Happy 2024! (using the New Year to your advantage)

We ADHDers are full of contradictions. We love built-in structure and in the same breath, we despise being told what to do. So you may be feeling both begrudgingly and excited about setting resolutions for the upcoming year. I am going to kindly ask you to set your distaste for being told what to do aside for a few minutes and lean in to the other side of the ADHD experience, which is our love for routine and external structure. Structure makes our brains feel clearer and allows our creativity to have some guardrails to keep us on task.

Give yourself permission to set your goals or intentions for the upcoming year. Instead of feeling obligated to make goals, see it as actively taking advantage of the built-in structure that is the new year. How can you use it to create clarity for yourself for the year ahead? 

Those of us with ADHD, we are wanderers by nature and we will wander (often we will wander great distances within the confines of our own heads). But getting clear on goals, intentions, values and direction can help provide a place to come back to when we have found ourselves wandering once again. It can help us not feel like we have to start from scratch every time we lose track of what we were doing, where we were going or why we even started in the first place.

I myself, like many ADHDers, need visual reminders that I can see all the time. I like to make vision boards and hang them above my desk therefore whenever I find my eyes wandering away from my work I can look up and see how what I am working today fits in with the greater picture of what I wanted for my year.

What ways do you like to set goals and intentions?