2023

Hey team, Happy New Year!

I’m excited to get going into 2023, but I also don’t want to just be doing everything by the seat of my pants, so it’s time to do a little planning and think about how we want this year to go. In this episode, I will be talking about rest and planning and getting into some of the things I specifically want to do with the podcast in 2023.

Despite all the planning you do, life can come at you fast - while working on this episode, my wife and son tested positive for Covid, while it seems like my daughter and I were able to avoid it this time (fingers crossed). This, of course, means that many of my plans for the beginning of the year are going to have to be changed up a bit. Since I’m the healthy adult in the house that means all the meals and cleaning are on me and while I’m currently doing a good job of over-functioning in the face of everything I also know that I can’t keep that up forever.

And this relates to one of the most important aspects of planning we need to consider, which is taking time off. Sure it’s great that I’m getting everything done and I’m feeling good now, but I can also guarantee that isn’t going to last, even though it feels like it’s going to. One topic I’ve mentioned a few times on this podcast is the hot-cold empathy gap, which is where it’s hard for us to relate to others or even ourselves when we’re in different physical or emotional states. So when we’re calm it’s hard for us to predict how we’re going to be thinking when we’re angry. When we’re tired it’s hard for us to imagine what it’s going to be like when we’ve got energy.

And with ADHD we also have a tendency to view this states as permanent - that when I’m tired not only can I not imagine what it’s going to be like when I’ve got that energy, but it also feels like I’m going to feel tired from now on. And while I absolutely know that I’m going to feel better after taking a break part of me feels like it’s going to be impossible to ever feel energetic again.

But the other side is also true, when I’m in this state of high energy and over-functioning it feels like it is going to just keep going. It’s hard for me to picture what it’s actually going to feel like when once I’m not in this state anymore.

This can make planning incredibly hard because if I’m not anticipating how I’m going to be feeling in the future, especially in term of how much energy I’m going to have, it makes it super easy to over plan what I’m going to accomplish. It makes it easy to keep adding onto my daily todo list because well that’s all stuff that needs to get done and well I feel like I could do it right now and well when 4pm rolls around I bet I’ll feel the same way. But history tells me a different story, I actually know pretty well that around 4pm I have an energy dip and if I’m trying to plan certain tasks during that time I’m way more likely to blow them off - I mean, I’ll feel bad about blowing them off but I’ll also feel like I have zero energy to accomplish them.

While I might be able to flex my over-functioning right now and get more done, what I’m really doing is borrowing that from my future self, meaning that I am setting myself up to crash later. I don’t want to be overly dramatic about this because sure, when needed we can push a little harder and get the results we need and we will be okay, but generally that’s not actually what we do - we don’t just push a little bit harder, we go all the way. We see that well we can drink from and we greedily slurp. I’m not saying this in any moralistic kind of way, sometimes we do need that extra something something to get us over the hump over what ever needs to get done.

What I’m trying to say is that we need to realize that doing so does not come without consequences. Again, it’s this hot-cold empathy gap, I’m feeling good now so I’m just going to keep feeling that way because I can’t imagine feeling any other way. But we’re not going to be able to always keep up that level, we have fluctuations of energy throughout the day and the week. And what we really need to pay attention to is how we’re treating ourselves when we’re not feeling great.

For a long time I was incredibly unkind of myself about needing time for rest and recovery - I can still feel that way sometimes, it’s easy to forget that we’re not built for running at 100% all of the time. We need to give ourselves space for rest and recovery.

And that also needs to come in when we’re doing our planning. Most often when we’re sitting down to plan we’re thinking about all of the thing we’re going to be doing, but we tend to neglect the time in between. The time when we’re not doing - time when we’re resting, time when we’re letting ourselves recover, time when we’re just not being productive. And let me reassure you that we need time for all of that. This is about preventing burnout. This is about preserving our mental health. This is about feeling good about ourselves. When we get too focused on all the thing we’re supposed to be doing and all the things we’re failing at and the things that are falling through the cracks because we’re doing too much it drains us of our best selves.

So as we are entering 2023 I want us to not only think about those things we want to do, but I want to us to really focus on when we’re going to be taking time off. When are we going to be letting ourselves not do stuff - and I do feel like that’s a bit of misnomer there, because it’s not that we aren’t doing things, it’s more about doing things that you enjoy doing. Things that let you recharge, things that aren’t about the grind. But also to be fair, it is okay to just not do things. It is okay to spend time scrolling on your phone and it’s okay melt into your couch and let yourself just do nothing.

Now with that said, it’s also nice to look forward at what we want to do, just make sure you’re doing that other part first, because it can be real easy to complete fill our calendar with all those things we’re going to be doing and realize that we don’t have room for relaxation any more. No, we need to add our time off first to our calendars - that needs to be non-negotiable. But once we have that in there we can look at those things that we want to do. And I want to take this time to talk a little bit about where I want to take the podcast in 2023, because while it’s all well and good for me to be thinking about it and writing down goals, my listeners are who those decisions are going to be effected the most.

But let’s also talk about what I’m not going to be focusing on - first of which is metrics. Now, my metrics are somewhat important, as I’ve started adding a few advertisers to the show, having those numbers is important, but in the grand scheme of my podcast, they are also, somewhat meaningless.

One of the lessons that’s incredibly important for me to understand as a content creator is that I cannot win the game of number go higher. There is no point when I look at my download numbers and I’ll go, well, I’ve done it, I’ve reached my goal and now I’m satisfied. In fact, more often than not, those numbers aren’t going to make you feel good. By all accounts I should feel great about how the podcast is doing in terms of downloads. In 3 years I’ve already passed 3 million downloads and I’m on pace to easily pass 5 million by the end of this year. When people ask me how I feel about that, I’ll tell them I feel great, but truth is that I don’t feel much of anything. Those numbers don’t really mean anything to me - like I read them and it blows me away, like yeah, the show has been downloaded that many times, that’s wild, but also I don’t know, it’s just a number.

And so when I’m looking at things to do in 2023 I’m going to be trying to stay away from that kind of goal because I know it’s not really going to change anything for me if by the end of the year I have 5 million downloads or 10 million.

The point is that when we’re thinking about goals and the things we want to do in the upcoming year it’s important that we focus on the things that we’re actually going to feel good about.

So for the podcast, there are a number of places I would love to work on growing.

Certainly, bringing in more advertisers would be nice, but I also want to ensure that I’m not advertising things I don’t believe in - ugh, double negative there, but point stands, if I’m advertising something I want it to be something that I use. Having Athletic Greens reach out to me was great because it was a product I already used, so it wasn’t hard to make the leap over to doing that kind of advertising. And I have had other advertisers reach out to me that I haven’t gone with - like a CBD gummies company. While there are claims that CBD can help with some ADHD stuff I haven’t actually seen any robust studies showing those results and I couldn’t in good faith advertise that kind of thing on the show.

Nor do I want the show to become completely overwhelmed with advertising. I’ve certainly listened to podcasts where you get ad roll after ad roll, and it’s just too much, so it’s going to be about finding a balance.

Along with that, I also want to work on having more interesting interviews on the show - but specifically, I want to be having more people that I reach out to instead of people reaching out to me. I get a lot of pitches for this show and many of them are just not a great fit for the show or people who are simply peddling misinformation about ADHD. Last year I had a lot of great interviews that I really enjoyed but I also had a few that ended up being clear misses, so I really want to work on making sure that doesn’t happen again this year. That means more vetting of the people who approach me and figuring out who I want to have on the show based on my interests.

This also means I’d love to work on getting onto other podcasts - I did a few interviews last year and they were always a ton of fun to do so I think that’s something I could definitely try and fit into this year. So if you have a podcast and are looking for a guest feel free to reach out.

But while I look at all the things that I want to do in the coming year it’s also incredibly important that I’m not trying to do them all at once. Often when I’m looking at a list like this it feels like I should just be able to put in a little effort in all of the categories and make progress on everything all at once. But often that doesn’t work out so well - when I’m looking at this I’m not looking at any of the potential snags I might hit, I’m not thinking about how my productivity is going to vary day to day. I’m thinking, oh I’ll just do x, y and that’ll take care of z and I’ll even have time to add in a couple more things.

So instead what I want to do figure out the places that I want to focus first. And this is really where we have to figure out what we want to prioritize. Now prioritization can be incredibly difficult with ADHD, everything feels important. But there are a few ways that we can help ourselves narrow it down. One of my favorites come from the book The One Thing, and that’s the focusing question - "What's the one thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?”

Now that can be a bit wordy so I like to think of that as, what could I do that would make my life easier. Is there anything on this list that if I did that, well the rest of the list would be easier to complete - if so, do that thing first. In my case that would probably be finding more interview guests because when I’m doing interviews I’m doing less writing which gives me more time to work on other stuff.

But I also like to ask myself what I would be happiest completing - what would I feel most proud for having completed? That’s also a pretty hard question, but something that I feel like is worth thinking on. I don’t know if I have anything on my list yet that would qualify for this, so it’s also probably worth it for me to investigate what would fill that role.