I have a clear picture of the person I always wanted to be.
His actions match his ambitions. He reads the books he bought instead of using them as room decor. He works on his side projects past the second weekend. He breaks his goals into action items and follows through. All I wanted was to be a functional adult who has his shit together, and I have been failing at this for about a decade.
I set a goal. I plan it out the way the productivity people tell you to. Milestones, action items, calendar blocks. I work on it for three days. By day five I’m off track. By the second weekend I’m either quietly giving up or building a new plan to replace the one that just failed. The new plan accounts for what went wrong last time. The new plan also dies on schedule.
After enough cycles, a belief settles in. Why can’t I just get on with it? I’ve got zero discipline. Maybe I’m just weak.
The weird thing is, the parts of my life I never put effort in are the parts that work.
My dog has perfect recall. I’ve never trained as a yoga teacher, but I have a better understanding of biomechanics than most instructors at your local studio. I didn’t plan either of these things. I never set a goal, never opened an app, never committed to a streak. I just showed up, and it was fun, so I kept showing up.
The things I never bothered to project-manage turned into the kind of competence I keep failing to manufacture deliberately. The things I set out to build collapse on schedule.
I have ADHD, and the standard prescription is more structure. My working memory can’t hold the plan. I lose track of what I committed to. I forget what I decided last week. So I should put the plan somewhere outside myself. Externalize everything so my brain doesn’t have to hold it.
This is the logic that kept me trying every productivity tool for a decade. Twenty dollars a month on Sunsama, until I took my frustration out on the founder in an angry email I still regret. Notion dashboards that would impress a McKinsey associate. Things 3, Todoist, OmniFocus, paper, index cards. None of it stuck. Meanwhile the yoga kept happening and the dog kept coming when called.
Productivity tools remember your tasks, sequence them, and tell you what’s next. They don’t decide what matters and they don’t make you start. Those parts are still on you, and starting is the part I can’t do.
The whole category assumes starting isn’t the hard part. Lay the work out clearly enough, the thinking goes, and you’ll engage with it. For most people that’s true. Clarity produces action. For ADHD brains it doesn’t. The task is clear; the scope is right; I’m right in front of my computer. I still can’t start.
And even when the tool would help, I have to maintain it for it to keep helping. Maintenance means sitting down, processing what came in, updating what changed, deciding what matters now – the exact executive function I needed most help with. Because of that, every productivity app I’ve used has decayed into a junkyard of half-captured commitments, because keeping it clean was its own initiation problem.
The ADHD-specific tools are the same, just in pastel colors. They still ask you to plan, prioritize, and maintain. They still don’t help you to start.
There’s a second problem underneath. Every productivity system runs on deliberate practice – break the goal down, sequence the work, calibrate each step to push just past your current ability, repeat.
But it was never meant for beginners. Anders Ericsson developed the framework studying elite performers. Violinists who already practiced six hours a day. Chess grandmasters who’d been playing for twenty years. The point was to explain what separated the very good from the elite, not how to start. The precondition was that you already had a practice.
The productivity industry took the conclusions and dropped the precondition. The same advice now gets sold to a Juilliard student trying to make principal and to me, trying to read more books.
“Calibrate each step to push just past your current ability” only works if you know your current ability. Without a practice, you don’t. You have no intuition for what’s hard, what takes a week versus a quarter, what’s a reasonable next step. So you aim at what looks ambitious. That’s the only signal you have. The plan that comes out is wildly above your real capacity, and you only find that out by failing to execute it.
For the first two years I did yoga, I had no plan. I showed up because I liked showing up. The body awareness came from the showing up. The opinions I now have about what matters, mobility over stretching, full range under load over passive flexibility, came from years of living inside the practice. They couldn’t have come from a spreadsheet.
Five years in, I can plan a practice that’s actually calibrated. I know what’s hard for me. I know how long it takes my hips to open up after a long sit. I know which drills move the needle and which ones are theater.
If five years ago I had started a thirty-day project to get into dragonfly pose, none of this would exist. I’d have spent the first weekend reading about hip mobility progressions. I’d have done one drill session on Tuesday, missed Thursday, and by week three I’d be looking for a better program. The practice that eventually taught me everything would have died before it had a chance to teach me anything.
The order was wrong. Build the practice first, through whatever version of the activity you’ll actually show up for. Let it develop its own pull. Let lived experience surface what needs work. Then the scaffolding becomes useful, because there’s something for it to support.
Donna treats outcomes as the unit, not tasks. Every productivity tool I’ve used treats the task as the thing. You either complete it or you owe it. Skip enough tasks and you’ve built up a debt you can’t pay back. The list grows. The shame grows. You stop opening the app. But the task is one of many possible ways to get to an outcome. If a specific task doesn’t happen on Tuesday, that’s information, not debt. The specific action on any given day is disposable.
When I disappear for a week, there’s no overdue list. Donna absorbs what I missed and turns it into something I can do today. Smaller. Different in shape. Scheduled for when I’d actually do it.
For anything bigger than a daily practice, Donna doesn’t ask me to plan it to completion. The plan never extends past the horizon I can actually feel. I commit to a week or two with a specific shape, Donna helps me make it concrete, and we look at what happened at the end. The next cycle starts from there. The ambition lives across cycles. The activation cost stays low inside any single one. The information from one cycle calibrates the next, which is the version of deliberate planning that finally works for a brain like mine.
The planning, the prioritization, the tracking, all the scaffolding that other tools make you maintain, lives inside the system.
My job is to show up.