How to plan your week as a creative entrepreneur (with or without ADHD)

Are you a creative person who finds routine and scheduling to be a soul-crushing endeavour?

One area clients have requested strategic support for is schedule management – which is essentially about helping them prioritize their work each week without having their creativity feel restricted, or ending up overworking or burning out. 

As a neuro-spicy business owner – or what I like to call – A CREATIVE thinking business owner I have tried every single time management tool and technique and have majestically failed at most of them! 

Until I discovered how to hack my body’s natural reward system. It’s all about using pleasure & reward (dopamine) to motivate myself to do things throughout the day. 

Here’s a few tips that you can use to have more pleasure-based days with less overwhelm, and still give yourself grace for the days where sitting on the couch is the only thing you can do – feeling zero shame around having “one of those days”.

This all starts with having your foundation. 

The foundation is the key to every single day. It’s a series of events that are strung together, repeatable and most importantly: they are enjoyable and rewarding either intrinsically or extrinsically. 

This is what my foundation looks like:

1. Wake Up (no snooze, not ever), coffee, wordle, and Instagram engagement time (commenting, liking, following and using the app as a consumer and not a creator). 
2. Workout (20 minutes max, usually some kind of metabolic conditioning) immediately followed by a Peanut Butter Cup Smoothie & a shower.

 The rewards are built into this ritual – a delicious cup of coffee, getting the wordle right and usually doing better than my husband, chatting with folks on Instagram, the post-workout bliss,  the smoothie, and a hot shower. 

This foundation starts pretty much every day and sets me up perfectly to follow through with my plans for the day. It’s the one thing I know I can come back to the next day if I happen to have an off day.

 I prioritize getting this done every day. You can include whatever you want in your foundation but I suggest doing some kind of movement, using your brain in some way, and having a delicious breakfast treat after you’ve finished the routine. 

This is the opposite of bro-morning routines, it’s not regimented, it’s a flow or a sequence of events that is as natural to your day and essential to how you’re feeling as brushing your teeth or showering. It’s generally its own reward but in order to establish it – having an extrinsic reward like your fave smoothie can help. 

 From here you can start your work day. 

I suggest starting your day with deep work. This is 2-3 hours of focused time working on something you enjoy doing and that feels rewarding in and of itself. 

I like to do client work, content creation, or writing during this time. 

This is not a time to be doing a lot of tasks – it’s about doing one thing for a few hours and really allowing yourself to drop into focus mode (taking as many breaks as you need or using the Pomodoro method to help stay focused during work times ). 

After the deep work – eat and drink something. If you’re neurospicy, you may need to set a reminder in your phone or consciously make yourself do this. It’ll be tempting to stick to the work and not take a break to go to the bathroom, eat, drink, touch grass. 

The afternoon can be about tackling your to-do/task/wish list. 

Creating your task list on Sundays as a bit of an art project is an extra creative & rewarding way to approach this. Take time to write out everything you have to do & then put it into priority order. 

 When working on tasks choose the higher priority tasks first then work down the list – physically crossing things off as you complete them. Do your best not to switch tasks. 

If you ever get to the end of your day and feel like you haven’t done anything – it’s likely because you’ve been switching tasks and half-finishing tasks before moving on to the next. I definitely do this but I’m learning to see a task through, get the reward of crossing it off my list and then move on to the next as a way to motivate myself to keep going. 

This – like any time management system isn’t perfect but it isn’t rigid or restrictive which can really be helpful for creative (or neurospicy brains). The best part about organizing this way is that it allows for freedom to choose what to focus on each day and if you have a day where all you can do is lay on the couch watching Queer Eye – you know that the next day you have your foundation to kick things off without (hopefully) too much overwhelm.

There are plenty of nuances here around what is rewarding to you and how you approach deep work (including how you feel about the work you do) – and I hope that you’re open to playing with this if you are currently struggling with routine & scheduling.