Why Time Blocking Doesn't Work For ADHD & What To Do Instead

Time blocking. Decide your day in advance and when the time comes, just follow the calendar. Just do it. Color code your calendar so that it's easy to organize and categorize. It sounds amazing in theory, but here's what actually probably happens. You spend ages making the perfect plan, you color code your calendar and make it aesthetic, and when the time comes, you either completely ignore it, rebel against it, or completely forget that it even existed in the first place. One task's run over, the whole schedule collapses, and your all-or-nothing attitude brain goes, well, today's ruined, might as well do some random stuff for four hours. Time blocking fails ADHD brains because it assumes two things that are not true. One, you have a decent sense of time, and two, you have relatively stable energy day to day. And that's just not us. Our performance varies wildly daily. Some days you are super productive, get actually ---- done and hyper-focused like for six hours straight, and other days one email feels just impossible. But time blocking assumes consistent energy and it also treats all tasks equally. For example, under time blocking, replying to an email is the same. But when you think about it, an email that comes from a government that is about taxes versus about an exciting project that you genuinely want to work on are completely different, even though they are the same action of just like replying to an email. Because our ADHD brains actually relies on novelty, urgency, and fun factor when it comes to task initiation. But time blocking doesn't take that into an account. And when plans derail, you're supposed to constantly recalculate, adjust your calendar, almost like, you know, micromanager thing, and that is executive function, which is the weakest part when it comes to ADHD. So we ping pong between rigid schedules we never follow and chaotic to-do lists where we do random stuff all day. I got so sick of this loop that I built a different system. Instead of trying to force myself to obey the clock, it actually works with my motivation, energy, and brain work. And let me explain how it works. So if I would explain the core idea in one sentence, one summary, because I know your attention span is short. Instead of batching tasks by activity type, like emails, admin work, deep work, blah blah, we batch them by how stressful or energizing they feel. And we're going to call these batches, kind of like the batches that we create sprints, and we're going to treat them as one task instead of 10 different tasks under the same batch. Time blocking batches by activity. However, for an ADHD brain, what actually matters is not like the activity itself, it's actually the pressure and the emotional energy that it requires. That is the variable that we actually care about. But how do you find out your categories, right? I want you to think about the variables that actually affect how a task feels to your brain. So I noticed that anything with a deadline today feels actually completely different from a same task that has a deadline tomorrow or next week. A boring email that I freaking hate, like the one that I have right now from the government about taxes, because the consequences is really big and the deadline is absolutely today, I'll do that. But if the email's due date is tomorrow or next week, I'll probably wait until the deadline is just like staring at my face like this. So I decided to make a urgent as a one sprint category that I have, because that's like one of the factors that motivate me the most. Anything due today or already overdue goes here, regardless of what type of task it is. Then I noticed tasks with upcoming deadlines. It's not today, but they're approaching. So I made deadlines as another sprint group. This is basically like the buffer zone that I have for myself. If I procrastinate too long, which is the most common case, they're jumped to the urgent sprint category. I also noticed that boring maintenance tasks like email scheduling, chores, replying to personal messages on WhatsApp drained me in like in a specific way. Even if they take me like three minutes each, I just hate them. And I need different strategies to get through them, like body dabbling, working at a cafe with other people to get through them. So I made an admin as a one sprint category. They have their own category. And finally, everything else that is not urgent, that doesn't have an approaching deadline that is super close and not boring like admin tasks goes into the creative sprint group. For me as a YouTuber, that's like content creation, strategy, idea generation, things that I can hyper focus on and that I genuinely want to do. And your categories might look completely different depending on the profession and depending on the responsibilities that you have. The point is that your buckets of like sprint groups and the chunks that we divide needs to based on how tasks feel to your brain and not necessarily to mine. And one note is that meetings, appointments, anything that is time bound and also involves other people are the only things that are blocked on my calendar. If it has a fixed external time, it goes on the calendar. And if it doesn't, then they belong to the sprints. Figuring out like the chunks of the sprints, how you're going to divide them takes a little bit of experiment and love of time. But you can start with my own groups and then adjust later. So let me explain in detail how you can figure out your own groups and how to run them so that you can figure out the best way to split them. So the first thing that we need to do is called a brain dump. We need to get everything out of our head, okay? The reason behind that is because your brain is a reliable storage device. It's like constantly running in the background process, worrying about the things that you're supposed to do, terrified of forgetting something important. And that kind of like mental noise drains your energy, makes it way harder to focus. So we externalize everything. We don't trust our brain. Because first of all, we're going to forget. And second of all, even if you remember the thing that you're supposed to do, you're probably not going to do it. So I use WhisperFlow for this because it's like way faster than typing. And my thoughts are already racing in my head like 200 kilometers per hour. And my typing is not that fast. So I just use WhisperFlow to dictate my voice memos. The great thing about this is that like you can take your phone, just like ramble for a few minutes, like everything that you have in your mind. And it will turn that into organized like notes. I'm not sponsored by the way, I just love it. It's definitely like a complete game changer and helps you to like get everything out of your head. And it helps you to like visualize the things that were occupying your head. In my Kaizen system, the system that I specifically built for ADHD brains, I mean because I was struggling, we have like a dedicated section called brain dump so that it's easy to do it every single day. If you're interested, check out my website, drudeohoma.com. If not, you can also do it like on whatever app you choose to do. So now we have the second step, which is sorting these brain dumps into sprints. Now we need to go through the brain dump and drop each task into the category that matches how it feels. So I need to ask yourself, what does this task actually require from me? Is it a high pressure because something bad happens if you don't do it? Then it either belongs to the urgent or deadline depending on how close the deadline is. If it's boring, draining, and not necessarily time sensitive, then it goes to the admin. And if it's energizing and interesting, it goes to creative or whatever version that you named yours. It can be also like fun tasks category. So now step three, which is picking based on energy. Most productivity advice tells you to like eat the frog, do the most hard thing in the morning, get that thing out so that you feel accomplished. But the problem is that if you're not in the right space, if your energy isn't really aligned with the task, you're going to fight yourself the entire time. Like think about it, how many times you have like a very important task that you're supposed to do, but because you don't want to do it so much and you're telling yourself that I need to get that out of way, you're also not doing the tasks that you can actually manage to do right now and that you actually enjoy. So you end up doing nothing all day. That happens with me quite often. And this like resistance of thinking that you have to do the most important thing first, actually drains your momentum before you even start. So instead, I actually want you to follow your energy, which kind of like sounds voo-voo. Look at your like sprints, like the groups that you have and ask yourself, what am I actually in the mood to work on right now? Not like what I should work on, but what do you want to work on? Obviously, sometimes you don't want to work on any of them, but like which one is the least awful one? Because when you're working on something that matches your current energy and current like mood that you have, you are not fighting resistance or like fighting it less at least. And once you build that momentum and kind of like unlock that, and once you start to kind of like heat your engine, almost like your brain as an engine, like that momentum spills over into other tasks. Some days, for example, I start with the creative sprint that I have instead of urgent, because maybe I am more in the mood to come up with ideas. But sometimes I'm like, I don't really have any ideas. I don't want to do anything that's like urgent right now. I look at it and I'm like, okay, let me start with like some admin tasks. Let me like listen to music while I'm doing it. And once I get into the mood, I go into the different sprints essentially. So there's essentially like no prescribed order how you're going to tackle the sprints. And the important thing is that you work through the sprint as one chunk. Before you finish that sprint, you don't move into the other sprint. You might ask why am I not like supposed to take a break? But the reason is that task switching kills momentum. Every time you stop working, even like for a five minute break, your engine actually cools down. With ADHD brains, like our task switching is like one of the things that we struggle the most. There are so many times that I even like hold my, you know, pee to go to the toilet because I'm working on a thing, working on something, and I'm actually in the flow. And if I go to the restroom, I'm going to break that flow. So I wait until I finish it, even though I know it's not healthy. I just forget it. So instead of like scheduled breaks, you work through your sprint, like as a one chunk, and then rest. So you go through, let's say like sprint one urgent, you go through them in whatever order that you want to do within that sprint. And once it's done, you take a good long break. And then you come back and do another sprint. Now like to make this realistic, your sprints should be around like two to three hours max. So that like you're not forcing yourself to sit down and do six hours of work or something. Even though I sometimes do it when I hyper focus. You're not trying to clear every single urgent task you have in one sitting. You're working through a manageable chunk. So for that, we have to adjust our sprints. Because if everything is in the urgent category, are they actually all urgent? There should be a priority order. So we have to like group our sprints into two to three hours max. And if you can't focus that long, the chunk can be also way smaller as well. The important thing is that you have to go through it in one chunk, no matter how boring it is. You only see four tasks actually. You only need to do four different tasks. And when I see my sprints visually, kind of like a Kanban board, it feels way less overwhelming for me. And it only requires me four activation kind of like engine starts instead of like 60 different starts if it's an individual task. Now, like you might be thinking, okay, like follow your energy sounds great. But without structure, it can turn into infinite procrastination. You just keep doing whatever feels good and avoid the harsh stuff forever. So for that, we actually need a guardrail. Mine is the daily highlight. Essentially, daily highlight is that the one thing that I identify every single day that makes today a win. Just one. And that is my daily highlight, which is the core concept in our Kaizen system. And then I follow this rule. I follow my energy freely and pick the sprints that I want to do until 4pm. And I work on like whatever sprint matches my mood, right? But if my daily highlight isn't started by 4pm, I switch it to it immediately, even if I'm in the middle of the sprint that I'm doing. There's no negotiation around that. And then I also have another stop, which is 9pm. I don't work past 9pm unless it's absolutely urgent. And this creates like a daily deadline. And your guardrail for your daily highlight, as well as when you stop working, will obviously depend on your work schedule. But having those two things as like almost like checkpoints really like allowed me to have the perfect balance of structure, but at the same time freedom so that I don't rebel against it, but also I don't do random ----. And when there's like this 9pm hard stop deadline, I can't procrastinate infinitely, right? Like I can't say, oh I'll do it later tonight, or I'll pull an all-nighter, which was like one of my favorite excuses actually. But I feel like I'm kind of getting older that I can't pull an all-nighter anymore. Anything that's not done by like 9pm automatically moves to tomorrow. So if I don't want to move that tomorrow, I have to finish till 9pm. And this helped me to like prevent burnout. And because like there's this like 4pm rule, it also like prevents me from avoiding the important work all day, just because it doesn't feel fun. And by also deciding one task that is going to define today, whether it's a success or not, allowed me to feel less overwhelmed as well. Because I'm quite like a perfectionistic, so if I look at my like to-do list and I see tasks that I didn't finish today, I would feel like, ah today wasn't a success. But if I finish that daily highlight, even if there are like 100 tasks that are still waiting for me to do, today is a win. And that helped me to keep motivating myself and keep going. And the most important part that a lot of people skip is actually keeping a work log. And this is the reason why it actually like, why most people's systems keep failing and why mine kept failing in the past. So when you are running your sprints, you need to keep a work log. And how you keep this work log is that essentially you just like open a page while you're working on your PC or whatever. You can also use like a notebook and you keep that tab constantly open. And whenever you switch to a different task or you start doing something, you just lock like the time. For example, I'm keeping a work log while filming this video. And I literally have like, I started filming from like 2 p.m. and I wrote it down like filming. And if I look into my work log, it looks like this today. 11.40, I started to get ready to film the video. 12.30, I'm filming the video, realizing the script is not good enough. And from 1 p.m. to 1.30, I adjusted the script once again. And I was like, I cried a little bit. So I've written down what I have done today while doing like working, okay? And you write down what exactly you're doing, not just like I reply to emails, but you write down what kind of emails you reply to. And personally, I don't really use like a time tracking app or anything because I always forget to stop that timer. But if I keep like a one tab always open on my monitor, I don't really forget it. You can also like put like a post-it to like kind of like remind yourself to keep the work log. But it's really like helping to me, honestly. And even if you forget like to log some of the details, it's fine. A little bit of data is always better than no data at all. For example, you know, I've been doing this like work log maybe like for three months now. And now I'm able to see the overall energy patterns that I have. For example, usually around like 11 p.m. to 3 p.m., that's like my highest energy time usually. And then the next energy kind of like sprint comes around like 9 p.m., like 6 p.m. or something like that. So I just might work around it. I might be thinking like, but how am I supposed to figure out my patterns and my energy drops and what kind of sprints work for me? Is when you keep this like work log, you can just like simply ask AI about the patterns that it notices and what kind of sprints actually provided the best results. After a few days of logging, just like paste your work log into ChatGPT or Cloud and ask these questions. What patterns do you see? Which times of day was I most productive? How long did different task types actually take? What sprint order might work better for my specific patterns? You know, let the AI do the pattern recognition. You're probably too lazy to do it anyway. And it will require a lot of brain power. So skip it. And you might discover that like, for example, admin work is actually better when you do it around like 5 p.m. instead of 10 a.m. or first thing in the morning. And it will also help you to like understand how long each sprint will require from you and what kind of responsibilities you actually have. And based on what you learn, you change something. Maybe you need to reorder your sprints or change the sprint categories that you have because maybe you realize you actually have maybe like three chunks instead of four chunks. Or maybe you have five chunks instead of four chunks. You make the change and you run the same sprints again and you keep the work log and you keep analyzing essentially. This is all based around the Japanese philosophy called Kaizen, which means continuous improvement that Toyota actually uses to make their cars. And it consists of four steps. Plan, do, check and act. It's a continuous cycle of doing things, running a little bit of an experiment, seeing how it went and adjusting from there. And that's exactly what we're doing here with my method. You plan your sprints, you do them, you check what happened with your work log, you act on what you learned and then you plan again. And this allows you to continuously improve without obeying the clock, like using time block. For example, I even changed the order that I work on my sprints so many times. Some days you'll nail it, some days will be a mess. But both gives you information and by continuously tracking and adapting, we're going to be able to see the patterns that we have right now. The goal definitely is not perfection, but getting a little bit better every day and having more understanding towards yourself, your brain and the patterns that you're experiencing. So everything that I just explained, you can absolutely do it yourself, right? Like you can use the apps that you're currently using or maybe even like a pen and pencil to run this structure and try this method. The principles are what matter and I just gave you all of them essentially. But here's what I know about ADHU brains, including my own, is that the chances of you actually setting this up on your own is very low, right? How many of you actually stayed till this point of the video? You're maybe reading comments, maybe you're scrolling Instagram while watching this video. So you're not even watching the video, I know you. And the chances of you opening this on your PC and then setting this up from scratch is 0.1%. If you did it, I'm proud of you. My stomach growled. I'm so hungry. But anyway, you might maybe like do the first steps and you'll get overwhelmed and abandon it and you're like, ah, this didn't work again. You will start to look for another method. That is actually the exact reason why I built my Kaizen system. Everything I just explained is already built because, you know, that's the method that I use every day. The braindump space, the daily highlight, the sprint categories, how you organize them, how you categorize them, the visual board version of it, all of them. You don't have to set up anything out. You just like start using it from day one. And when you get my Kaizen system, you also get access to our Discord community and you can see how other people with ADHD have customized their sprints and you can ask questions to other users how they adjust theirs, how they categorize theirs, or you can also ask me directly if you're struggling with it. I'm also in the Discord chat. So if you're interested and if you want to check it out, check out my website, rudiohama.com. If you can't invest in it right now, that's completely fine, to be honest. Everything I explained in the video still works. What is important is the methodology rather than the specific tool that you use. But if you know yourself that if you're not going to do and if you're not going to apply it, then check out my website for a little shortcut. I'm happy to help. So this is essentially how I work with my ADHD brain without using the time blocking method. This is how I basically improve continuously with ADHD and get actually stuff done. Please don't walk away like from this video thinking you just need to be more disciplined or you're not going to like never figure this out. This is so much work. I mean, it is a little bit of work, but the world is not fair. You know, you have to accept that. Like I had this grief over time, like thinking why the hell do I have to do just to get stuff done? But complaining and crying about it didn't help even though I did a lot. You have to make like some sacrifices and I know it's kind of difficult, but I am in the discord community. So if you need help, I'll also happy to help you. And I'm also planning to host some free live streams where we get together, get stuff done, plan our days, and you know, just like be productive. I'm going to do like some live streams on my channel. So subscribe if you want to join the body doubling sessions. But if you're interested into my Kaizen system, check out my website rodeohoma.com. And also if you're wondering like, okay, sprinting system is cool, but even when I make plans that are quite approachable, I never follow them. Like why the hell am I not able to follow? Then watch this video next because making plans and following them are two completely different skills. And in this video, I discuss how to actually follow the plans that you make with ADHD.