Thoroughly ADHD

Creating Your ADHD Operations Manual: A System for Consistency and Growth

• Alex Delmar Coaching • Season 1 • Episode 26

Share episode

Send us a text

Ever wished your ADHD brain came with an instruction manual? Good news – you can create one yourself! Drawing from corporate best practices, a personal operations manual becomes the external structure your neurodivergent mind craves.

The ADHD experience often means struggling with inconsistency, unclear expectations, and forgotten systems. We're constantly reinventing our approach because what worked yesterday might not work tomorrow. This episode introduces a transformative solution: documenting your personalized systems, motivations, and strategies in one accessible place.

Your operations manual serves as a trusted companion through the fog of ADHD. It outlines household responsibilities with clarity, reminds you which rewards actually motivate you, and provides a roadmap when executive function falters. The process starts with defining meaningful objectives, then tracking your daily activities to identify patterns. By analyzing what works and what doesn't, you'll build a living document that evolves with your changing needs and circumstances.

The potential benefits extend far beyond basic organization – expect lower stress levels, decreased decision fatigue, improved relationships, financial savings, and greater alignment with your core values. This isn't just another planning system; it's a framework that honors your unique brain while providing the structure needed for sustained growth.

Next week, we'll explore specific categories to include in your manual with detailed examples. In the meantime, consider what format would best serve you – whether digital, physical, visual, or audio-based. Remember, consistency doesn't mean perfection; it means having reliable systems to fall back on when your brain needs support. Ready to create the instruction manual your ADHD brain deserves?

Alex Delmar:

Even in the best of circumstances, inconsistency and lack of clarity hamper productivity and growth, and having ADHD means we are not starting under the best of circumstances. We need help, external structures that remind us what we need to do, when, and how to do them. When you have an ADHD memory, you need a reliable system to compile this information if you want to make any progress.

Alex Delmar:

You may be familiar with the concept of an operations manual from your job. Many companies use them to provide consistency and standardization in order to increase the efficiency and productivity of their employees. An operations manual defines your role and outlines how to best navigate your ongoing responsibilities. Doesn't that sound like a great tool to help people with ADHD? I'm going to show you how to modify this idea and use it to improve things for yourself.

Alex Delmar:

I'm Alex Delmar, a certified ADHD coach and person with ADHD. Welcome to Thoroughly ADHD, where I share what I've learned to help other people with ADHD enjoy better lives lives.

Alex Delmar:

You've probably heard that the best way to motivate an ADHD brain is to present it with things that are urgent, interesting or novel, and then reward any appropriate action immediately. Easy, right? Except all of these things are subjective and unique to each of us. We need to figure out what works for us, we need to remember what that is, and then after a while, because the ADHD brain gets bored, we need to swap out strategies. It never ends.

Alex Delmar:

Imagine how much easier it will be to deal with this aspect of your ADHD when you can just consult the section of your operations manual that describes rewards and strategies that have worked for you in the past or didn't work at all, or that you've heard about somewhere but not yet tried.

Alex Delmar:

Another example is how a lot of people with ADHD struggle with household maintenance. Think about how much calmer your home will be when everyone is clear on who is doing which chore, how to correctly complete it and when to do it. Even if you live alone, consider how much more efficient you'll be if you've already determined the when and how of these tasks. An operations manual can do that for you!

Alex Delmar:

Because all the information you need to run your life is consolidated in one place, using an operations manual can lower your stress levels, decrease decision fatigue, increase your productivity, improve relationships, keep money in your pocket and help you prioritize the things that are important to you

Alex Delmar:

.

Alex Delmar:

Speaking of things that are important to you, the first step to develop your operations manual is to define the objective. Do you want to be more organized or improve your health, or spend more time doing things you enjoy guilt-free? This step helps narrow your focus on how you'll spend your time and energy. When defining your role and responsibilities, you want to weight your activities to those that serve your current intentions. Also, knowing you have a concrete objective and keeping it front and center can help you stick with your plans when you hit a patch of low motivation. Next, do an outline of the major categories you'd like to include and decide on what format is most useful for you. Any easily accessible format where you can keep everything together, add to it or modify it and keep your thoughts organized will do. I recommend that you keep the writing as brief as you can without losing clarity, and use color and graphics to keep it interesting and draw attention to the headings.

Alex Delmar:

The next step, you need to gather information. Try to track everything you do in the course of a day for a few weeks. You can jot it down, use voice memos or take photos or video. You're doing this to develop a list of tasks, so after a few weeks you should also note the things you should have done but didn't, and recurring obligations that didn't happen to fall during this period, like paying bills. You may need to add actions that are necessary for moving you toward your objective because you aren't currently doing them.

Alex Delmar:

To get a skeleton for your manual, assign a level of importance, an estimated duration and frequency and, if applicable, the responsible party to each item on your list. For instance, sleep is non-negotiable, eight hours long, every day, and everyone in the house participates. Then add a bullet point list of steps that activity entails and how long they take. In this case, I'd itemize the steps of my get ready for bed routine.

Alex Delmar:

You have to rank importance, because your list will likely include an impossible number of items and, unless it's something you love to do, you're going to delegate, defer, postpone or drop the lower rated tasks..

Alex Delmar:

Now that you know how you spend your time, the next step is to analyze and refine your processes. Consider what's working well and where you are having trouble. Are there less vital tasks that can be bundled together or done less frequently, or that someone else could take over? Come up with possible solutions for obvious blocks of wasted time and regular duties that always frustrate you, and outline your plan for them.

Alex Delmar:

The next step is to review and refine each section. If needed, you can write out more detailed processes for complex tasks. If you share your household with other people, some sections will require their input and once the systems in the manual are implemented, you will all need to communicate and support each other in following the plan.

Alex Delmar:

The last step is to periodically update this document. There are some tasks that will remain consistent, such as paying bills, but the method of payment and your budget might change. Your objectives will change as you get better at working your systems and, of course, your roles and responsibilities will change over time, because that's how life goes..

Alex Delmar:

To recap, to develop your operations manual, first define the objective, next track your responsibilities, analyze what works well and figure out how to apply it to areas you are struggling. You can begin with a bare bones outline and then add details as you develop systems. This is a living document and you should make updates as your circumstances change.

Alex Delmar:

Next week, I'll cover supplemental information you should include in your operations manual and I'll give a more detailed example of a category and some suggestions for which categories you might include. If you're having trouble figuring out how to use these strategies on your own, you can consult a therapist who specializes in ADHD behaviors, an ADHD coach like me, or join an ADHD support group, either online or in person.

Alex Delmar:

I'm Alex Delmar and this has been Thoroughly ADHD. I know your time is valuable, so I hope you found this useful and that you'll like follow, subscribe, let us know how you're doing in the comments and come back next Tuesday. Thank you.