes, each with its own topic (and if those sticky notes are all different colors, then all the better!). I also want to see the big picture, so I have a very large (3’x7’) annual calendar on my home office wall that helps me understand the whole year at one time.?

This all means that strategic planning for me looks a bit different than it does for other people – and that’s OK! I think if we all just lean into what feels right for us, we would be better off. I have had to try lots of different things over the years to get to where I am now, and I am still learning tools and techniques.

If you have any you would like to share, I would love to learn from you. We are all stronger when we work together.??