Aurora Remember of Embracing Intensity introduces her guest in this excerpt from the original podcast episode.
From the Show Notes:
"This week, we talk with Arianna Bradford, an ADHD productivity coach, about the best ways for adults with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder to boost productivity in their daily lives.
We cover a range of topics, from common symptoms of ADHD and organizational strategies to productivity hacks and the Pomodoro technique.
Arianna shares her expertise on how to set specific goals and prioritize tasks, as well as how to use the right tools and resources to get the most out of your work mode.
We also discuss the importance of taking breaks and transitioning between tasks, as well as how to manage ADHD symptoms in the workplace or in your personal life.
Whether you’re a project manager, creative professional, or simply looking to be more productive, this episode has something for everyone.
Arianna Bradford, an ADHD productivity coach, shares her tips for building productivity processes that work for neurodivergent brains.
Productivity for people with ADHD is not an arbitrary number or percentage, and should be set by the individual in regards to upcoming external deadlines.
Keeping all tasks and deadlines in one central place is important for feeling in control, and regularly reevaluating task priorities is crucial.
The ICNU method (Interest, Challenge, Novelty, Urgency) can help hack an ADHD brain and increase productivity, as can adding challenge and urgency, trying new approaches, and allowing for downtime."
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Hear the full episode, and see transcript and Show Notes for episode 261 ADHD Productivity with Arianna Bradford in the Podcast section of Embracing Intensity.
[Photo of Bradford is from her site - find link in the Show Notes.]
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See more neurodivergence-related posts and podcasts.
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Transcript ['Rough Transcript' from the Embracing Intensity episode page]
Aurora Remember: Hello. This week, I get to share a talk with Ariana Bradford on ADHD productivity. The irony is not lost on me, that we recorded an episode on ADHD productivity during my least productive month in a long time. Between burnout, extra work and lots of life changes both personally and professionally. I had to take the time to rest.
The good news is my summer is almost here and I have a lot of positive changes ahead. Outside of rest and recovery. My goal this summer is to hyper-focus on planner club and course content. So I have it ready to go for the rest of the year. You can find my executive functioning planner, prioritization tools and other printable planner content in my monthly planner club. And I’m building up the resource library for the full course membership. You can find them on my website.
In addition to finding Arianna on Instagram and YouTube, she’s also hosting a chase, the chaos summit in September. You can find the details in the show notes. Enjoy.
Welcome
Aurora: So excited to have Arianna Bradford here with us today to talk about ADHD productivity. Arianna, why don’t you go ahead and introduce yourself.
Arianna Bradford: So, there’s a whole thing in my presentation here about who I am, so we’ll get into that a little bit more. But for right now, my name is Arianna Bradford. I am an ADHD coach and I myself have ADHD, so I’m amongst good company.
Aurora: Awesome. And a little background with Arianna. We actually met in real life in a networking group of moms, and she was doing photography and this project, the not your average mom project and a bunch of around that, which was great. And when I interviewed her and I made a bunch of shorts for stories, Of growing up basically neurodivergent.
And her story was one of the most relatable to me as a person with ADHD, but she didn’t actually have ADHD at the time. So, when she announced that she had gotten that diagnosis, I was not surprised. And I’ve loved seeing everything that you’ve done ever since. So,
Arianna: yeah, I don’t think anybody who knows me is surprised that I also have ADHD,
Aurora: But you do manage to do quite a lot. So, I’m excited to hear from you. So
Arianna: Thank you.
Aurora: Awesome. So, I’m gonna go ahead and mute everyone and let Arianna dive in.
Introducing Arianna
Arianna: Cool. Before I get started, just a couple of things that I wanted to make sure that we all knew.
The first is a personal thing. I took a pretty rough hit to the head about a week ago, and I am still recovering from a minor concussion. So, if it sounds like I’m searching for words, if it sounds like I’m kind of to think. I promised you that I actually know this stuff. I’m telling you. It’s just, it’s taking me a minute.
The other thing is, just as a reminder for everybody here, for anybody who’s listening, nothing that I say is meant to apply to all ADHD people. One of my favorite things ever said to me was said by a therapist friend of mine. He said, if you meet one person with ADHD, you’ve met one person with ADHD.
Take what is useful
Arianna: So, if you hear something I’m saying and you’re like, that doesn’t apply to me, that doesn’t mean that doesn’t mean anything. It’s pretty, like, everything that I’m saying here is going to be very like basic. It’s kind of the foundation of how I think of productivity and how I teach other people with productivity.
But that does not mean that if it doesn’t work for you, that means that there’s something wrong with you or me. That just basically means that you need something a little bit different. So hopefully these are all gonna be concepts that you can kind of take and run with and make your own. But just as a reminder, because I’ve realized that.
A lot of us in the neuro divergent spaces tend to take things personally sometimes, and we’ll be like, this does not apply to me. How dare you. It. That’s okay. That’s okay. Okay. And with that, let me go ahead and pull up my thing here.
About Arianna
Arianna: All right, so, this is just like I said, what to know about ADHD and productivity. What I know about it, anything that might be able to help you guys out. So first we’re gonna start with who I am. That’s why I was very short because I was like, I already put this in there.
Just to let you know why you should be listening to me on this. I was diagnosed with ADHD in 2021 at the age of 35. And that came kind of as Aurora and I touched on it, came as a surprise to no one really. I had found out that I had ADHD thanks to looking up a diagnosis for my son. My son was five years old and he was starting to struggle at school and it just really felt like there was something going on there.
As we started looking into ADHD and I started looking into what ADHD looks like for adults. It really resonated with me. It made sense. That a lot of things I had struggled with as a kid made sense. So, I went and I got the diagnosis and it changed my life as you would imagine any diagnosis would, but it changed it in a way that I feel a lot of diagnoses don’t, in that it retroactively connected me to a lot of things that did not make sense, and suddenly they did, and suddenly they weren’t bad or wrong or shameful.
They were who I was, which was kind of mind blowing. And one of the things that occurred to me is that despite having ADHD, I didn’t really know what the
Exploring your ADHD brain
Arianna: The problem was with my brain, but I had figured out ways to do things that a lot of people with ADHD struggle with on the regular.
I wrote a book, I had started a couple of businesses by that point, I was growing communities, I was homeschooling my children, I was doing a number of things that supposedly people with ADHD weren’t supposed to be able to do. And I realized that a lot of that had to do with how I had built productivity processes and how I had come to think of productivity in connection with who I was with my brain.
And knowing ADHD made it so that I was even better equipped to figure out how to work with brains like mine. So, I decided to become specifically an ADHD productivity coach. Even though that is even kind of starting to encompass artists and things like that as well, because. As we all know, ADHDers cannot stay on any one thin line.
But now I work with people who have brands like ours to help them figure out productivity and task management processes that make sense for their brains. And uh, that, that’s what I, what I, uh, do where I’m at.
Background
Arianna: I am in Costa Rica. That’s where I live. I live here with my two children and my husband. It is a sunny, awesome day outside. I’m hoping it’s going to rain. We are in the middle of rainy season.
What else? I am a musician, I am a writer, I am a host of things. And I try to also help ADHD understand that it’s okay to be multi-passionate and to focus on multiple things because we are not told enough that we’re allowed to do that, which we’ll get into later.
What is productivity?
Arianna: So, What is productivity? And we’re talking about this literally right now. So, the definition, if you look it up, is the effectiveness of productive effort, especially in industry measured in terms of the rate of output per unit of input. Sounds like it was written by a robot, right? Therein lies the problem because we take this and we apply it to human beings.
This kind of cold, heartless definition is applied to people who are warm and with a heart Therein, lies are a mistake, especially with ADHD. So, productivity when you are an individual with ADHD. So, productivity is different for everyone, but when you have ADHD, productivity is best defined by what it isn’t.
It is not an arbitrary number or percentage. Anybody who has worked in any sort of business anywhere, you know, you’re used to hearing 30% productivity. Productivity is up 50%, productivity is up 75%. You are not just this machine, you are not a robot, you are not a percentage. And especially with ADHD, that is not what productivity is.
Productivity for you is set by you. It is not set by anyone else. You have deadlines set by other people, but you are not responsible for what other people’s productivity levels are in. And it is not a measure of how many things you’ve got done. When I say this, a lot of people stare at me like, isn’t that the whole definition of productivity?
The world wasn’t built for ADHDers
Arianna: And I usually wind up saying, weren’t you listening? The answers no. It is not about how many things you’ve gotten done. Because as we all know, especially with ADHD, we can wind up getting a bunch of stuff done. That was not what we wanted to get done. We’ll say, oh my God, I did like seven things today and not one of ’em was what I actually planned to get done.
So, there is a difference in what productivity is and what it isn’t. For us and for people with the neurotypical, I guess be the term there, would be the noun remember that we are working in a world that is set up according to numbers and rules that don’t have us in mind, okay?
The world was not set up by ADHD people. What was expected of us was not set up by ADHD people. It was set up by people who do not have the same challenges and the same strength that we do. So, it’s really not fair of you to yourself to try to judge productivity according to what it is, when what it is as we understand it, is not built by people like us, right?
You’re setting yourself up for failure from the jump thinking that way. So, you don’t want to do that. So how do we measure productivity with ADHD? We’re going to do this in regards to three things, our upcoming external deadlines, okay? Not personal deadlines, and we’ll get into that more when we get older or when we get not older, when we get further on.
Honoring your commitments
Arianna: But your external deadlines are the important deadlines. The deadlines that you set for yourself are commitment, but they’re not the most important deadlines for your mental health’s sake. You’re going to also look into, speaking of mental health, how stressed or anxious you’re feeling about where you are with things.
If you feel like you are getting things done, but by the skin of your teeth, that’s important. If you feel like you’re getting things done and you feel like you have wiggle room, that is also important. And at the last, by the, for the last thing here, your satisfaction at the end of the day is how you’re going to measure your productivity.
And we’ll get into how to look at all three of these things. You’re gonna hear me say a few times that productivity is satisfaction, not perfection. A lot of us tend to see productivity as being able to knock everything off of our to-do list in one day. That is not what that is. That is the bullshit that I was talking about.
That was not made for us...
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