My Top ADHD Productivity Technique
The Amplified Impact Podcast
January 12th, 2023
Today, I tackle a common question: how to manage the chaos in an ADHD mind.
I reveal the game-changing tool that turned my ADHD into an asset: time blocking.
Embracing my calendar was tough, but it shifted my life.
I’ll share how consistency, not perfection, is the key to making progress, even in the face of challenges.
Join me on this journey of turning chaos into productivity.
TWEETABLE QUOTE:
“The skill, the number one skill that I recommend or the tool or habit is time blocking it, is sitting down and owning your calendar.”
– Anthony Vicino
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Episode Transcript:
So I get asked a question probably three times a week. Somebody slide into my DMs saying, hey, you know, I got severe AdHD like you. I resonate with your story. I struggle because I have this chaotic mind. I have so much potential. I can feel it simmering below the surface. But whenever I sit down to do work, I struggle to stay on, on tasks present, stay concentrated, not get pulled into a thousand different directions. And so the question always ends with some variation of, like, what is your number one tip or habit or tool that you would recommend for somebody like me? And it’s a good question.
It’s a hard question, though, because everybody’s a little bit different. And what you need is going to vary by context. But I’ll tell you for me, what had the biggest, most profound effect on my journey of turning my ADHD into a superpower, and not just a weakness, not just a kryptonite. It was one skill, it was one technique. And this is going to sound really simple, and it’s going to be something that probably you will struggle with if you have ADHD. But even if you don’t have ADHD, this is still going to serve you well. This is a recurring trait that I find in so many of the successful people that I’ve met. It’s ridiculous how often this behavior reappears over and over and over again.
And so I think there’s a strong correlation between this and achieving success in life. And so regardless of whether you have ADHD or not, it will help you. But if you do have ADHD, you’re probably in particular going to rebel against this. And I know I did. It took me a long time to give in and see that this was the path forward for me. And so the skill, the number one skill that I recommend or the tool or habit is time blocking it, is sitting down and owning your calendar. I like to say that you can either own your calendar or your calendar can own you, but there is no third option here. And the problem for a lot of us is that we rebel against external authority.
As people with ADHD, we don’t like to be told what to do. I don’t. At least I really struggle with it. Even though I’m aware of it, I still struggle with it. But what I didn’t understand in my early years is that I also rebelled against my own internal authority. So I’d rebel against external authority, but also internal authority. I couldn’t get myself to do the things that I said I wanted to do, like I couldn’t hold myself accountable and so I really needed to shift my perspective, because if you can’t discipline yourself, the world will inevitably have to do it for you. And this is how I lost one of my teeth.
This is how I ended up in a van with $80,000 in debt. I didn’t understand that if I couldn’t hold myself accountable to doing the things that I said I needed to do, that eventually my life would fall apart, that the universe would discipline me and my life would be the consequence of the poor decisions I’d made up to that point. When I burned myself enough times, I eventually got to the point where I started to realize, oh, crap, I need to do something about this. I need to be able to control my life better. I need to control myself. And time blocking was one of the first steps in doing that. This is sitting down and just blocking out your day and saying, here is what I’m going to accomplish in each chunk of my day. From eight to nine, I’m going to do this.
From nine to ten, I’m going to do that. From ten to eleven, I’m going to do this. And then once you have that day mapped out, you need to follow through and hold yourself accountable to doing what you said you would. Because it’s so easy to break the promises we make to ourselves, right? It’s much harder to break the promises you make to a loved one. You’ll go more out of your way. You’ll work harder to keep the promises you make to somebody else than you will to keep the promises you make to yourself. And the problem with this is that when you break the promises you make to yourself, you’re slowly degrading your self esteem, because self esteem is simply the reputation you have with yourself. And if you can’t show up and hold yourself to what you said you would, then what does that really say about you? And I’m not judging you, but you are judging yourself.
You just don’t realize it. It’s happening subconsciously and it’s slowly degrading the potential, the greatness that you have inside of you. And I don’t want to see that for yourself. And I know for myself this was such a big part of the struggle, and there was a lot of self loathing when I would set these tasks, these goals, I time block my schedule but not hold myself to it. I would just end up hating myself. And then I would say, well, screw this, I just won’t do the time blocking. If that makes me feel like shit, I’ll just stop doing it. But that didn’t move me forward towards my goals at all.
I just felt like shit and wasn’t moving towards anything. And so the solution for me was I needed to, regardless of whether or not I could perfectly adhere to my time blocked calendar, was to keep doing the process and say, this is important. This is an important part of progressing towards my greatest self. And I will show up every day and do the best that I can, but even if I fail, I’m not going to abandon this. And what started to happen is I started to get better at actually adhering to my time block calendar. And as a result of sitting down and planning out the perfect day ahead of time, rather than reacting reactively in the moment, I started to make meaningful progress towards my goal. And as I started making more progress towards my goals, it became a self fulfilling positive reinforcement loop where now I wanted to continue doing the thing because I was starting to see the positive results. And now I started to see, like, time blocking is actually benefiting my life.
It’s actually helping me. And so these days, it’s actually very easy for me to time block and stay to my time block calendar. In fact, I’m a little bit too rigid, if anything, these days. Now I have no space in my life for any kind of improvisation because if I do, then I go all full autistic mode and I can’t adapt. So we’re all somewhere on the spectrum. I’m just a little bit further to the side than most people, I guess. But that is the number one strategy. That’s the number one tip that I have truly time block your day.
Define what winning the day looks like before you start the day. Get clear about that, and then do your best to stay on that calendar, that schedule, and then just wake up, regardless of you did the day before, and try it again. Try it again. Just keep showing up and it will take longer than you want it to. But eventually it will start yielding results, I promise. So that will do it for me. Guys, I appreciate you being here. We’ll catch you in the next episode.
But until then, stap or focus, my friends.
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