Tracy Otsuka

We are almost halfway through the year. And I'm curious, what number planner are you on? Number two? Three, four? Because if you're anything like me, every planner starts with the same promise. This one is finally going to be the one. You know the planners, the ones with 400 pages. The ones that want your 10 year vision, your life purpose, your goals before death and possibly your blood type before you're allowed to write down. Buy dog food. Yeah, you know what I mean, right? It's almost like planner companies believe the more complicated a planner is, the better it must be. But what if that's actually the problem every single time you want to use a traditional planner? Think about it. You have to tab to the right month, then the right week, then the right day. By the time you find Thursday, you. You've forgotten what the hell you even wanted to write down. You know what I'm talking about, right? Look, after years of abandoning planner after planner, I finally realized something. Maybe the problem wasn't me. Maybe the problem was the planner. So I started removing things instead of adding them. And that's what led me to create AOK every day. In fact, we call it the Unplanner. It's a simple card based planning system that keeps your current week or right in front of you, visible, accessible, easy to use. I've spent my entire life abandoning planners. This is the only planning system I've ever been able to stick with. I've used it every day for the past eight years. A few years ago, during COVID I released 100 of these planners. They sold out immediately. Then production costs got out of hand, so I stopped selling them. After years of people asking me to bring it back when I. We're finally bringing it back, but we're starting again with just 100 planners. When these 100 are gone, they're gone. So if you've been looking for a planning system that's simple enough to actually keep using, head over to tracyoutsuka.com planner and grab yours before they sell out.

Richard Branson, Michael Phelps, Justin Timberlake, James Carville.

Wait a minute. Where are the women?

Greta Gerwig, Lisa Ling, Audra McDonald, Simone Biles. That sounds like a list of highly successful titans in a variety of industries.

They all have adhd, but you don't

hear much about that now, do you?

You know what else you don't hear

about are the 43% of people with ADHD who in excellent mental health.

Why aren't we talking about them and what they're doing?

Right. I'm your host Tracy Adsuka. And that's exactly what we do here. I'm a lawyer, not a doctor, a lifelong student, and now the author of my new book, ADHD for Smartass Women. I'm also a certified ADHD coach. And the creator of youf ADHD Brain is aok, a patented system that helps

ADHD women just like you get unstuck

and fall in love with their brilliant brains. Here we embrace our too muchness, and we focus on our strengths. My guests and I credit our ADHD for some of our greatest gifts. And to those who still think they're

too much, too impulsive, too scattered, too

disorganized, I say no one ever made

a difference by being too little. Hi, I'm Tracy Otsuka. Welcome to ADHD for Smartass Women. This is where we challenge the old narratives about adhd and we replace them with something more accurate and a lot more inspiring. And you know what? No small talk today. We're going to get right into it. I have a lot to say on this subject, and so my sense is that we're going to go long because today we are going to talk about planning. Now, not every ADHD brain struggles with planning. In fact, I know plenty of women with ADHD who can use a traditional planner with absolutely no problem. And this actually makes sense, because what we know is that no two ADHD brains are exactly the same. Some may love Google Calendar, some may swear by digital apps, some may use bullet journals, sticky notes or color code, everything. And somehow it works beautifully for them. Good for them, truly. But this episode, it's probably not for them. Well, it is, sort of. Because, you know, if you're here, you're always going to learn something about how your ADHD brain works. This episode is especially for those of us who have spent years buying planners, getting excited about planners, using planners for a few weeks and then somehow forgetting we even own them. Does that happen to you? I think if it does, you know exactly who you are. You have what I call a planner graveyard. A drawer, a shelf, a stack. For me, it was boxes. Boxes and boxes of barely used planters. I'd been saving them for years. I'm not sure why, but I just found them when we moved from our family home of 25 years. I threw them all away. I'm not sure why I was even keeping them, but I had evidence. So, anyway, we have these spaces filled with planners that were absolutely, positively, definitely going to change our life.

Right?

We are sure of that. You know the story. This one is going to be different. This One has the perfect layout, beautiful tabs. This one has a goal tracker, a habit tracker, and a whole section with inspirational quotes. This one had stickers. This one had color coding. That one had everything. And yet somehow, by March, you couldn't even remember where you put it. Doesn't that sound familiar? For years, I thought this meant something about me. I don't know, I thought it meant I wasn't disciplined enough, I lacked consistency. I thought it meant everybody else had received some secret instruction manual for adulthood and planners that I somehow had missed. But over time, I noticed something else. The women I worked with, they weren't lazy. They weren't unintelligent. They certainly weren't lacking in ambition. In fact, they were some of the smartest, most creative, most driven women I'd ever met. Many were running companies, raising families, managing teams, building careers, creating incredible things, yet they still couldn't seem to consistently use a planner. They were just like me. Which made me wonder, well, what if this isn't a planner problem? Or at least not the kind of planner problem that we think it is? Because I don't actually think most people have a planning problem. I think what many of us have is a time problem, a decision problem, and an emotional regulation problem. Planning is simply where problems show up. Let me explain most traditional productivity advice. It assumes that if we know what to do, we're going to do it. That is the assumption. You create the plan, you follow the plan, you get the result. Simple, right? Except that's not how most ADHD brains work. And honestly, it's not how many non ADHD brains work either. Because knowing what to do and being able to do what you know are two completely different things. I want you to think about this. We know we should work out. We know we should go to bed earlier. We know we should stop scrolling, right? We know we should finish that project. So knowledge isn't the problem. The problem is translating our intentions into actual action, doing the thing that we want to do. So what if planning isn't about productivity at all? What if planning is really all about emotion, how we feel about doing the thing? I know that's not how most people talk about planning. Most people talk about planning like it's logistics, right? It's schedules and calendars and time blocks and systems. But think about what happens when you sit down and create a plan. The work is still there. The bills still need to be paid, the project is still due. Nothing has actually changed. And yet most people, they immediately feel better. Why? Because uncertainty is stressful. And our Brains hate uncertainty, especially our ADHD brains. Our nervous systems hate uncertainty. And what else? When your brain doesn't know where to start, everything feels urgent. Everything feels important, everything feels overwhelming. But the moment you create a plan, even a simple one, your brain, it gets a message. You don't have to solve everything right now. You know where to start. And that somehow changes everything. Everything. Planning, it doesn't remove the work. It removes some of the uncertainty. And uncertainty is often the thing creating the overwhelm in the first place. Now, once I started seeing planning through the lens of emotion, a lot of things suddenly started making sense. For example, have you ever noticed that some goals feel exciting and energizing and other goals feel heavy and exhaust before you've even started? Similar goal, same amount of work, completely different emotional experience. This is one of the reasons planning can be so difficult for so many of us. You see, most productivity advice, it assumes that if something is important enough, we're gonna do it. But what we've learned from ADHD research is that motivation works differently for many of us, and importance alone is often not enough to activate our brains to get us to do the thing. We can care deeply about something and still struggle to get started. And the science actually supports this. Researchers have found that ADHD brains process rewards differently. So what am I saying? Well, tasks that are interesting, novel, urgent, challenging, or emotionally engaging tend to motivate us. Tasks that are important, but emotionally flat, they often don't. Which is why many of us can spend four hours researching the history of, I don't know, a random topic nobody asked us about. And we can struggle to spend five months scheduling a dentist appointment. Yep, that's me. A dentist's daughter, no less. So the issue, it's not intelligence, it's not capability. The issue is getting started. And I think that's where many planning systems get it wrong. Most planning systems, well, they're built around productivity. I think planning should create positive emotion first because positive emotion is what creates productivity for our brains. And so this is exactly why I don't think planning is primarily a productivity tool. I think it's an emotional tool. A good plan doesn't just tell you what to do. A good plan changes how you feel about doing it. I want you to think about the last time you completed something meaningful. Maybe you finally cleaned out the garage, or you finished a work project, or you paid off a credit card. You reached a goal you'd been working toward for sometimes months.

Right?

How did you feel? Probably proud, probably relieved. I bet you felt capable and Accomplished. That feeling matters more than most people realize. In fact, I think most of us move past it way too quickly. It's an ADHD thing, right? We check something off, we say great and immediately move on to the next thing. You know, I often call us next people. What's the next thing that I can conquer? We don't pause. We don't celebrate. We don't acknowledge what we've just accomplished. We don't give ourselves gold stars. And yet that feeling of accomplishment is one of the most powerful sources of motivation that we have. Because for our brains, success creates success. When our brain has evidence that we can do something, it becomes easier to believe that we can do the next thing. Which brings me to another reason planning can be so difficult for us.

Time.

Or more specifically, how our ADHD brains experience time. Many of you have heard me talk about time blindness before, but I think part of what we're really dealing with is future self blindness. The future doesn't feel real enough for us to organize around. Tomorrow doesn't feel real. Next week doesn't feel real. Three months from now definitely doesn't feel real. And because it doesn't feel real, it's difficult to make decisions today that benefit the future version of us. Researchers call this temporal discounting. The farther away a reward or consequence is, the less valuable it feels. Which means many of us are constantly asking our present self to do things for a future self. We don't feel connected to. We are now or not now, people. It's as simple as that. And unfortunately, most planning systems are built as though none of that exists. They're built for a brain that's motivated by importance. A brain that's naturally connected to the future. A brain that remembers to use the planner. And that's where things start to go sideways. Because I think there's another reason so many planners fail. And we're going to talk about that next. Now here is what I think is the biggest problem with most planners. It's almost like planner companies have the sense that the more stuff that they can cram into a planner, the better it must be. They add more sections, more trackers, prompts, reflections, goals, worksheets. I've seen monthly, quarterly, even annual reviews in a planner. I've never used them, but I've seen them. So I'm supposed to document my hopes, my dreams, my life purpose and my five year vision before I'm allowed to write down review that contract.

Right.

It's almost as though somewhere along the way we decided that if it's really Difficult. If it's complex, then it must be valuable. And maybe for some people, that works. But for those of us with ADHD brains, complexity creates resistance. We don't want to do it right, and resistance matters, especially when we're already feeling overwhelmed. But that's not even the biggest problem. The biggest problem is what all that space encourages us to do. It encourages us to create impossible days. Think about what happens when most people sit down to plan. They write down everything. The errands, the emails, the projects, the phone calls, the workout, the meal prep. The thing they've been putting off for six months. I once had build a website on my to do list for almost a year. We write down the thing we should do, the thing we wish we'd do, and a hell of a lot of things somebody else wants us to do. And Suddenly Tuesday has 37 tasks on it and nobody stops to ask, wait a minute, is this actually possible? Because somewhere along the lines we got the message that a good plan is a huge plan, that a productive day is a ridiculously no way anyone can do it kind of packed day. A successful person is an ultra busy person with so many things on her planner. But I don't think that's true. In fact, I think that's one of the reasons that so many people like me feel like they're failing with planners. Because they're measuring themselves against a plan that was never realistic to begin with. And then this is what happens. You complete five things, maybe six, maybe even 10. But instead of feeling successful, you feel behind because you have 37 things on your list. And then what do our brains do? They don't focus on what we actually got done. They focus on what we didn't get done. Psychologists call this negativity bias. Our brains naturally pay more attention to what's unfinished than what we've completed. Which means the longer your list gets, the more opportunities your brain has to feel like a failure. Even when you've had an incredibly productive day. Notice what's happening here. This isn't really a productivity problem. You got things done. The problem is the emotional experience you're having about what got done. That's why planning matters. Planning doesn't just shape your actions. Planning shapes how you feel about your actions. Think about that. You can have an objectively successful day and still feel unsuccessful. Not because of what you did, but because of how you planned. And that is why I have become obsessed with realistic weeks. Not ambitious weeks, realistic ones. Because remember, success creates success, and successful days create successful weeks and successful weeks Create successful lives, not perfect days. Successful days. A successful day is a day where you move something meaningful that you care about forward. A successful day is a day where you keep a promise to yourself. A successful day is where you make progress. And that's why I think one meaningful goal beats 10 random goals every single time. Because your brain doesn't need more to do. Your brain needs clarity. It needs focus. It needs a win and notice. I didn't say a successful day is a day where you get everything done, because that's impossible. I didn't say that a successful day is a day where you answer every email or check every box or solve every problem. I said that a successful day is a day where you move something meaningful forward. And I think that's where a lot of us get stuck. Because many ADHD women spend their lives accomplishing things, but they don't necessarily spend their lives accomplishing things that matter to them. And those two are not the same thing. In fact, I think it's one of the main reasons that so many smart, capable, successful women still feel unsuccessful. We're getting things done all day. We're just not getting our things done. And that's really a different problem. I want you to think about a typical day. You answer emails, you return calls, you solve problems, you put out fires, you handle so many requests. You take care of the kids, you take care of work, you take care of everybody else. And by the end of the day, you are exhausted. You were busy all day, you were productive all day. You accomplished a hell of a lot of. But somehow you still don't feel successful. You still don't feel like you did enough. Why? Because accomplishment and fulfillment are not the same thing. And I think this brings us right back to emotion again, because what we're really talking about is the emotional experience of our lives, not whether we're getting things done, whether we're getting things done that are actually meaningful to us. You can spend your entire life crossing things off lists and still feel disconnected from your life. And I think that's especially true for those of us with ADHD brains, because we're interest driven, meaning driven, purpose driven. We're not just trying to get things done. We're trying to do things that matter, things that are interesting, things that are meaningful and that make us feel more like ourselves. We want to do things that move our lives forward. And when week after week goes by without touching something that matters to you, it's hard to feel successful. So it's no wonder we feel depleted. We lose motivation we start wondering, oh, my gosh, what is wrong with me? Nothing is wrong with you. You're simply starving a part of yourself that needs to be fed. And I think this is one of the reasons traditional productivity advice, it just fails us. It assumes that checking things off is enough for us, but for many of us, checking things off, it's just not enough. Again, we need meaning. We need interest, we need connection. We need progress on something that feels really important to us. Because here's what I have noticed when a woman tells me she's stuck or she's overwhelmed, unmotivated, or just plain exhausted, and we start looking at her life. Usually she's become the manager of everyone else's priorities, everybody else's needs, goals, and emergencies. And somewhere along the way, she's disappeared from her own calendar, her own goals, her own interests and dreams. She doesn't even know what they are. And then she's surprised that she feels flat. But if your entire week is devoted to maintaining everyone else's life and crossing everything off their to do list, when exactly are you building your own life? This is why I believe that every single week should include at least one goal that is absolutely yours. It's not your boss's, it's not your spouse's, it's not your kids. It is yours. One thing that matters to you, that excites you, that moves your life forward. One thing that creates positive emotion. Because planning is not just about managing responsibilities. Planning is about protecting what matters to you. A good plan. It doesn't just help you manage the weak. A good plan helps you build a life that you actually want to live. Here's another place where a lot of us get into trouble. We treat a plan like a promise. If we're lucky, we sit down on Saturday or Sunday, we create our plan for the week, and we decide what we're going to do, how we're going to do it, when we're going to do it. And then Monday shows up. And Monday has other ideas. You know how Mondays can be. You wake up with a headache, the dog throws up, your kid needs something, a client calls and throws your whole schedule off. So instead, you spend half the day dealing with something you hadn't planned for. In other words, life happens, right? But instead of adjusting the plan, many of us do something else. We decide, okay, that Monday it's a failure, we failed. And once again, not really about planning, is it? It's about emotions. Specifically shame. Because the moment we decide the plan was a promise, a commitment, every change becomes evidence that we failed again. And that's a terrible emotional relationship to have with planning, don't you think? I mean, we had things on our list, we completed six of them, and somehow the conclusion becomes, I wasn't disciplined enough, or I didn't follow through, or I should have done better. But what if that's the wrong conclusion? What if a plan isn't a commitment or a promise? What if it's just information? What if it's simply your best guess based on what you know right now? Because none of us are fortune tellers. Not me, not you, not the world's greatest planner. A plan is not a crystal ball. It's direction. And I think that's also an important distinction, because when you stop expecting yourself to be able to predict the future perfectly, planning becomes much less stressful. I think one of the biggest benefits of planning is that it actually reduces decisions. I want you to think about how many decisions we make every single day. What should I work on? What should I do first? What do I do next? Should I answer that email? Make the call? Start the project? Should I keep researching? It's like, should I? Should I? Should I?

Right.

Every single decision requires energy from us. And when we're overwhelmed, even tiny decisions can feel just so exhausting. A good plan, it removes a lot of those decisions. Not all of them, but enough. You already know. Okay, this is what matters to me this week. You already know what your goal is for the week. You already know the next steps, and that frees up energy for actually doing the thing. But this is what's most important. When the week doesn't go according to plan, and sometimes it won't, that doesn't mean that you failed. It means that you've learned something. Maybe the task took longer than you expected, or your estimate was wrong. Maybe you were trying to do too much. Yeah, that's all information. It is data. It is not failure. One of the things that I've learned over the years is that you don't become an expert on your brain by judging it. You become an expert on your brain by observing it, by paying attention, by getting curious and noticing patterns. By thinking that's interesting instead of what's wrong with me. Why couldn't I do this? Because the goal is not to create a perfect week. The goal is to create enough successful weeks that you learn how your brain actually works. And once you understand how your brain works, planning, well, it just gets a whole lot easier. Not because you become perfect, but because you're finally working with your brain instead of Fighting it. And there's one more thing that I hope you take away from this episode. It's this. Your brain makes sense. Maybe not to everyone, maybe not all the time, but it makes sense. There are reasons certain goals energize you and others drain you. There are reasons some systems work for you and others don't. There are reasons you've struggled with certain planning systems. And when you start understanding those reasons, something shifts. You stop asking, what's wrong with me? And you start asking, how does my brain work in this specific instance? And that is a much more useful question. Because once we understand how our brains work, we can stop trying to force ourselves into systems that were never designed for us in the first place. So that got me thinking. What if we've been blaming ourselves for a problem we didn't even create? What if we'd been trying to use planning systems that were never designed for the way our brains actually work? And what if that's why so many of us, like me, have or had a plan or graveyard sitting somewhere in our homes? Because that's certainly what I had. And eventually, I realized something. The goal was never to become better at using planners. The goal was to find a planning system that worked with my brain instead of against it. One that kept my current week sitting right in front of me. One that helped me focus on what mattered to me instead of everything that didn't. One that helped me create successful days instead of impossible ones. And that was simple enough to fit into my life instead of taking over. One that, instead of adding more pages, more sections, more trackers, more things to manage, started taking those things away. So that's exactly what eventually became what we call our unplanner. A. Okay. Every day. I created it for myself after decades of, frankly, just abandoning planners. I wanted something simple enough that I would actually keep using. And for the first time in my life, I did. I've used it because it works for my brain. Whether you ever use my planner or not, this is what I hope you take away from today's episode. You do not need to become someone else. You don't need more shame. You need a better understanding of how your brain works. Because once you understand your brain, you can start building systems around it instead of fighting it. And then things get easier. Not easy, but definitely easier. So if you've spent years staring at a planter graveyard wondering why you couldn't make those planners work, maybe you're asking the wrong question. Maybe the question is actually not what's wrong with me? Maybe the question is what kind of system would actually work for the way my brain works. And maybe, just maybe, you are not the problem. Maybe the planner is. So if you've been listening to this episode, thinking, yep, that's me, then I'd love to show you the exact planning system I've used every week for the last eight years. A few years ago, during COVID we tested a hundred of these planners, and they sold out. Then with COVID you know, production costs just got so out of hand, so I stopped selling them. But I never stopped using the system. It's the exact planning system I created when I realized overwhelmed brains don't need more. We actually need less. Less friction, less complexity, less resistance. So after years of people asking me to bring it back, we are finally bringing it back in a very limited release of just 100 planners. This is going to be a July 2026 to June 2027 planner. So you're going to get a full 12 months. But when those 100 are gone, they're gone. So if you've been looking for a planning system that's simple enough to actually keep using, head over to tracyoutsuka.com forward/planner. And because you are a valued podcast listener, use our code podcastplanner all uppercase for $10 off. That code will only work for the next 72 hours, assuming we still have planners available again, when they're gone, they're gone. Tracyoutsuka.com forward/planner until next time, stay curious, stay compassionate with yourself, stay in positive emotion, and as always, stay brilliant. That's what I have for you for today. I am your host, Tracy Atsuka. Thank you so much for being here for yet another episode of ADHD for Smartass Women. If this episode helped you see yourself a little more clearly, please take a moment to leave a review. It helps more women find this podcast so they too can see themselves more clearly. Thank you so much for listening and I'll see you here next week. You've been listening to the ADHD for

Smart Act Women podcast. I'm your host, Tracy Otsuka. Join us at adhd for smart women.com where you can find more information on my new book, ADHD for Smartass Women. And my patented you'd ADHD brain is a okay system to help you get unstuck and fall in love with your brilliant brain.