Hey, it's Erica here. Today on the topic of priorities, planning, managing your time, I'm going to talk a little bit about planning out your week and how to use planning out your week well as a way to make sure that you do focus on your priorities. So almost every adult I know in the world has some kind of calendaring system. But for almost every ADHDer, I know it's challenging to manage one. And the biggest challenge is really to stick with something. I know a lot of people who love to come up with a new system discover one design that spent a lot of time designing a new system, I love doing it for a few days, stop getting interested after a week. And after a couple of weeks, I can't even remember how it works. And it's not surprising that that happens because people with ADHD brains are driven with something that's interesting an opportunity to create stuff, something that's new, all of that brings focus. But once it's no longer new, once you've already created it, it can be hard to keep your interest up to actually make all that work useful and keep it up.In this conversation, I'm going to share some strategies that have worked for me or for the people I coach. And as always, they're not things I'm saying you have to do. But they're ideas that might spark your own life hacks, or might be useful experiments for you to try. So if any of this sounds familiar to you, if you have an abandoned stack of planners used for only a week, somewhere on your shelf, or somewhere in your computer, my biggest recommendation to you is to find ways rather than to reinvent your systems to resparklise them. What I mean by resparklise is just find something, something that makes it interesting and new, anticipate the fact that you're going to get bored with it. So maybe you can do something like change the colour, change something about how it's formatted. But avoid, avoid, avoid trying to fully reinvent your system because you waste so much time doing that. The other thing I can recommend is to check out a bullet journal. This is a specific kind of notebook that is just really popular right now and I know a lot of people with ADHD find that this is a super helpful format. The best way to learn how to use a bullet journal is really to look online, there are a couple of videos that are only three or four minutes long but I'll share the highlights here so you're not left completely mystified. It's a paper system. And it's not one of those journals that you buy already filled in. It's actually just a simple plain notebook, either dot gridded or plain paper. And you create a way to keep this as a notebook in which you put everything in there. So it contains your to do list your calendar, any miscellaneous thoughts or notes you have about some grand new idea or about some mundane idea, like something you need to fix around the house. And the way you keep it organised is that you number all the pages and you have an index at the front. So it enables you to just jump around topics. But it also gives you a place to be able to find out where that topic is. Again, the best way to find out about a bullet journal is just to put a bullet journal into your search engine and look for some short videos.The next strategy I have to offer you is creating a standard weekly plan, what you'll want to do is pull up an empty calendar either on your computer or a paper calendar. And you may want to find somebody to sit with you as your reality check. And also to make sure that you finish it, that's optional, then what you do is you really think about the fact that there are 168 hours in a week. And, you know, it's that optimism plus time blindness that can be this devastating formula for so many people with ADHD, you know, you think you can get so much more done in a day in a week than you can. And then you're so very disappointed at the end of the week. And you probably haven't gotten to some pretty basic stuff like, I don't know, laundry, meal planning, all that good stuff. So doing a standard weekly plan allows you to take this blank calendar and just start mapping out what a good but very standard week might look like. So let's say you have 168 hours and you want to sleep seven hours a night. You also have 40 hours a week that you work, and you have some time that you commute. So you subtract all that. And you probably still have about 75 hours that are not yet allocated, then you can figure out okay, how much time do I need for just some of the basic stuff in my life like laundry, cleaning, cooking mowing the lawn if you have one social time and time to play with your kids if you have them and start blocking off that time. So you really get a sense of how many hours are left for you to pursue these projects that are real priorities for you.Then what you can do is start to do something that is really going to reduce your cognitive load, and all the decision fatigue, just start creating a structure and habit of when you're going to do all of those kind of boring things. You do your laundry on this day, then you grocery shop. And you can think about when you have the mental energy to do important things. And when you have the mental energy to do kind of mundane things, and then do your best to kind of fit in all this stuff you've got to do so that it's at a time of day when you're not using up your sort of prime thinking time to do something that you don't need it for. And this is the moment when it really helps to have somebody doing it with you. You should at this point, have a weekly calendar with some stuff scratched out some stuff written in, ask your friend to help you look at it. Think, are you covering all of the things that you need to do in a week? And do you have a realistic time allocation. Once you've got there, leave some white space for all the things that come up that are unexpected. And then finally, at the end, this is when it gets really fun. This is when you have a chance to fit in those three projects or priorities that you want to make time for and you don't seem to ever have time for. So you know you've got this commitment, you really want to see your grandmother more often you can actually look at a calendar and say this would be a good time to do it. I'm going to write it down. And I'm doing that on a regular basis. And, you know, Saturday morning is going to be when I want to practice for my jujitsu finals. And I really want to make that paper mache llama full size. And I think I can start working on it in my garage on Tuesdays, map those things in so that you're chunking out time for stuff that's important for you. And so when other things pop up, you can actually look and compare it to what you had planned.So that's sketch never perfect, but it's a started thinking about how you'd like to plan out your week, I recommend people hang it up and just look at it. As you go through your week. Notice what you predicted well and what you didn't predict what you forgot, and see how you can tweak it. Over time, you can revise it into a weekly plan that feels pretty accurate. And that helps you set up some habits for the things that you want to make sure you do every week.So as a recap, we've talked about three strategies here talked about the spark lysing your calendar system if it's working for you, but you're getting bored with it. Resparkalysing rather than fully reinventing, also talked about checking out bullet journals and check those out online, find a video and then last the project of sketching out a standard realistic weekly plan for yourself so that you can start to get realistic about the amount of time you need to spend on some of the mundane stuff and also free up the time that you really want to spend on the projects and priorities you care most about. Until next time