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What if the problem isn’t your job, but the version of yourself you had to become to succeed in it? Corporate jobs don’t trap us because they’re evil. They trap us because they slowly teach us to disconnect from ourselves. If you're in corporate America and your life looks successful on paper but feels empty in practice, you’re not alone.
This podcast is a space for the quiet questions you don’t say out loud at work. We explore the inner side of change: the fear of starting over, self-sabotage, the trap of external expectations, imposter syndrome, and the unsettling moment when you realize someone else’s definition of success isn't enough for you.
This isn’t about quitting your job overnight or chasing money, but asking what feels right for you and finding clarity before making your next move. We deliver actionable strategies for complex career transitions. From managing ADHD-related overwhelm at work to overcoming the disconnect of the corporate grind.
You’re not broken. You’ve just outgrown the life you built.
New episodes weekly.
Hello and welcome to episode 89 of Working towards our
purpose. In today's episode, we're going to talk about what to
do when everything feels urgent, especially with
an ADHD brain. But. But before we get into that, we're going to take a
moment and just check in with ourselves, see where we're at, see how we're feeling
today.
Alrighty. Hopefully you got a moment to check in
for me. Feeling pretty tired,
sad. Yeah, it's been a long
two weeks. My grandmother passed away
last week and me and my family are going through the grieving
process of that. She was
80 or, sorry, 98 years old, almost 99
years old. A month. Month away from that. And she was an amazing
woman. I was really fortunate to have her as a
grandmother and. And yeah, that was my last
grandparent. So if you still have a grandparent,
maybe check in on them and go play a game with them.
My grandma loves playing games. So,
yeah, we're trying to get back into
working and all that, so might be a bit
distracted today as we talk about
focusing and when things feel urgent and stuff.
But to get into the episode, I just finished this
book, this one up here called the 5 Minute Focus
Reset by Scott Allen, and
it basically talks about how you can
better focus with adhd. And
it was really helpful for me. And as I'm learning more about adhd,
it just gave me some language and framework to
describe how I feel sometimes and also
how my brain works. It gives me language to it
and yeah, just to better be able to work with my brain
instead of against it. And it's been really helpful for me.
So hopefully I can boil down the things that I took from it
and hopefully that can be helpful for you.
So, yeah, I guess to start off with
what ADHD feels like, at least for me,
or what the biggest struggles are for me is focusing on
something that's like the big one and then also just finishing tasks.
And I think there's some things that we'll get into in this episode that can
help with both of those things. And
before we get into that, and then at the end, I'll also have this
one technique that I've found from this book
that can help you, like, stay on. On focus
and also help you to finish tasks. So. So stay till the end for that.
But before we get into all that, I do want to, like, talk about,
like, the biggest myth, I think, with ADHD and productivity in general
is that, you know, when, when you lose focus with something or,
you know, it's taking you longer to finish tasks or you have trouble finishing tasks.
I think at least for me, the first thought that comes to mind is
like, oh, you're not working hard enough or you're not disciplined enough
to finish this task. You got distracted and you need to try
harder or you don't have enough discipline.
And I think that's never the answer. Shaming
yourself into not being good enough is never helpful.
I do it all the time and it never helps. It
usually just makes me more self critical and go down that spiral.
So yeah, I think it's a myth that you need to have more discipline. And
I think something that I got out of this book and
what makes a lot more sense to me is
that when you're losing focus, it's
not because you're not working hard enough. And especially
like when we talk about urgency, when you start to lose focus and you feel
like there's so many tasks that you need to do and you get overwhelmed by
how am I going to get all this stuff done? It's all important.
Having everything feel like it's urgent goes right along
with this. And I think that that's
not true. There's not that many urgent things. And I think
especially it's so easy in corporate culture or in
your work life or if you have a business or something.
It's always so easy to feel like everything is urgent.
And I think that a way that
we can instead shame ourselves for not working hard enough.
What I've noticed is that when you feel that sense of urgency,
it's your nervous system not being regulated.
You are
sort of going down these spirals of
catastrophizing and making everything feel like it's urgent
when it's not. And instead of applying more discipline
to that, I think a better approach is to try to help
regulate your nervous system, which basically just means calm yourself down.
So I had a really good example of that
the other day at my grandmother's funeral. Me and my brother were doing the
eulogy and you got to stand up there and read it in front of
everybody. And public speaking is tough for most people. And
I got nervous and it was really interesting
because I've
done eulogy before and I did one for my grandfather maybe 10 years ago
and that was so much harder and I don't remember it. I just
kind of blacked it out. And I've been going through these, doing different
open mics and all these examples of
places where I need to regulate my nervous system. So anyways, I was sitting in
this church. We have to Go through the whole mass before we could do the
eulogy. And I found myself
getting worried and I'm like, oh, I'm going to mess it up. I'm going to
trip or something, or hands start getting sweaty. And then I realized
that I'm becoming worried and my nervous
system is unregulated. And I
simply just breathe, like, did a couple long breaths.
Like, one thing, the easiest thing for me to do to regulate your nervous system
is to just breathe. You breathe in a big breath, and then you breathe
out longer than you breathe in. And just doing that
three times can really help calm you down. And it's so interesting
because this fight or flight response is
like your body's protection system. It's like you think you're in danger,
so your body's like amping itself up and you're getting adrenaline and
all the stuff that makes you freak
out and want to fight or flight mode. But if you
just try to breathe through it. I watched myself
get worked up, calm myself down, get worked up, calm myself down, get worked up,
calm myself down throughout the whole mass. And I found it
interesting. I was just observing it and being like, wow, this is cool. I have
ways to get myself to calm down
now. And I say all that to
describe, like, this is that same. It's the same principle as, like,
thinking things are urgent and being worried that you're not going
to get things done. It's like you're becoming worried, you're
working yourself up. And I don't say that in like a it's your fault
way. So I'm not. Hopefully that doesn't come off like that
because it's natural to worry about things and to be worried about things.
But we can do something about it. We can calm ourselves down. We can have
different techniques to calm ourselves down. Something as simple as a breath, trying
to get yourself out of your head and into the present moment.
Another thing, feeling the ground, feeling the bench that you're sitting on,
the chair that you're sitting on, smelling things, essential
oil, candle, all those sorts of things can help bring you back
into your body, into the present moment, and out of that fight or
flight, unregulated nervous system response.
So for me, I've kind of realized while reading this
ADHD book that that's what that sense of urgency is,
and you can do something
about it. And I know that people are going to make you feel like they're
going to tell you that things are urgent, Especially if you're in a corporate setting.
Everybody's going to Tell you things you should worry about and you got to get
this done and blah, blah, blah. But.
It's interesting to feel control over that and I think it's helpful
to feel like there's control over that.
So. Yeah. So how do we eliminate that feeling of urgency you
try to get out of your head? Because usually the urgency is like a spiraling
in your head and once you are
able to kind of reduce some of that panic, then that
sense of urgency will also go away.
So, yeah, where do you go
from there? I guess so. I think that's the major
thing that I kind of took from this book and my experiences in the past
week is that self regulating, self
calming, like making yourself feel safe and not in
fight or flight mode is a
productivity hack, I guess, for lack of a better term, because
once you're calm, you can make better decisions. And
so for the rest of the episode, we'll go through
these things that I've learned from this book and some of the language and
framework that I've learned. And then at the end of it, we'll talk about
one tool that I've been using that has been helpful for me to stay more
focused. So, yeah, so once you get calm, once you calm
your nervous system down, one of the
biggest things for adhd, like I mentioned, is
not being able to focus on tasks. And in this book they use the term
focus drift. And so this is like, I don't know if you've ever
sat down to do something. Maybe you're writing a blog post or something
or anything. You sit down to do that. But then
you think, oh, I have to pay my bills today. So then
you log onto your banking app and then you're like, oh, well, I have to
track how much I'm spending in my spreadsheet, so I got to open up that.
And then you think about like, oh, well, I should pay my business credit card
too, because that's also due. And then you open up your business tracking spreadsheet and
before you know it, there's like 15 tabs open and you're doing something
completely different than what you sat down to do. And this is
focus drift. This is feeling like other things
need your attention, but you actually sat down to do this one thing.
So this is very common in adhd.
That specific focus drift is something I've done before.
But in this book, the five Minute reset,
one of the biggest concepts from it is how do we interrupt these spirals,
how do we get out of these drifts and notice that we're Drifting
and try to bring our attention back to focusing on what we should be
focusing on or what we want to be focusing on.
And
so
a lot of what I talked about with, like, regulating your nervous system is sort
of a way to find. To find focus again,
to go for a walk, like to go and move your body, to
go do something that
resets your mind and try to getting out of
that spiral that you're stuck in. And it is really hard. It's really hard to
not just pick up your phone and scroll through Instagram.
I mean, that's the easiest thing to sort of distract yourself from
what you're doing. But if we can go do
something small and try to, like, get some
awareness, and then once we do have some awareness that
we're drifting our focus, the thing to do
to try to restart your focus, because that's
something too, to realize that you can restart your focus, you can start at
any time and you can come back into it. But something that
they wrote about in this book was trying to find a re entry point.
And I think that was really helpful for me because I think sometimes
I feel like it's too far gone. I've lost focus.
I'm an hour into scrolling or to doing
something that doesn't. It's a distraction. I feel
like, well, today's gone, maybe tomorrow.
It's easy to just write it off or to feel like you can't come back
in. But if you can find a re entry point, you
can get back into, kind of snap out
of the unfocus and try to
do what it is that you set out to do. And
something that's helpful that I read was
finding the simplest reentry point. Maybe you lost focus
because the task that you're working on is a really big task, and
it's easier for your brain to get distracted and to
go play your guitar or scroll on your phone. So
the technique that I picked up in this book was to find the
simplest thing that you can do so your brain can't say no.
So for me yesterday, an example is I was trying to work on
something and I couldn't get started. So I
thought about one really simple thing. I had to make a phone call to the
bank, and I called the bank. It took five minutes. I
thought I had a fee, but it wasn't a fee. And after I did that
one little task, I felt like I had some momentum on my side.
And once I finished that, I was then able to do
something else. And then I was able to do the task
that I wanted to do that day. So finding these little
simple re entry points into focus and
even to think about it in that way has been helpful for me.
Another thing that is difficult
with ADHD is finishing projects and finishing tasks.
And one thing that this book gave language to was
open loops and having things
always be opened. And I sort of resonated with this
because if I don't finish a project,
I'll always be thinking about it and always be
using mental energy to process it,
I guess. And so that makes it really hard to relax. And even if
I'm finished working for the day, it's hard to feel like you're done
for the day or feel like you can ever just
actually relax. It's hard to put stuff down.
But in this book they talked about how can you
close loops? And there's a couple different things that
made sense to me. And
if you're working on something that isn't finished, when you're done
working on it, to just simply get a sticky note, whether it's digital or
analog, just to write down where you left off,
where you're at, and then what the next step is to get back
into the project. And by doing that, you can sort of close the
book on that project and put it on the shelf, and then when you come
back to it, you know you're not going to be lost. And I think
I sort of subconsciously do that all the time where I feel like I have
to remember everything instead of like
writing things down. And I know that's really simple concept, but
yeah, with adhd, if you're struggling with it, it's like so easy to
not do that. And I think that that's something that I picked up from
reading was sort of like parking your tasks.
That's what they called it, parking the tasks that you're
working on so you don't have to continue to carry it with you. And this
is helpful too, even if it's not the end of the day. But you're switching
tasks to help you to just focus on one thing. Because
I think that's the biggest thing that people with ADHD struggle with is
having too many brain tabs opened at once and there's too many things
you're thinking about. And closing
these loops and finishing projects and stuff can really
help you to drop all of the other things and to focus on the
one thing that you're doing right now. So that's been kind of helpful for
me. I've really tried to think about just doing the one
thing that I'm on. I'm Notorious for keeping 20 tabs open on
my computer because I'm like, well, I don't want to forget to do that. So
I'll keep that there and I'll keep this here. And then when you look
at takes your attention away.
You're on one tab, but you see the little thing and you're like, oh, that's
right. I gotta buy tickets for that event at some point,
not right now. And it takes a little bit of
thought power to do that. And by just clearing everything and
only having the tabs, that. That's such a new thing for me that I've started,
then it's been really nice because it's a lot less.
It's a lot easier to not get distracted by not having so many tabs open.
So just little things like that and finishing your
projects. The last thing that I want to talk about too is
like, I've always noticed
this to myself, like when you finish a project, you don't. When I
finish a project, I don't notice that I get any sense of
fulfillment from it. Usually I get really excited at the beginning
of a task, but it's really hard to feel much of
anything when I'm finishing a task because I'm normally already onto the next thing.
So kind of tracking
what I'm doing with tasks. I think sometimes it can be hard to
realize that you even finished
a task. I don't know if you can resonate with that or if
you've experienced that, but I'll finish a task and I'll still feel like it's
not done for some reason. I'll finish a big task
and I'm like, well, it's not really done because it's not perfect. So
I'll just keep thinking about it even though it's done and I don't get
the feel good feeling of finishing it.
So that's really annoying. But
if I can close the loops and be like, okay, this task is done when
this happens, and almost sort of tell yourself that
the task is done, okay, I'm done. Done working on this. Have a
checklist and cross it off, those sorts of things.
Visual indications I think are helpful to realize that you finished a
task because I do know that for people that struggle with adhd,
it is hard because you don't get that same sense of
dopamine hit when you finish tasks. And it's so much easier to start a bunch
of tasks because that feels good, but to finishing them into doing the
tedious stuff. To finish them is more difficult.
So those are some of the things that I picked up in on that book.
And then the one thing that I've started incorporating
from this book is called the Focus Dashboard. And
it's basically just a piece of paper, like a very simple one
thing sheet of paper. And you can customize it to what
works for you. And here's
mine. It's on a whiteboard right now because I'm still testing it and still figuring
out what works for me and what I need. But it's basically just this
one sheet of paper to help you stay focused on what you're trying to do
today. And also checking in with
yourself, seeing where you're at, writing stuff down so you don't
have to remember it. And so I'll just walk through what mine
looks like. And so on the top I have this mood
tracker, and on the left hand side I have like, not focused. And on the
right hand side I have super focused. So in the morning I've been waking up
and just trying to like put down on that chart between those two points,
like where I'm feeling, is it in the middle or is it, do I feel
focused today or less focused? And with that, I can sort of help, like
pick which tasks I should be working on. Cause if I'm not really
focused, like doing a really hard task, like
recording a podcast might not be possible.
So that's why I had to skip the episode last week, because I wasn't able
to do it, which is okay.
So yeah, there's the mood tracker. And then right down on the second
list under that, I have what's the one thing that I want to do today?
And this has been really
helpful because it reminds me of that book that I read. The
one thing. Picking one thing to work on and
doing that one thing, that's just been such
a helpful concept for me. And I had an episode a while back on it.
But picking the one thing that will help
to get you to your goal and focusing on that because there's
so many distractions and there's so many different things you can be doing, but
trying to identify the one task that's the most important, that's also
aligned with how you're feeling today, it's been really
helpful for me. And what this basically does, this Focus
Dashboard is it kind of like sets up my day and it tells me
like, okay, if I do this one task today, then I had a successful day.
And it doesn't mean I can only do that task. But if I
Get that one task done, then I'm good. Because there's been so many days where
I've gotten a lot done, but at the end of the day, I just didn't
feel accomplished. I didn't feel like I got stuff done. And it
was mainly because I wasn't looking at what I was doing. And
if in the morning I can set myself up and be like, okay, today
will be successful, if I do this one thing, then I do that
one thing. And I'm like, okay, I did good today. I can still do more
if I want, but I still am making steps
forward. So for today, for example,
my one thing is record this episode. If I record this episode, at
the minimum, it's a great day. And I can get to the end of the
day and be like, well, I did my one task. Maybe I wanted to do
more, but that's okay. I at least made some progress forward.
And I think that that's really helpful to track that and to
see how you are getting things done. Because sometimes,
like I said, you just don't realize that you're doing things. You don't realize that
you're getting stuff done. So, okay, back to this focus dashboard. On the
third level here, I have micro tasks, which is just
like, things that need to get done, but they don't need to get done right
now. They're not the most important thing, but they're just some things, some
bigger things, some smaller things, just kind of like all the tasks that come to
mind. So what this does is it helps me not have to remember it in
my head so I can write it down. But then it also helps me, like,
if I'm trying to find a re entry point, you know, I'm distracted.
I'm trying to find a focused reentry point. I can tell you an easy task
and be like, okay, I gotta make this phone call. I'll go do that now.
And then maybe I can get started back on my one thing task.
And then it also helps me cross stuff off. So when I cross
stuff off, that makes me feel good about
getting things done and carrying that momentum. And then I have
another line here for in progress projects,
like bigger projects or things again, so I don't have to remember
them. And then lastly, I have a section for finished.
So here I'm literally writing down, like, all the things that I finished today.
And something that's been helpful is, like, I usually read in the
morning, and sometimes I don't see that as like a good
thing or like, it's just Become normal. So now I'll
write and finish like I read today. So even if I did, like,
nothing, well, I read.
And that's just really helpful, I think, to recognize that
I'm doing things because so much of
this feeling bad for not doing enough
work is just not realizing that you're doing things
for me. So that's been really helpful for me to sort of have this.
And I'm doing it on a whiteboard now because I'm still adjusting it. Another
thing that they recommended in the book was, you know, things that you shouldn't do.
So if you, you know, get caught playing your guitar
all the time as a distraction, like, say, do not play your guitar, like, you
can have a section on here of things not to do. For me, I didn't.
Didn't feel like I wanted to do that, but. But,
yeah, just sort of making this tracker and it's just sort of like a
status, not a status that sounds bad. Sort of like a tracking
my own, like, progress and
mood and just trying, you know, trying to stay
focused on my day. I think that's the biggest thing is just trying to stay
focused on my day so that each day I'm accomplishing something
that moves me towards my goal. And,
yeah, hopefully that makes sense. Hopefully. Hopefully you got something from this
episode. Did feel a little all over the place, but, you
know, hopefully if you. If you felt any of these
things, things, if you struggle with focus,
you can always send me an email on workingtowardsapurpose.com if you have any
comments or questions or feedback, I'd love to hear from
you. And then also I have a
guide in the link of everything that I put out there for
softening your inner critic. If you'd like to download that, you
can find the link. And yeah,
be good to yourself today, and I'll see you on a
podcast real soon. Take care.