I received a question from a colleague on a mentoring scheme.

Them: “Hey, quick question: what are good strategies to organise/ structure time as someone with AuDHD?”

Me: “This is not a quick question.”

But such a very useful one. I don’t know enough about the wider experience of AuDHD people in academia, nor the time to dive in to it right now, so I’ll write this to my younger self and hope you find it useful. It’s longer than I usually aim for and still quite dense.

For me, I now just organise everything using my Office calendar and daily and master task lists. Making the calendar work for an AuDHD individual is an art – I recommend everyone sit down at least once with a mentor / coach to see if they can make some large blocks of time available for the tasks that need large blocks of time. Doing that well, for yourself…. takes time.

First, anonymous mentee / younger Self, you will need to start developing some long-term skills that other people can avoid without addressing explicitly:

Skills to Learn

Task categorisation and self-awareness skills:

Recognise which types of activity are energising, soothing and draining.
Recognise which activities require a long spool-up time to get going and which do not.
Recognise which tasks will become easier if you think about them “on the back of your head” for a few days.
Recognise which tasks you would prefer to do in big blocks of time.
Recognise how big your blocks of time are that are a good balance between spool-up and task switching costs – an hour? half day? day?
Recognise which tasks you can do in smaller chunks if you have to.
Understand how many tasks of each type you can do in a row.
Understand how many big / medium / small tasks you can reasonably do in a day. Then, understand you will always be optimistic here.
Work out how long you can work on something productively. Sometimes you may be in The Zone, but the brain is not sparking as smoothly as it was earlier…
Work out what you need to be able to focus.
Work out what time of day you are best at each type of task.

Note that all of these are likely to change over time, or even from day to day. Sometimes I need the buzz of the office to focus well. Sometimes I need the quiet of home to do anything at all.

Other essential skills:

Say no to other people sometimes.
Say no to yourself (much harder, due to internalised ableism and getting excited about new projects)
Plan ahead: great, you’ve admitted you can’t do everything this day or week or month. You won’t be able to do them all next month either!
De-scoping projects that have blown up because they are exciting. That’s fine – as long as you make them a chain of projects.
Re-organising your thoughts into linear, top-down structures needed for communication and project planning.

The last two points are not really covered in this post. Let me know if you want a follow-up.

OK, let’s put some of those in practice. Then I’ll point out some other tips that aren’t about organising time but are still important for AuDHD time management.

Organising Your Time

Let’s start with a week. What structure do I have that carries over from week to week?

One – two days a week working from home. I need the reduced sensory input for my health and sanity, but I also need some time I can reliably work on things that require longer chunks of time. I cannot do research with less than a day, until I am already quite deep in a project, because I need the spool up time.
Some times need to have a dedicated slot in my calendar to make sure there is time for them – PhD student meetings, project meetings, yoga.

This means I already have set aside chunks of time for weekly tasks and my overall needs in a week.

And how to structure each week?

Monday morning has time to read my calendar and understand what my goals that week are. Ideally I also sort emails at this time – I can’t focus properly on anything with lots of small tasks hanging over me. (I do this at the beginning of each day, to a certain extent)
Meetings and intense tasks may not be more than three hours in a row. Turn down the least important meeting to make sure you can recover.
No more than four of these in a day – and even that is too much, really.
Block out chunks of calendar for specific tasks. Mark as “free” if they can be moved, or “busy” if you have to do it then. Make sure you have enough flexibility to respond to other people.
I collect small tasks together as “admin time” to make them one larger task. I try to deal with these on Mondays, as I’m always spending Mondays trying to understand what’s going on anyway.
Do not fully plan each week. Tasks, and especially meetings need time afterwards to write up notes and actions, and carry out those actions. However, you may need that gap just for decompressing or for thinking. (This is not just part of work time but is also productive work – you are planning and working out the best way approach)
Anything that involves interaction with other people gets moved to Monday and Wednesday if possible, with Tuesday as a backup. (Friday is for research and I don’t work Thursdays)

It’s useful to have an idea of what you can do in downtime, for example checking social media work accounts when I’ve twenty minutes free before a meeting. Unfortunately I can’t usually answer emails in this time, but I know most people can juggle small tasks this way.

And each day?

I try to have time before any meetings when I get in. I look at my calendar, skim my emails (do not answer any yet!), look at the tasks I listed for today and for the week as whole, and approve today’s tasks or tweak them if priorities have changed, or my internal state is unsuitable. (see below)
Do the stuff. Remember, this is a guideline structure only. Move any tasks that are unfinished to future times.
Have a break!!
At the end of the day, write down where I got to and what I expect to do tomorrow (or the next working day)

Sometimes the tasks I had planned are not suitable. On many days, I can do any type of task. However, maybe I’m feeling extra social, or extra monotropic (internally focused on one thing at a time) or extra structured (I want to plan or sort out small tasks). It’s best if my week is allowed that flexibility – I work to my strengths (efficiency bonus) and avoid penalties from doing unsuitable tasks (either making me grumpy or feeling slow and stuipd, or at the worst triggering demand avoidant tendencies).

Of course, one of my earlier Skills was to think long term. So. How?

I’m still working on this one.

I have tried a quarterly plan on a big whiteboard. I did not acheive it. What works for now is a simple paper calendar showing four months at a time (two months to an A4 page). I write big unavoidable deadlines on this, and cross off each day.

I still need to work out how to plan and implement longer term strategy, as I get too excited about current projects and try to have too many long-term goals. I’m currently trying out MindGenius (my uni has a subscription, as do many) which allows you to list tasks and dependencies in a mind map form and then turns this into a Gantt chart. I recommend that students start trying to learn this sooner by planning each resaerch mini-project in detail and checking how accurate your estimations are. It’s very difficult for me to do this now as I work on so many things, what does “one week of research time” even mean?

Tools Summary

Day-to-day time management:

Your office / email calendar. Pick one, import all other calendars to it and keep it up to date. Make other people use it if they want to talk to you.
A paper calendar for the longer term, on my wall (I actually have two, one for the uni year so I can see term dates etc and one for my deadlines the next few months)
I really need something to help keep track of where I spend my hours in a given day. I’ve tried a lot of tools and given up on all of them. A colleague showed me a cube that you turned, the upper face showed what you were working on at that time and it tracked this. Sadly, too expensive for something that “might work”.

Day-to-day task management:

Daily list of tasks.
A detailed list of everything, to refer to (I use Todoist right now and expect I will stick with it for some time)
Sometimes, a weekly list. Post-it notes are great for information but not reminders as they quickly fade into the background.

I’ve tried lots of other tools for task management. There are lots out there (trello, monday… I forget) but these work for me. Check what your uni offers, as the paid version of anything is probably better than the free version of anything else.

Longer term planning:

I separate out the phases of coming up with ideas, as I usually need to move around the ideas until a structure arises (miro, whiteboards, wall + post-it notes) and then turning this into something useful (list, todoist, Gantt charts…)
Still working on this. Trying out MindGenius right now.

Summary

So, really for me the trick is working out how to use my office calendar effectively, through constant reflection on the type of cost task exacts from me, and when I will have those resources. This only works if you protect that calendar from other people, and be kind to yourself when your plans don’t work.

To make the calendar, I also need to consider my tasks on daily, weekly and monthly scales. I’m still working on the longer term.

Another important realisation for me is that my AuDHD is very cyclic: I will keep returning to each type of question, including how to be efficient. Each time, I will probably try a different efficiency tool. That’s OK, it paid off eventually. Each one has helped me develop the skills at the top. All along, I mostly needed my calendar. But I’d never have got to that point without spending a lot of time and effort trying new ways to be efficient.

Finally, a quick summary of related tips for AuDHD time management:

Other stuff for AuDHD time management

ADHD is often characterised by leaving tasks until the deadline and then rushing it, or waiting until you panic. Don’t encourage this. Each time you do, you are training your body to use an unhealthy tool and teaching yourself that you cannot trust yourself, eroding your own agency. Look up the PINCH list of potential task motivators for ADHDers.
Autistic people often find that they are working out how to do something every time that they do it (this is the reason behind scripts). If this is you, there are almost certainly tasks where you can save yourself time and energy. Instead, the first or second time you do a task, write down the steps involved in a so you don’t have to work it out each time (or where you can find the instructions). Although there are resources like goblin tools for everyday tasks, they cannot tell you the institutional and departmental steps for organising travel, paying for paper publications etc.
- Similarly, I keep detailed notes on all meetings / tasks and a summary so I don’t have to re-filter it each time. I keep both these on Notion databases; you can also use Obsidian if you work only on one machine.
Make other people use your calendar. You don’t need to hold this all in your head.
DO NOT SUBMIT ANYTHING PERFECT. Just good. It may be more satisfying to be perfect. Is it really worth the extra time?
You are always allowed to say no, to other people, to yourself, and this can change in time. It can be partway through a meeting if necessary. Recognising your needs is a higher priority than hiding them.
The best thing for me for both demand avoidance and ADHD motivation is to “visit” a task. I sit down with it, for 30 seconds, then for a minute, then for a few minutes. Can I move this task forwards? I don’t have to finish it. Let’s see what I can do. Don’t force yourself – this is not teaching yourself how to work efficiently. You’re teaching yourself how to work poorly.
Apparently, some people actually get brain rewards for finishing tasks! Cheats!
- Do you get dopamine / pleasure for finishing a task? → Break all tasks up, use gamification tools.
- Does having many tasks feel overwhelming and you get no pleasure from completion, but only stress at the next bulk of tasks? → Collect them together into one big task and concentrate on “moving it forward” each time. You don’t have to finish all the tasks to have progressed or done a good job.
Structure your meetings: what do you want out of each one? what are your tasks at the end and when are they due?
It’s easy to get excited by a new efficiency tool. Is it easy to use? Does it actually help?
If people ask for a new task with a short deadline and push you to answer now, the automatic answer is No. If you don’t know if you can fit it in, the answer is No. I tell my colleagues to give me 20 minutes thinking time before agreeing to anything.
Sometimes its REALLY hard to focus, on anything at all. Then I have a big post-it note saying “you are doing this” on my screen.
Post-it notes make excellent ~~short term~~ working memory tools. If you’re struggling to fit things in your head, write them all down so your brain doesn’t have to. When the task is done throw it away. You won’t do everything on the post-it. A working memory with more capacity would help you filter the important things; the post it does the same.

I read a lot of books and listened to a lot of podcasts to get to this point. I’ll add references later if I have time, but for now here’s a shoutout to the ADHD Adults Podcast, AUDHD Flourishing, Divergent Conversations and Neurodivergent Insights.

AuDHD in Academia: “How do you structure your time?”