Welcome to Hacking Her ADHD, part of the ADHD Wired Podcast Network. I'm your host, William Kerb, and I have ADHD. On this podcast, I dig into the tools, tactics, and best practices to help you work with your ADHD brain. Hey team, good news. I'm finally over COVID. Took me a bit longer than I would have liked, but I'm healthy now and ready to get back into things. This is an episode I started working on before I got sick, and one of the areas that we had been looking into was planning and goals. So I thought it was time to shift a bit into an area that we often forget about, and that's leisure time. Now, I want to be clear here, leisure time is not in opposition to goals and planning. In fact, it's just as important to our well-being. There are a myriad of health benefits we get from taking time off work, but not all leisure activities are equal. In this week's episode, we're going to be looking at how we can work on reframing the way we look at our free time, how we can be a little bit more intentional with how we're spending that time, and then look at a few things that we can do to make that time time well spent. If you'd like to follow along on the show notes page, you can find that at hackingyouradhd.com slash leisure. Before we get started, I'd also like to take a moment to let everyone know about the Hacking Your ADHD Patreon. While the podcast will always remain free for everyone to listen to, it isn't free to produce. If you enjoy the show and would like to help support it, here's your chance. And there are some great perks. For example, at the $10 level, I'm going to be releasing bonus content every month, and this month I put up a mini-sode on systems thinking and how we can apply it to our ADHD brains. I have to say this is probably one of the best mini-sodes that I've created yet. These mini-sodes are on topics that I come up with, but don't quite warrant a full episode yet. If you may use some of the same ideas in a later episode, these mini-sodes are going to remain exclusive to the Patreon. If you'd like to hear this one, just head over to patreon.com slash hackingyouradhd and sign up for the $10 a month tier. Alright, keep on listening to find out how you can leisure with the

best of

them. When I was in middle school, my math teacher, Mr. White, had a printed out sign that read, work hard, play hard. I'm sure a lot of you have heard this idea before, but it often has a catch with ADHD. Our version of work hard often has us grinding ourselves into the ground until we can't function, let alone play anything. And if we don't hit that ridiculous standard of what hard work is, well then in our brains, we don't deserve time off. Which is absolutely… Look, while I like the idea of earning my time off in theory, it often doesn't work out in practice because of my warped idea of what hard work is. So let me ask you, what do you think hard work really is? Is it an 8 hour day? 10 hour? Do you have to exert yourself and do something physically demanding? Or maybe you have to check off every single thing on your to-do list to consider it hard work? As an added wrinkle, let's think about dropping in the wall of awful from Brendan Mahan. What about those tasks that we think should be easy but are difficult for us? Or at least difficult for us to activate on? Even if it took me 30 minutes to build up the mental fortitude to make that phone call and drained me of a bunch of EFs, my brain is going to go, well actually that was an easy task, you're still going to need to put in some hard work today. Additionally, my brain has a propensity for deciding that when I've found ways to make difficult things less difficult, well that just means they weren't difficult to begin with. Take writing for example, I've been working as a writer for a good number of years and I figured out a few things to make the process easier, but that doesn't mean it still isn't a difficult thing to do. And in fact, it's only because of years of practice that I'm any good at it and I find any ease in doing it. Or how about things where you don't get the results you wanted? Next week I was troubleshooting a tech issue and it took me 90 minutes to implement a solution that didn't work. That took a lot of effort, but in my head, since I didn't get any results, it means I didn't put in enough effort. Isn't that a fun catch-22 there? If I got the results easily, or if it was so hard that I didn't get results, either way my brain says that didn't count. And then when I haven't put in the hard work, well I haven't earned that time off, right? So what I'm proposing here is that we uncouple some of these ideas. We don't need to tie results to effort. But beyond that, and more importantly, I don't have to tie doing hard work to deserving time off. When reading through the book The One Thing, there's a section on planning your year and one of the first things you're supposed to plan out is your time off. I think this is pretty great advice, but I want to take it a step further and say that as we're planning our days and weeks, we should also be putting an emphasis on scheduling that leisure time then. Which I know sounds a little bit gross from a couple of different angles. Part of it comes from hustle culture telling us that we should always be working, and part of it comes from the idea that we'd rather have our leisure time be organic. I mean, is it really leisure if we planned it out? Yes, it absolutely is. In fact, we often get more out of our leisure time when we plan it out. Just think about that last time you had a day off, infinite possibilities of what you could do. But by the end of the day, you felt like you squandered that time. Maybe you found yourself watching TV for hours while scrolling through social media, not really paying attention to either.