Follow-through requires consistency, and consistency can be a challenge (except when it comes to eating dessert or binging a favorite streamer.) 

When your emotional regulation and impulse control are shaky, it is all the more necessary to have some scaffolding in place to ensure the consistency needed to achieve your goals. While structure may seem like anathema to the creative with ADHD, it’s pretty hard to accomplish much of anything meaningful without it. 

People I coach often start out with a kind of internal oppositional defiant disorder towards themselves, repeatedly rendering attempts at routine as the occasion for failure and shame. 

What is called for here is flexibility within the routine, so the routine itself does not feel routine. 

The method I’ve created for this is The Workday Salad.

To make a salad you need a bowl. I am in the process of creating an analog planner that allows me to stay on track without feeling trapped or overwhelmed. That’s one kind of bowl. Stay tuned for that. 

In the meantime, let’s have some fun: 

Create a coloring book-type sketch of a salad. Don’t color it in. You’ll be coloring in the metaphorical ingredients each time you execute the related action. 

Read on and you’ll see what I mean:

identify three or four behaviors that you know will improve your life. They could be meditation, exercise, journaling or practicing the guitar for example. Think of these as the lettuce forming the base of your salad. Decide how many times each week you want to do each one to completely color in the ingredients. 

There is something magical about the number three, so start with that: commit to executing each behavior three times within a given week. Here’s the key: Don’t try to schedule it. Just know that you want to color in a third of the lettuce each time you execute the activity before the end of the week. 

Work-wise, commit to only three high-impact activities per day ie: one job application, an outline for a story, and an email follow-up. It doesn’t matter when during a 24 period they happen, just that they do. These tasks are the protein on top of the lettuce, like chunks of salmon or tofu. Add the week’s total of that ingredient and color in accordingly.

Finally, be sure to sprinkle in some croutons or dried fruit. Make the dressing delicious. Splash that color around! Here I’m talking about pleasure: schedule coffee with a friend, visit a museum, end the day with a couple of episodes of your favorite show, have a glass of wine, and listen to audiobooks or podcasts while you make the bed. Thinking of pleasure this way makes it more of a transitional activity or reward than an escape. You don’t need to outline these in your ‘paint by numbers’ salad in advance, just add them freely as you move through the week.

Have fun trying out this salad approach to ‘routine’. It doesn’t matter how much you think you’re fucking around, as long as you eat your lettuce and protein. 

If your salad ends up all croutons, well, that’s good information, not the occasion for shame.

By the end of the week, you’ll be surprised by how much you’ve accomplished… and what a beautiful picture of a salad you’ve created.