In this episode of the Translating ADHD podcast, Asher and Dusty explore the challenges and opportunities involved in creating routines that work well for people with ADHD. They emphasize starting with what you already do and finding ways to add value without overcomplicating or overengineering your daily habits. The hosts discuss how routines don’t have to be perfect or rigid but should instead be adaptable to individual capacity, positionality, and life seasons. They also provide real-life examples of small adjustments, such as using waiting times productively or breaking down tasks into manageable chunks, to help listeners build sustainable daily practices.
Asher and Dusty also highlight the importance of self-awareness in designing routines, pointing out that some people thrive on structure while others need flexibility and novelty to stay engaged. They caution against forcing generic advice like strict checklists onto everyone and encourage listeners to find their own balance between formal systems and going with the flow. Ultimately, they remind listeners that routines serve the purpose of making life easier and more fulfilling, not more stressful or overwhelming. The key takeaway is that progress matters more than perfection and that routines should be tailored to fit one’s unique needs and energy levels.
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Episode Transcript:
[00:02:06] Asher: Hi, I’m Ash. [00:03:13] Dusty: And I’m Dusty. [00:04:10] Asher: And this is Translating ADHD. Listeners, I am doing a live coaching demo on Thursday, March 19th at 8 p.m. Eastern Time. This is for our Patreon subscribers. If you are not currently a Patreon subscriber, you can visit the website at www.translatingadhd.com and click on the Patreon tab. For $5/month, you gain access to these monthly events with either me or Dusty.You also gain access to our Discord server, and all of our Patreon funds go to covering the costs of bringing this show to you. So thank you very much to our Patreon subscribers who are helping us pay for editing and the other things that we need to keep this show going.
[00:46:22] Dusty: So, Ash, what are we talking about today? [00:49:16] Asher: Dusty, last week we talked about preparing to make the stars align. This week we’re going to take a slightly different approach to a similar topic and talk about building on basic routines, which, by the way, can be a real ADHD pitfall.We talked about this a little bit last week – the idea of a routine that we overcomplicate out of the gate. A morning routine that we think has to have 17 steps and it needs to be just perfect. But the idea here is how can we catch ourselves with something we’re already doing and find the opportunity to add value there? Before we hit record, you said something really interesting, this distinction between adding value versus just adding on.
That’s where we can get in trouble as people with ADHD as we can add on in this way that loses sight of the original goal, and then the whole routine falls apart and we don’t really know why.
[01:50:10] Dusty: Yeah, that overengineering is so hard. And sometimes expanding is the right move, but I think it’s so hard to set up routines that accommodate the flexibility we need to expand and contract as our variable capacity expands and contracts. So I like this because it feels like a good middle step where you’re getting more out of it without necessarily adding more to it.That feels hard, yes. Maybe I’ll try to explain what it is that we’re talking about as best I understand it. So we all have routines, whether we recognize them as routines or not, whether we like them or not. You know, if I come home every day, leave all my crap in the car, come inside, flop down on the couch, fall asleep, wake up, wander around the house looking for all my stuff and not remember that it’s all in my car.
By the time I should have already left and then when I do actually leave – I’m late but that’s my routine. I don’t have to like it but that’s the routine that I have, right? I know we all want these “perfect” routines that are intentional. We set them up, we follow them step by step but we all have routines somewhere in the middle, you know, we get up in the morning, make a cup of coffee, put on our clothes, maybe brush our teeth, feed the dog, etc. that counts as a routine, whether it’s formal and intentional.
As you were talking about this idea of making more out of those routines, an example might be if you’re standing waiting for the coffee to brew and you’ve got ten minutes, you could clean the kitchen for ten minutes.
What are the opportunities in the things you’re already doing to add more value in a way that doesn’t feel heavy, if you don’t have capacity. So for me, an example is when my daughter was young, I used to take her to dance lessons and the parents weren’t allowed in the dance lessons to watch the kids, we had to wait in our cars.
They were short lessons, like half an hour so I would often just be sitting there scrolling, or maybe I would run a quick errand. But I realized at a certain point that something that I kept wanting to add into my life was more time to read, and I just never seemed to be able to make the time for it.
And it felt like this thing I was going to have to restructure my day to make space for reading. Then, I realized, oh, actually, I’ve already got that time, I’m just using it for something else. So I started bringing the books in the car, and then when I would sit and wait for my daughter, I would do the reading there.
So it wasn’t hard to just switch out scrolling or running an errand for reading. And again, sometimes, I needed to run those errands so it wasn’t like every single time I had this perfect, oh, when I drop my daughter off, then I read. It’s like when I drop my daughter off, I’ll read some of the time.
I got to use that time for something else. It doesn’t have to be this perfect formal thing, but I was able to get a lot more books read by just repurposing something that I was already doing as part of a routine anyway. And I think if I’m understanding correctly, that is kind of what you were talking about with the example you gave as well, right?
[04:50:07] Asher: Yes, that is exactly the type of thing I’m talking about. For me, I have learned to let go of a clean kitchen as a goal and instead to sort of treat it as this thing that I am continually doing a little bit at a time, and that works really well for me.So when my coffee is brewing in the morning, I take ten minutes to do whatever. This morning I actually took that ten minutes to continue disassembling my dishwasher so that I can repair it, which is technically in service of tidying the kitchen.
[05:30:07] Dusty: Oh, no, not the dishwasher! I had to clean my dishwasher filter last night too – it was all full of chia seeds and glitter. [05:39:03] Asher: Chia seeds and glitter – ha! Yeah, mine’s not getting power right now. I’m in an era where I’m trying to learn how to do more DIY. I found the instructions last night to take the next step when I got stuck yesterday. And so this morning I used those ten minutes to finish the disassembly process.So now it is fully disassembled. We’re waiting on some tools before I can do anything else, but I was able to move that forward. And by the way, here’s a place where we can get really hung up. Is that all or nothing? Thinking I moved it forward but I’ve also made a huge mess because there are now dishwasher parts all over my kitchen and dining room.
But it’s not done and I can’t get it done right now. But it’s ready for the next step. And so it’s kind of breaking out of that all or nothing thinking that routine has to necessarily equal completion in some form.
[06:39:11] Dusty: Yeah, that’s huge. I see that with clients a lot, you know, and the most extreme examples usually come to find it is the most extreme where people have to go outside and they don’t want to be perceived unless they’re put together, which is interesting to me because I’m totally fine being like a huge slob. Like, I will just drop my kids off at school and I don’t even have a bra on. I’m wearing the same pants I was wearing yesterday. Sometimes I forget that other people can see me, but I have some clients for whom it’s very distressing to go outside. Or maybe they live in an apartment where other people can see them if they haven’t, you know, showered, shaved, all that stuff.But that is often necessary for other tasks like taking out the garbage, taking out the recycling. So you’ll get this kind of interlocking dependencies where it’s like, well, I can’t break down boxes because the recycling is full, but I can’t take the recycling out because I haven’t showered and I can’t shower because of this other thing. Ergo, I just have to deal with all these boxes in my space. Right?
I had a client describe it as if you give a mouse a cookie type of situation, right. And I’ve definitely found kind of like what you’re talking about. For me, one of the biggest things that has helped me to keep my house at a dull roar is actually not so much following through on one thing, but just putting things kind of generally where they need to go.
Like if my recycling bin is full and I can’t bring myself to take it out rather than just not take it out, I will just move it to the stairs, for example, and then the next time I’m near the stairs, I’ll just grab it as I’m on the way somewhere. And so a lot of things in my house, I’ll just put them generally in like an area where I know that “Future Dusty” who’s passing through this area, can deal with them and that has helped me a lot with not needing to stop what I’m doing to attend the laundry or attend to the dishes or attend the recycling.
It’s like I can just set it in motion. I can do the first couple of steps so that I can then do the thing I’m trying to do. If I need to use the sink and the sink is full, I can just put the dishes next to the dishwasher to load them later. I don’t need to spend 30 minutes getting off track and then have no energy left to use the sink for what I need it for. I can actually just make the sink accessible.
Finding small ways that we can lean into the things we’re already doing, you know, habits stack, get value out of where we’re already going to be is great because it doesn’t add on in this energetic fashion. I think it’s about being imperfect and messy, but still making progress.
[09:13:08] Asher: Right, exactly. Dusty, I’m sitting here kind of chuckling to myself because the clients you mentioned who don’t want to be perceived unless they are ready to be perceived – I definitely have that. Ages ago on this podcast, I was talking about a mantra of mine – start with clean. That’s a foundational routine for me. My days always go better if I start with a shower and fixing my hair and putting on decent enough clean clothes, because if I haven’t done those things, that becomes a barrier to doing so many other things as you’ve just described. So listeners, if that describes you, that might be a foundational routine that you need to establish for yourself.I want to kind of shift gears a little bit and talk about task management, because that is an area where clients come so often looking for routine, and where clients are so prone to overengineering or attempting to over engineer.
[10:18:24] Dusty: That’s something I think about a lot because I run an online community. And in that online community we have a new group that we started last year called the Consistency Collective, which is all about systems maintenance. And the first year that I beta tested it with clients, I warned them that it was a beta test, and sure enough, I had a lot of clients get really stuck in systems overwhelm and perfectionism.What I did was I asked everyone what are all the different areas of your lives that a person might need a system? House cleaning, meals, exercise, those are really obvious ones. But we even got into stuff like the sort of nuanced things that you might not think about, like friendship or even spirituality. I had a client who was really struggling to do their Bible study or actually make the space to not be so busy that they never felt like they could connect spiritually.
So I sort of came up with these headers that were all the different areas that this group identified. I came up with some resources so that if they were struggling in these areas, they had some examples of systems. And I said, the goal here is not for you guys to over engineer your life. The goal is not to go through this resource and try to build a system for every area of your world. That would be crazy. And still, I had a couple clients, that’s exactly what they tried to do.
So this year I’ve retooled the approach and made sure that they’re a little bit better supported and being like, okay, our goal here is just to understand what our options are when we don’t know what our system should be like. If we know we need a budget and we need some sort of routine or system around finances, but we don’t know what it should be because everybody out here is trying to reinvent the wheel, and then they discover, like wine AB or they discover French and they’re like, oh man, I just spent all this time setting up these elaborate spreadsheets and here’s this app I could have just gotten.
I see this a lot in that context, where people are very fixated on this idea of engineering and overengineering and it’s been interesting to watch my clients figure out where putting in the effort and engineering a system or a routine is worth it, and and sustainable and where it’s like too much, right?
For me, there was a period where having my morning and evening routines written out explicitly and trying to follow it was helpful. But I have just come to this place in my life where maybe it’s because I’ve been doing it so long, it is not helpful to me anymore, and it feels arbitrary to try to overengineer that or to use a routine app or even tick it off every day and track it.
At this point it would be more work than it’s worth, and nobody’s going to give me a sticker or a medal, right? I don’t get a trophy for nailing my morning routine, you know, every single morning and night. It’s still useful. I still have a morning and evening routine, but I’m in a place right now where being more flexible about it and doing some of the things some of the time, you know, allowing myself to go off script and switch it up as needed is a lot more adaptive to my personal life circumstances.
I’ve really kind of been on a journey of trying to help a lot of my clients figure out where the “Goldilocks zone” is between putting an effort and building a system and engineering and not putting in effort and not building a system and not overengineering, but just going with the flow. So it’s a really interesting thing.
The hard part is once you get something locked in, life is not an Instagram photo, it’s not a snapshot. It’s going to change. And the way that it’s working for you in one season may be totally different than what you need in another season, which can be frustrating if you’ve put in a lot of effort.
But I think the key thing is to roll with the punches and to recognize that neither is actually superior. It’s not better to have an explicit system that’s on a list that you tick off or an app that you’re using for habit tracking. It’s not better to just roll by the seat of your pants. They’re just different for different circumstances.
[14:19:22] Asher: To add to what you just said, I have this friend who’s ADHD and she was describing to me her cleaning “routine”, which is not a routine at all.She said if I just do the thing that’s in front of me, then I do the next thing and then I do the next thing, and then I do the next thing, and then the house is clean.
And the moment I try to write it out or check it off a list or systemize it in some way, then I do nothing. I do absolutely nothing. And so that Goldilocks zone you’re describing is really key.
Which takes us back to the idea of starting with a really basic routine and then building on it, the opportunity. This is the work that we do as coaches. The opportunity here is not to build the perfect routine, but to start to figure out what works for you.
So for me and my kitchen, as I said earlier, I have learned what works for me is to let go of the expectation of a clean kitchen. The only time my kitchen is perfectly clean is if I’m having company, and that’s because my kitchen is a really cute room and I want it to be clean. I want it to look nice. I want to make it special for my friends coming over so there’s positive motivation there.
There are a few dishes I do, a few dishes I may not do, all of the dishes. I have limited counter space, so I can’t always do all of the dishes because there’s not always room for all of the dishes to lay out and dry, or there’s not always time for me to stand at the sink for 20 or 30 minutes to wash every single dish. But I keep it moving, and that’s good enough for me. It keeps things to a dull enough roar that when I do have that moment, and I want to put in the extra effort to have a fully clean kitchen, it’s not such an onerous task.
So when thinking about routines, the opportunity here really is curiosity, right? Start with the thing you’re already doing. What do you want to build on and why? What’s working and what’s not working? Where do you need actual structure and where is it okay to sort of – I hate to use the word “vibes” because vibe coding has become this sort of toxic language, and a toxic thing happening in capitalism right now.
But, where can you just kind of go with the flow? For me, somewhere I’ve learned to do that pretty well is with relationships. I have a lot of clients who want to build routine and structure around maintaining relationships. For me, I’ve gotten to a place where if somebody is on my mind, I just shoot them a text or get in touch with them in some way.
Something comes to mind where it’s like, oh, I haven’t had 1:1 time with this person in quite a while. I then set an intention to make that plan, but I don’t complicate it more than that, and doing it that way works well enough for me. But I also want to say that there’s a lot of work that went into that being true.
Why do my clients need to build routines around relationships? Well, in part because of how they can get in their own way because of ADHD. Oh, I haven’t texted this person in so long or I didn’t reply to their texts. And so that guilt and shame can then build up that wall of “awful” around the task itself.
I don’t struggle with that anymore. If I didn’t answer your text three weeks ago and you’re my friend – you’ve met me. You know that this is par for the course for me. And you know that if you actually need my attention in some meaningful way, you can ask for it. But if we’re just conversing and I dropped the ball on the conversation, that’s okay. I’m not going to let guilt and shame get in my way.
So I don’t need routine and structure to help me reengage. I just sort of naturally find my moments, my pathways to make that happen. But routine and structure along the way and unpacking some of the stuff that gets in the way helps me get there.
[18:43:03] Dusty: Yeah. And something you said there about your client is so important because it is about self-awareness. I think where a lot of people get stuck in properly leveraging routine is not accounting for our positionality. Knowing our own oppositionality and knowing how to work with it is so important.Personally, I love systems, I love engineering, I love routine. That’s just something that I genuinely enjoy so I do a lot of that for myself. And when clients are into it, I love to talk with them about it. But there are some clients who that’s just like a big no go zone and I respect that. What I think counts as overengineering, is creating a system for yourself that is going to require your nervous system to engage with it in a way that doesn’t always feel effortful.
If you’re someone who has higher oppositionality, I think the challenge is to figure out how to create something that flows that doesn’t feel like it’s exhaustive just to engage with it. Right? For some people, they just can’t tell themselves what to do. An example of this for me, is that what tends to get me around oppositionality is feeling like choice and variety and fun and keeping myself on my toes.
So I don’t want to call it overengineering, but I have to massively engineer my relationship to meal prepping. I’ve tried and seen all these different meal prepping systems and the thing that ultimately works for me is actually to switch up how I meal prep, almost every week. Sometimes I can get two, maybe three weeks out of the same way of doing it at a time. But basically I have a meta system, which is whenever I feel like I’m struggling to just manage groceries and manage meals, I sit down and go okay, what would feel fun? Where’s my energy at? What am I in the mood for? Do I want to cook? Do I want to avoid cooking?
What do I need out of a meal planning system this week? Sometimes it’s been something really elaborate, like I’m going to have a theme week or a month. And the theme is soup. I’m going to look up new soup recipes. I’m going to try to make as many soups as I can, and then it feels like a little challenge to myself.
Other weeks I don’t even feel like I understand how to plan meals. Instead, I need to keep it as simple as possible and just use some ingredients in the cupboard tonight, but another night I’m just going to fly by the seat of my pants, I’m going to under plan because that’s what I’m feeling.
But the system is essentially checking in with my capacity and being like, what do I want this to look like this week? I rebuild it sometimes every week, but that is the best way for me to be consistent with feeding myself and the people in my family because my willingness to engage with a formal system or routine really waxes and wanes when it comes to food.
Some weeks, I have a little meal planning thing that goes on my fridge and I’ll happily fill it out and refer to and follow it, I love that. And then other weeks I hate it. And I’m like, absolutely not, I just can’t even.
I think understanding your relationship to a positionality is a really key thing, because like you said, for your client, they were self-aware enough to know, they couldn’t write down a routine. I hate generalized ADHD advice and it’s one of the reasons I think coaching is so, so endlessly valuable.
If you go on TikTok, you read a book or you read an article, they’re always going to give you the same generic advice, and that advice is going to be something about writing it down, have a routine, follow some steps. And that advice will work for some people some of the time about some things, but it’s going to be really disempowering for a person like your client, for whom writing down actually ruins it.
And they could have done it, but they’re trying to force it. They’re trying to force themselves to do it “the right way” because they saw some TikTok where some influencer said, well, this is the way to do it. I always try to be really careful with the content that I make to always give a disclaimer and say this is what’s working for me, or this is what has worked for some of my clients.
This might not be right for everyone because there’s never a right way with ADHD about anything forever. It’s just what works for you, right now.
[23:03:26] Asher: Dusty, I really love that example of this flexible system that is really retooling the system based on capacity, based on our positionality, based on bandwidth energy towards this particular topic. I also want to note that there’s probably an element of novelty in there that is helpful.I had a client years ago who was a special educator, and we spent a good long while in our coaching over a period of a couple of years, coming back to this topic, kind of beating our heads against the wall about finding the system and the breakthrough moment was realizing that changing up the system is the system. The way that this client’s academic year works, because she’s not a traditional teacher, she’s a special educator at the high school level so she’s involved with things like testing for college. So SAT and ACT accommodations, parent/teacher conferences, etc. have an impact on who her kids are any given semester and what their needs are and where they’re struggling. So it’s this always variable schedule.
We kind of figured out that the system was whatever it needed to be in the moment. So she was often switching tools, switching apps, and rebuilding. Sometimes it was an app, sometimes it was a spreadsheet, sometimes it was this, sometimes it was that. But that process itself was really helpful to help her orient to the moment. And the breakthrough realization for her is that the element of novelty was actually supremely helpful and her ability to engage with that system.
So the idea of going back to last year’s system for this year’s season, wasn’t a helpful concept for her. Looking for the thing that was going to work in the here and now and spending the time to build that was hugely helpful for her.
[25:10:08] Dusty: Yeah. And I just want to add, when I’ve talked to people about this, sometimes I’ve had a bit of pushback either online or from clients being like, okay, but the system that you’re describing, like what I talk about with meal prepping sounds really exhausting. I can barely get through my day. How can I do that for everything?And so I want to really clarify that for me, food is hard. It’s like one of the hardest – like a boss level thing. So it’s not that I do this process with every area of my life. There’s lots of routines and systems I have where it does just stay the same for a long time and I don’t need to retool it.
That’s the thing important to remember too, with all or nothing thinking – we’re not saying that everything has to be like this. It’s about looking at which areas of your life you need. And I think we started this episode talking about for me, it comes down to how do you, how do you be, and how do you have the things that you want to be doing without massively increasing your cognitive load?
Where are the opportunities in the routines that exist to get more value without more effort? That’s where we started. And so in any areas in any routines, whether they’re formal, whether they’re engineered, whether they’re casual and just kind of grassroots, so to speak, I think there’s always an opportunity to be like, okay, what are the things that would make me feel like I’m showing up for myself as the person I want to be?
Yes. I would love it if I could sit down and practice the guitar for an hour a day. I cannot do that. And even when I’ve had the time and the capacity, I haven’t been able to do that because that’s just not. There’s different challenges for me. But if I put my guitar in the kitchen and I’m standing there cooking, yeah, I can like noodle for five minutes at a time or sometimes what I’ll do is I’ll put my violin here on the, desk, and between clients, I’ll just pick it up and run a scale really quickly because, frankly, my scales are a little weak. I could be a bit more precise. I should really develop a violin practice, but in all my years playing, I never do. But in between clients for a couple minutes at a time, I can be like my nana, nana nana nana. And if I do that, you know, intermittently over the years, guess what? I’m improving and I get the fun value of it. But I get to see myself progress without putting myself under a whole lot of stress, when I don’t really have the capacity. And I like that idea. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to be something.
[27:39:01] Asher: Ooh, Dusty, I think that’s a really salient point to end on. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to be something. So listeners, the opportunity from this episode is what are you already doing and what might you tack on to it? Or where do you have a few minutes here or there that you could find some of that you do have value?Where can you distinguish between what needs a formal routine and where do I benefit from some structure versus where can I let it be more organic, versus where might novelty help? Where might changing it up be part of the routine for me?
[28:24:00] Dusty:Yeah. [28:24:25] Asher: So until next week, I’m Ash. [28:26:15] Dusty: And I’m Dusty.
[28:28:21] Asher: And this was the Translating ADHD podcast. Thanks for listening.
