Frawley Coaching

Linsey’s ADHD Life Hacks: Four Tactics to Manage Squirrels

 

I have ADHD. It’s no secret and I’m often quite transparent about it. What I’ve come to learn about my particular form of neurodiversity is something that I see in a lot of business owners: our penchants for hyper-fixations, our tendency to procrastinate, and our inability to measure time while living in the moment. I’m not saying everybody is the same, I’m saying this is how MY brain works. I want to share some tools that I’ve found to be valuable to me and how I operate and manage my squirrel brain. 

There is no magic number, no secret code, and no life hack that will hockey stick your business trajectory better than strategic planning and sticking to your commitments. It doesn’t matter that you have a gridiron map if you aren’t completely committed to the actions needed to get to the finish line. Let’s talk about tools I use to gamifying my actions and goals that increase my chances of repeated success.

Tactic One: Move the End Zone Closer

Brian Moran’s The 12-Week-Year is one of the most utilized books in my personal library, and the value Moran brings to his community of readers and learners is extraordinary.
While finding my own success as a business owner, I used the 4-1-1 tool that a lot of real estate professionals use, however setting those annual goals didn’t always work for me. When I stand on the January first calendar square, the December thirty first spot always seems far away- it is almost unimaginable. Inevitably, this would lead to me slogging my way through action items, feeling like I was micro-managing myself. The joy wasn’t there and the drive to get things done wasn’t there. I wasn’t at all attached to the end game because it seemed like a dang unicorn! I realize now I was masking satisfaction when getting through my day was darn near torture. 
Look, I’m not proud to admit this. No coach wants to confess repeated failures because what’s the definition of lunacy? Yep. Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. I thought I was broken. I thought I was doing it wrong. Everyone else seemed to have it figured out but I felt like I was nose-diving. I realize now that I wasn’t broken. I was just different. Maybe you or someone you know might relate to this?
Let’s talk about that 4-1-1. The essential premise is to set annual quantifiable and achievable goals for yourself, preferably in business and in your personal life. Then you are expected to break those goals down into meaningful monthly chunks in order to pace your workload. From there, weekly and daily visits to the 4-1-1 tool are integral to re-assess and set relevant action items to complete each week. It’s straightforward, it’s simple, and it’s effective for a lot of people. It also fell down on me. 
It wasn’t until I read The 12-Week Year that I realized that it is more effective for me to move the finish line closer, shrink those goals a bit, and  set a tighter deadline to accomplish them. What I found after I switched to this tool is that I nearly doubled my productivity, I gamified my action items, and I had more fun doing it! It enabled me to hit the goal line before I had a chance to lose interest- which is something a lot of us folks with ADHD experience.
Many real estate organizations and teams use a 4-1-1, so what’s an agent to do when they’re expected to use a 4-1-1 yet this 12-Week-Year seems like a tasty alternative? Simple. You marry them. 
Yep. That’s it. Stick a quarterly block between those monthly and yearly goals and there, my friend, you’ll find the magical 12-Week-Year structure you might be craving. 
What’s magical about it, you ask? 12 weeks is an incredible time to take on a new focus and see it to a manageable finish line, and it’s not so long that you feel over-committed to the new task. For instance, I might dedicate the next 12 Weeks to switching up my cardio routine at the gym, or maybe I’m going to use this space to take on a new form of lead generation. This gives me space to flex my new muscles (literally and figuratively of course),  try something new, and give it enough of a college try to be able measure results at the end without feeling over-committed. This allows me to explore a shiny hyper-fixation without changing my whole structure, and it gives me space to evaluate and add or remove new habits as I try them on for size. 
This tool isn’t designed to be a bulldozer. It’s a wind in my sail that keeps me moving forward.

Bonus:  Agents who set up their 2025 Business Plan with Frawley Coaching will receive a free personalized hybrid tracker!

 

Tactic Two: Theme Blocking With Time Blocking

This next part might seem a little nutso but hang on with me for a moment. One of the agents I have the honor of coaching has a similar neuro-spicy condition as me, and she asked me for a tool that might help her switch gears between tasks. Some of us have a hard time clicking back and forth between tabs in our brain and in the real estate business, we typically find ourselves ‘multi-tasking’ often to our own detriment. She and I talked about a tactic that might work for her lead generation specifically: Themes. Instead of spending some time on calls, then time on socials, then time on cards, then time on events, then time on whatever else is holding up her stool, she’s test-driving the idea of having specific days of the week to hyper-focus on those efforts. If a social post idea pops in her brain, she’ll set it aside and deal with it on her social media day. 
I use this tactic not only in business, but also in my personal life. I have themes every day for meal planning, working out, lead generation, social media, and even cleaning my house!  This might sound nuts but it keeps me organized and helps me plan things for myself and my family. I’ll use Tuesdays for an example. For my family I’m making something taco’ish for dinner, (you’d be amazed how many taco-type things there are out there- pizza, pasta, soup, etc), I’m catching up on laundry, and I’m tidying the kitchen and living room. Yes, I have a theme of the day for meal planning. Pastas on Monday, Tacos on Tuesday, Sliders on Wednesday, etc.  I regularly plan out several months of family meals in less than ten minutes. Shoot me a message and I’ll share my secrets. For myself I have a weightlifting plan to focus on my lower back and my legs. For my business I’m focusing on one blog post and handwritten notes.  

When I read this back to myself I realize it sounds too focused, but it works for me. It frees me from the mental burden of switching gears as well as deciding what to do, and it allows me to delegate anything that doesn’t fall in that day’s scope to the day of the week where it falls. If my floors are messy on Tuesday, I don’t freak out because I know “Wednesday Linsey” has it covered. If  I see something on social media that makes me want to drop a note in the mail to someone, I write it on a post-it and stick that in my basket of notecards so I can bang it out on Tuesday.  This keeps me from going on all the tempting side quests and falling off track.

Tactic Three: Reduce Resistance

Resistance is one of the biggest productivity killers, so try to be purposeful about identifying your points of resistance and remove them as much as possible. Much like greasing a wheel or opening a floodgate, booting something that stalls productivity can be a game changer. The real challenge is identifying things that are actually causing the  resistance.  For instance, once I’m in the weight room, I have very little problem rocking out a solid workout. Getting TO the gym, or more specifically, GETTING OUT THE DOOR TO GO to the gym, is my biggest point of resistance. I make a point every time I return from a workout to re-pack my bag with fresh clothes and towel so that the moment I’m ready to leave for a workout session, I don’t get stalled packing a bag and inevitably distracted by an email that pops up, a call that comes in, or sappy puppy eyes asking for belly rubs. If I ever bail on a gym session, the primary cause of said bail is my failure to have my bag ready to go. 
Consider yourself multiple people. I’ve said this before and it bears repeating. You owe yourself the utmost kindness and respect and as such, do yourself a favor by making your own life easier. Much like I make sure the coffee pot is pre-programmed to begin brewing right before I know my husband gets up in the morning, I’ll also do little favors for my future self to make my life easier. Handwritten notes used to be really tough for me and now I have a little fun basket full of neat cards sitting right next to me as I write this, waiting to be used. It’s not hard to send happy birthday messages to family and sphere, however my resistance to that is actually remembering someone’s birthday! I’m now growing a birthday spreadsheet, seperate from my CRM, that I visit weekly so I don’t forget to film a little message or send a card out in time. 
There are tons of ways to reduce resistance in your world. Any activity you repeat should be systematized and streamlined. Think templated emails and forms, utilizing your bookmark bar, and even creating a text shortcut in your phone for often duplicated messages. A word of caution, however: whatever it is you streamline or simplify, make sure you aren’t diminishing quality, service, or interpersonal relationships.  Canned messages and bulk actions can only go so far, and remember there is nothing that can replace personal connections. 

Tactic Four: Don’t Compare Your Insides to Other People’s Outsides

One of the most important pivots I made in my own life and business was pivoting to an introspective view of my business rather than comparing myself to how other people are finding success. We all have a natural tendency to view other people’s success and we often measure those successes against our own. We’re all on our own journey and climbing our own mountains, so instead of focusing on what everyone else is doing, I challenge myself to beat my own previous metrics. Likewise, it wasn’t uncommon for me to hear from a fellow agent, a leader, or a coach to tell me what I was doing wasn’t right, and in those instances, my RSD was intense. Finding systems and tools that work for me, especially when I was hunting for tools prior to an official diagnosis of ADHD, was incredibly challenging and when I did find something that worked, it was so disheartening to be told that I was ‘doing it wrong’. For instance, time and time again we hear that we need to “simplify our calendars”. At the same time, we hear “if it’s not in your calendar, it doesn’t exist”. What neuro-typical folks don’t understand is that if it’s not in front of most of us, it doesn’t exist either.  So when a leader sees my calendar and notices that I have time blocked to journal, eat lunch, or read to my kids… they don’t always understand that my day-to-day rituals and habits are 100% dependant on those calendar reminders. It took me years to reject some of the conventions and instead of lean in to what actually works for me.

 

Look, these aren’t solutions to all of the problems. What I’m hoping is that by being vulnerable and transparent about my own neurodiversity, I might be able to help at least one person acknowledge their challenges and maybe find some tools they can use to improve their life and business. 
As always, it is an honor and a privilege to be in business with each  and every one of you. 

Yours in Success, 
Coach Lins


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