I’m pretty good at planning and making to-do lists. And I love problem-solving. But the one problem that keeps biting me in the backside almost every day is this:

My days can be as unpredictable as the weather.

As an AuDHDer, I have this insatiable drive to find new, exciting, sparkly things I can twist my mind around while at the same time, I need some measure of routine, or at least the illusion I have a tiny bit of control over my days.

What fucks with my routine is our farm (and the ADHD part of my funny little brain, if I were brutally honest). A few years back, I had this sparkly new idea to start a regenerative goat dairy farm on Gotland. So that’s precisely what we did.

But what screwed with that idea was Covid and Putin, roughly translating into a doubling of the mortgage, a tripling of feed costs, and an up to six-fold increase in electricity costs. Among a bevvy of other crap.

My writing routine does not exist, because whenever I sit down and get into The Zone something happens.

A tree falls on the electric fence and the goats start to eat our neighbour’s flower beds. A large cheese order wasn’t picked up or came in too late, so we end up making a delivery run. The young bucks jumped a fence and are now trying to woo the ladies. A goat broke her foreleg. There’s suddenly a hole in the roof of the hay loft. The chainsaw broke, then the wood splitter broke, and now we’re making firewood with a handsaw and axe. Keeps us warm, tho. The fucking wheelbarrow broke. Another tree fell on the fence and the goats are now out on the road. It goes on and on. Even the most brilliant planners and problem solvers won’t get through this mess without shaving a decade off their lifespan.

So if you’re a writer, creative, or entrepreneur with one or several other jobs and side-gigs, plus ADS and/or ADHD, you can probably understand that some, er, most days are extremely hard to plan, and you ask yourself:

Life just keeps getting in the fucking way so why did I even bother making this bloody to-do list in the morning, knowing perfectly well that at the end of the day, all I’ll manage to do is lay face down on the couch and weep, and feel like a complete loser because I failed to accomplish 99.9% of the stuff I thought I should accomplish that day.

But I finally found the silver bullet to solve this mess.

Drumroll, please! Here’s my daily planner. It lists the ONE thing I absolutely need/want/have to get done on that particular day. And…oh, look! There’s even space for doodles:

I learned to leave enough space for crap to go sideways (because it will). But there’s usually ONE particular thing in each day that I have to or want to get done. Screw brushing teeth! Screw getting out of my PJs! But I always do that one thing, like finish writing this little post here, or killing one thousand words for my newest book, or fixing that bloody hole in the roof of the hayloft.

One step at a time.

As long as I have done that ONE thing, I’m okay.