Get Ready for Spring with Seasonal Planning
Typically the way that we want to go about planning is by breaking down our planning into various layers. Starting with the high-level stuff you have yearly planning. And I say high-level here because what we’re talking about is mostly goals and conceptual ideas - in yearly planning we’re not breaking things down into the specifics that need to happen yet.
From yearly planning, we can then go into quarterly or monthly planning, where we break out the goals from the yearly planning and shape them into something a bit more tactical. Knowing that we can use those plans to then define our day-to-day activities that are going to get you to those goals in our weekly and daily planning.
The idea behind all of this is that you can use this information to take your big goals and then bring it down to what you need to do on any particular day.
But to be clear you don’t need to have all of this upfront to start your planning - we all need to start where we’re at and sometimes that just means planning today or even just the next couple of hours. But we can also use that to help us look at how we want to do our overall planning.
I like this model of planning because while it let’s me see the bigger picture and the smaller steps along the way - what it really does for me is it really connects those ideas. It gives me a map of how to get from A to Z. In my head I know all the steps in the middle are important but it can be hard for me to really connect all that.
But while I do like the idea of this planning, it wasn’t always super functional for me. Specifically, I always found the quarterly plan to be... awkward. At first I thought it was the time frame, three months is a long period to look over and it kind of felt like I was just doing three months of monthly planning at a time. But what I think was the real issue was the timing of quarterly plans - or specifically how I went about them. What I realized would be more useful is using that planning to be more specific with how I was going to be using that time.
And this is where the idea of seasonal planning came in, because if I’m planning out a season, that feels very different than planning out the next quarter, even though they are going to cover relatively the same times and amount of time.
And to just generally talk about planning for a little bit, it can feel like a bit of a waste of time to even do any planning when you’ve got ADHD because it can feel like, well I’m not going to be following the plan anyway, so why plan?
And I’d agree, if we’re not getting any benefit and we’re not going to use it there really is no point. But I think we can also reframe this - because if what we’re doing isn’t working then that doesn’t necessarily mean that we should stop doing the thing, it may mean that we need to rethink our expectations and how we’re approaching that task.
With planning it is easy to get it into our heads that we’re creating a document that we’re going to follow from top to bottom. It can be something where we feel like if we miss a step we’re going to be completely off track.
But that’s not really what we want to be getting out of planning. When we’re not creating an unchangeable document - in fact, a good plan has plenty of space for us to modify it as we go. Even in daily planning things need to be malleable because things always come up - or more often than not I’m just more ambitious than I really should have been.
And what we’re getting out of planning isn’t just that we know what’s going on from hour to hour or month to month, because again, plans should be malleable. But what we also get is that we can get some of those swirling thoughts out of our head and into a place where we can make them into action. One thing that will always be true with our ADHD is that we will forget things but often it isn’t a complete wipe of the thought, it’s more of an “oh shoot, I was supposed to send that email two hours ago” - it’s that those thoughts are swirling around in our head and need something to trigger them to come back up. Creating a plan lets us get all of that out of our heads and onto paper. It also lets us see how all these ideas are going to interact - when I write everything I want to do for a day or even a season I can better picture if I actually have that amount of time to do the things. When they’re up in my head it feels like I can just keep adding things to my daily to-do list forever, but in reality there is only so much time I’ve got in any given day, week, month, season, or year.
And having those things out of my head also clears up my brain to focus on the things I need to focus on because I don’t have that nagging thought of “don’t forget you need to text back Derek later” because I’ve got it written down in my plan for the day. But of course, this also brings up another issue - our plans only work if we use them and that means checking back in on them through the day or whichever time frame that we’re using. If we don’t trust our systems then we’re still going to have those swirling thoughts because I’m going to feel like that plan will fail me. So a good system here is to but in reminders to check in on your plans with whatever frequency that you need. And importantly here, we still have to check those plans even if we think we know what they say already. I know it’s tempting to skip when you feel like you have it memorized but I can’t tell you the number of times that I had added something unexpected to my routine and I’ll go to check my plan even though I know everything on it and find that lo and behold there was something I forgot about. We don’t write a grocery list and then leave it at home when we go to the store... well actually... yeah I’ve done that a ton of times, but not on purpose. The point being it’s much easier to follow through with our intentions when remind ourselves of what they are.
Okay, so before we get into the actual plan part let’s discuss a little bit about seasons. Now I know this might seem like, “but I know what seasons are...” they’re... when the weather changes...”
Yeah, it is when the weather changes, and while I’m tempted to jump into the science behind seasons and really go into what seasons are... I’m going to assume that is unnecessary. We don’t really need to go into the orbit of the planet and how the rotation earth is tilted at a 23.5-degree angle for our understanding of seasonal planning.
But there are some definitions that are still going to be important. First off we want to know when we are defining the start of a season. So there are two ways that seasons are defined the more classical way of delineating when a season starts is by astronomical seasons which are defined by the earth's relation to the sun. So on the Vernal & Autumnal equinox, we have nearly an equal amount of daylight and darkness and then on the Summer and Winter Solstices, we have the most and least amount of daylight. This is a very clean way of defining the seasons because it’s very easy to describe when these events are happening.
But we all know that the weather is starting to change well before the start of the astronomical season and of course it does because the equinox and solstice happen on the extreme ends of the where the earth can be located in relation to the sun. So to deal with this there is another way to look at seasons, which are meteorological seasons. These seasons are defined by the weather and our calendar.
For example, for Spring, the astronomical spring of 2022 starts on March 20th whereas the meteorological spring starts on March 1st.
Is this a big deal? Well, it depends on how you want to be doing your planning. For me I think it’s a lot easier and makes more sense to go by the meteorological season for a few reasons.
Firstly, it’s somewhat easier to start your planning at the beginning of a month and that I’m just planning for the next three months.
And secondly, it makes sense more in the terms of how I’m planning, because what I want to be doing is defining what my days are going to be looking like with the changes in the weather. Since the astronomical season starts well into the weather change that doesn’t fit as well with what I was envisioning.
However, I can see the argument for planning around the astronomical seasons as well, because while the weather has already started to change this March, it’s still pretty chilly out and there are a ton of things I don’t really want to do outside yet. As well it can be useful to be doing this planning in relation to how the rest of the world is viewing the seasons as well. If I’m trying to get my Spring planning done there are
And finally... well I’ll be honest, I’m getting this episode out a bit late for anyone to do their spring planning based the meteorological spring.
But I also want to be clear here that that’s okay too. We don’t have to be super strict with our planning. We don’t want to fall into the perfectionist trap of having perfect planning and having to have it done by a certain date. So it’s mid-March... who cares? You could even do your yearly planning now and that would be fine.
And I know a lot of people don’t listen to these episodes right when they come out so here’s just a quick rundown of start of the seasons and their meteorological and astronomical starts.
Spring - March 1st and March 20th
Summer - June 1st and June 21st
Fall - September 1st and September 22nd
Winter - December 1st and December 21st
And of course I should mention that these are for 2022, the astronomical start to the season will move around just a little bit year to year.
All right, but how would we even get about doing this seasonal planning? What’s the process?
So first off while you can do this seasonal planning for any season I’m mostly going to be focusing on Spring here because that’s what I’m actively planning right now, but I’ll try and sprinkle in a few other seasonal planning ideas as well and there is going to be a lot that is transferable from season to season.
A great way to often start a planning session is by looking back - so we can start by looking back at Winter and asking, what went well? What do we want to carry over into Spring and what are we leaving behind? What are the things that we
And from that prompt it becomes easier to start looking forward - what are the things that Spring is going to open up for us?
Remember as we move into this new season we’re going to start getting longer days and if this episode comes out when I think it will, the US is just going to have had our lovely Spring Forward with Daylight Saving Time so we’re going to be having a lot more light in the afternoon and evening.
For me this means that I’m probably going to try and start playing frisbee with my Master’s team again.
I know we’re going to be having the community garage sale in my neighborhood.
Taxes are going to be due.
I’m going to want to start putting away my winter clothes when the weather starts cooperating... it snowed here last week...
And we can think of a lot of these seasonal tasks that come up every year. For Spring there is a lot of that mentality of climbing out of hibernation holes and maybe doing some of that fabled spring cleaning. With Summer we want to be getting outside and enjoying the sun. Fall brings back some of those cooler temperatures and we can try planning out that Halloween costume a little earlier than October 30th. And Winter we get to get cozy and staying indoors more.
And of course you’re all going to have your own version of these things - if you’re a Winter sports enthusiast than I imagine you’re going to have a vastly different Winter planned than I do.
We want to be thinking about all the things we do in each of these seasons and working out how we’re going to fit that into our lives. It may feel like this is all little stuff, but this is absolutely the kind of stuff that we want to have in here while we’re planning - because more than anything planning is showing us how we can use our time. With ADHD we tend to have a fairly poor idea of how time works and so it is incredibly easy for us to overcommit and find ourselves unable to follow through with all our plans. Part of this comes from the fact that we can easily find ourselves getting bogged down in the details without seeing the big picture. Yes, I do want to do all of these things, but in the scheme of my Spring there are only so many of them I can do. If I am only looking at them individually it’s hard for me to access what’s reasonable for me to commit to.
By laying out everything that we want to get done in Spring we’re going to have an easier time prioritizing the things we actually want to get done.
And while we don’t want to overcommit we also have to remember that we’re looking at a three month period here, so we do have some time to work with.
Once we listed out everything we want to do we can start breaking down what we want to do month by month - of course some stuff will be continuous over the course of the season. For example, while my Master’s Frisbee team is going to start practicing mid-March, I expect that we’re going to keep at that for the entire season. But my taxes are going to be due in April - so since those are an important thing to get down I’ll want to frontload those into March so that hopefully come tax day I’ll have them already completed - fingers crossed that I don’t have to file for an extension again.
And I think this is an important point we want to be thinking about when we’re doing our planning. We want to try and do those high priority items as early as we can. I know this isn’t always the most fun way to do our planning, but amazingly no matter how well we plan things are going to come up. There will be things that we forget to account for. There will be things that come up last minute. And there will be day where my executive dysfunction keeps me from even attempting to be functional adult.
What I’ve found is that if I’m doing those important things first then I’m not getting as thrown off when those things do come up, because I’ve already taken care of the important stuff. And I really don’t want to imply that this is easy to do, I understand that it can be incredibly hard to get stuff done ahead of time - I’ve spent many a Sunday night editing podcast that are going up Monday morning.
But that’s okay, because sometimes we just work with what we’ve got right now.
This Episode’s Top Tips
When we’re writing out our plans we’re not creating some set-in-stone document that we can’t vire from - our plans should be malleable. It’s also important that we’re checking in with our plans as often as we need to so that we can stay on track.
By planning with the seasons in mind we’re thinking about the way our lives change with the seasons - are we going to be staying indoors or outdoors more? Are there seasonal events we want to keep in mind? What are the things you’re going to be looking forward to in those seasons?
Once you’ve figured out how you want your season to go you can break it down into what you want each month to look like and then take that information to plan out your coming days and weeks.
