The AntiPlanner with Dani Donovan

The anti-planar is a strategy guide, survival kit, activity book for procrastinators. There are like 165 different single serving prompts and activities and challenges, tools, games, because I think that we have needed an answer for a long time that wasn't planners or to-do lists. Welcome to the ADHD Essentials podcast. I'm your host, Brendan Mahan. I'm an ADHD professional who has been working in the field for 10 years. I'm on the organizing committee for the International Conference on ADHD and a board member of the Men's ADHD Support Group. Before we get into today's episode, though, registration for the Fall 2023 session of the ADHD Essentials Parenting Groups closes on September 22, which is less than a week away from this episode posting. There's still some space available. These groups are built to improve the cooperation and relationships between parent and child to reduce the overall anxiety in the home. We do this with ADHD friendly strategies, compassion, and permission to have the challenges that you face. Over the past five years, I've helped hundreds of parents address the challenges they face as a result of ADHD and anxiety, and I'm sure I can help you too. Here's past the Tendee Troy, sharing some of his experience. I actually woke up thinking about this, and I just have to say that I think that the the the feel and the air and the just the whole vibe in our house has changed. Every time we finish one of these sessions, it's almost like I feel closer to my kid. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. He's not even there. Right. And I mean, yeah, I think, yeah. And that's like I always want to just just want to go and hug him after we finish these sessions. I also feel that you have given me permission just to feel out a little bit with being the thing of parent and just give him space and give him room. Just a little bit more accepting. And so yeah, I mean, I also, I'm just sort of like in in all of just how wonderful a father he must be. And that certainly has an impact on me. Again, just I really really enjoy these sessions and I get a lot out of out of them for sure. Check out the link in the show notes for more information about these groups or email me at Brendan at ADHD essentials.com to set up a free information call. Welcome to the show. Today, we talk to ADHD creator and friend of the show, Danny Dunnevin. Danny is the creator of the anti planner. It's a phenomenal tool for helping folks with ADHD get stuff done. Danny talks to us about the anti planner and why it is such a powerful tool. She also shares some of the strategies that are in it strategies that she actually used while creating this phenomenal tool such as letting yourself bounce from one strategy to another paper football decision making con bond boards and even meal planning. All right, let's get rolling. Hey, I am Danny Dunnevin. I'm an ADHD creator of comics of TikToks and of a new book, The Anti-Planer, How to Get Shit Done When You Don't Feel Like It. Am I allowed to say that? Am I allowed to? Okay. We're like a kid friendly show, but it's not the end of the world. And it's part of the title. So we've known each other for years and years and years and years now. If anyone is curious about your road to an ADHD diagnosis and all that stuff, they can go back and listen to the first episode you are in. I'll put a link in the show notes that gets them there because we're not going to do that. We're going to talk about the anti-planer. It's a book, but it's not a book. It's like, yes, it's a book, but it's not a book you read cover to cover. It's a tool. That's really what it is. And it's amazing. It's so incredible. I kind of just want to say talk about it. The anti-planer is a strategy guide, survival, you know, kit activity book for procrastinators. And there are 165 different like single serving prompts and activities and challenges and tools, games, all the types of ways to try and figure out how to get things done based on how you're feeling. And so the book is broken up into five different sections. Whether you're stuck overwhelmed, unmotivated, disorganized or discouraged, you can kind of flip to that tab. And then there are like these little sub-emotions. So, you know, if you're feeling overwhelmed, you might be intimidated or over committed or panicked or burnt out, whatever. And then you go to that section and each of the sections have activities that are specifically targeted to help you address that feeling because as someone with ADHD, as you know, the thing that gets in our way so often are those roadblocks, right? The wall of awful. Yeah. And so, but being able to identify what emotions are there and helping people develop that like self-awareness. And so like trying to tell people like, yes, this is the productivity tool. But it's also a giant like self-awareness tool from someone who's been in therapy for 10 years and ADHD coaching for five years to be able to give people the types of activities that will work for them, as well as the knowledge that like, you write one productivity system, it's not realistic that if you're not someone who sticks with something for very long, it's not realistic to expect yourself to pick up a new planner or pick up a new system or pick up a self-help book and stick with that the rest of your life. What's going to happen is like me, you know, you'll try it out, you'll get really excited at the beginning. And then slowly, either slowly at crumbles or you miss one day and it all falls apart. And then you, we blame ourselves a lot. We think, oh my God, I'm a failure. Why do I even bother trying? I waste so much money on this stuff. And the reality is, is if you can think about it, like, no, I need a toolbox. Like, not every problem needs a hammer, right? If you can zoom in and see like, oh, the resistance caused by this is not a nail, it's a screw. I need a screwdriver. It's kind of along the same lines of, I don't need a place to write down my to-do's. I need a place to help me actually get those to-do's done. So, yeah, I think my goal making it was really to show people, you know, you can kind of flip through it and pick one thing, read one page and try something. If it works awesome, you know, it doesn't work. That's all right. You can rip it out if you want. But overall, just giving people the option to play was what it was all about. Yeah. And that was the thing that jumped out at me the most as I went through it. Because you gave it to me at the conference and I was like, okay, I'm going to read this. And then I like read the beginning of it and went, oh, no, I'm not supposed to. Like, this is a book you play with. This is not a book you read. And that's, that's 80 HD, right? Like, we need that play because that's where the dopamine comes from. And I can imagine people cracking this book and being like, I'm a very serious person. And I do not think that this is a serious book. And those people are wrong because there's a ton of really important, really serious stuff in here. But it's all accessible and comfortable. The graphic design of this book, the layout of your book is amazing. I mean, I can only imagine how expensive this thing is. Yeah. Self-publishing is colored paper and it's it's white on black, which is a dream full bleeds and rounded corners and tabs like a recipe. It's pretty much a recipe book. It is. I've been thinking of it like an activity book, but it's an activity book that's organized like a recipe book. When she says tabs, she's not lying. Like, there's actual tabs in this book that you can flip. Like, there's stuck, overwhelmed, unmotivated, disorganized, discouraged, extras. There's tabs. You just go to the tab and flip to that part. You don't have to use the table of contents to figure out what page disorganized is on and then find that page number. You just grab the tab because that's ADHD friendly. I can rant about how amazing and incredible this book is for the rest of the interview. I'm going to try not to. But I do want to I want to comment on one more piece and sort of shine a little more light on you and then I'll shut up. The fact that you're an artist and a graphic designer really plays a prominent role in this book. And that makes it accessible because it's not a big block of text that you have to navigate and deal with. It's boxes of texts and some paragraphs here in sidebars and pictures and images and illustrations and everything is broken out in the headings and subheadings. That design makes it easier to access. It breaks the the book down into bite-sized pieces so that you can use it more like a recipe book more like a tool more like an activity book. And you don't have to read it cover to cover which is in fact the wrong way to go because it's not going to do what you wanted to do if you did it that way. And you also invite the readers to engage with it like an artist might. It is an activity book. There's sections in here where it's like right stuff down in this part. That interactivity of the book is also phenomenal. It is an honor to have been given a copy of this and read through it and play with it. I'm in the process of getting the wall of awful book done. It's going to take a while. As I go through this, I like, I get jealous and I'm like, that is a, oh, Danny already did it. But I also really love that like you're my friend and we can have books that complement each other and can kind of be companion pieces. One mind finally comes out. And then as we've sort of talked about here and there, when the wall of awful book is done, maybe we combine forces and we do a kids book about the wall of awful. I would love that. So I would love to work with you on that because I know how amazing it'll become with you on board, not just art wise, but content wise because you've there's so much in here that's great. Tell me like why? What made you sit down and go? I want to write a book about how to get unstuck. So the funny thing is that a lot of these things, I was just doing on my own to try to trick myself into being productive. I had not realized or quite a while how many of these things I was just doing. My, my business coach that I had hired like right at 20, I quit my job at Gallup the last day of February in 2020. And then it was like two weeks later like everybody's on, you know, lockdown. And so I was really terrified at the time because I was like, oh my god, what did I just do? But if I wouldn't have made that leap before that happened, I think it would have been so much more difficult for me to fully invest in myself. But anyways, so I, my business coach, I had recommended that I start a field guide where I keep all of my inner, I was a inner thoughts about how I function best, what's important to me. And so what I did was I started creating things like I think I started with in in-box sprint was one of the big ones where I would outline a bunch of boxes according to how I'm on a grid paper, according to how many emails I wanted to get written because I would just put it off until they're, you know, we're 120 in there. And then I'd set up Pomodoro Timer and speed through and see how many I could answer in that amount of time and check off each one as I went. And so I've got pages and pages of like inbox sprints, right, which is one of the things that I've got in the book or like the dice roll thing where I like turn myself into a D a D character. I came up with that in like 2016 and I'm sure again, I might I don't think I might not be the first person who thought of that, but like gamifying your life in these ways. I had made that into a TikTok. There are quite a few things in the book that I had created as content for other places like TikTok. And then there are ones I just did for myself. There are some things that I learned from books. There are some things that I learned from coaching. There are some things I learned from therapy, from art therapy, from talk therapy. So it's really an amalgamation of all of this knowledge that's sort of been in my head as well as things that have that have worked for me. Like I have not put I didn't put anything in here that I have not done. And so there were actually only a couple that I had to create specifically like for the book because what I did was laid everything out figured out all of the sections and then anything that was like, okay, this section feels a little bit light going through it and thinking, okay, how this doesn't have any games in it. Like how could I and then I and then I brainstorm, but that didn't have to happen very often because it turns out somebody of these were just kind of organically in my head. And so getting a chance to put them the paper and was really helpful. And as far as the the business of having things be on one page, that was really useful because I knew especially having made comics like my goal with my comics is always I want people to be able to understand these without having to zoom in. And I same with my TikToks, right, I want to be able to keep these under a minute. And so I think that having that knowledge of the attention span of my audience and knowing I'm the same exact way of like I want bulleted text, I want sort things I want to get I want bolded things I want to be able to understand things as quickly as possible. But that was really great for me because I could set a timer and be like, I'm just going to brain dump into this kind of recipe format of here's what you need. Here's how you do it. Here are some tips, you know, and so it made it much more accessible for me rather than sitting down and having to write chapters on chapters on chapters of a book. That makes a lot of sense just having sort of flip through those all of those strategies that are there. They're bite-sized pieces of content that's all it is. But that's the kind of content that I as an ADHD person want. I don't want to read what is effectively a textbook, whether you call it a self-help book or not. They repeat the same thing over and over again just because they don't have a new thing to say. And you get bored, right? Like I'm even reading ADHD books. I have trouble reading ADHD books because the beginning of every ADHD book tells you about ADHD. And I'm like, I know all this. I don't like, but I can't skip the chapter three because I'm going to miss something, right? But that's not this. This is so actionable. It's not about theory. Like if there's theories in there, but it's not about theory. It's about action. It's about this is the thing that you try if you're stuck or if you're unmotivated or wherever you are. And if that doesn't work, here's more stuff. Here's three, four, five other things to give it to make an effort with. And also maybe you're not unmotivated. Maybe you're overwhelmed. And you just like misinterpreted what's up and go to the other part. What people really hear when they do this too is being able to look at them and they're like, oh, I'm not just lazy. Like a lot of people have either labeled them as lazy or they've labeled themselves as lazy. And so right at the beginning of the book, telling them like, you are not lazy. Lazy is a capitalist construct. You know, like don't let me near that soapbox. But my heart when you when I read that, I was like, dude, he's the best. But just because, you know, it's a shame. It's a shaming word. It's self-shaming or other people shaming you. And then it's a lot of times how people start to define their own worth. And so I really want I'm kind of kick it off at the beginning of your worth, right? Your worth is not measured productivity. And it's time to start doing things because you want to and not because you're afraid you have to. That fear of consequences, that fear of getting in trouble, especially for those of us with ADHD is so prevalent and has been such a primary motivator for so many of us for so long that we don't know how to get stuff done without it there. And so a lot of times that is why we procrastinate. We procrastinate because it works. We procrastinate because that's it. It has worked for us in the past. We pulled it off. Our brain goes, look, we did it these other times. Why wouldn't we, you know, be able to pull it off this time? That way, I'm the most efficient with my time, but I could possibly be because I'm scrunching it all into one space. I use all the rest of it to be, you know, if I get started early, I might take too much time. At that time, I could be spending doing more fun things, right? And I get it down to this little bit of time that I'm now down against the wall or like against the wall. But if I turn it in and it's not my best work, I can blame it on not having enough time and not on myself. It's like a failure thing of like if I fail, it wasn't my fault. It was because I don't have enough time. And so like realizing that that last minute panic as a primary motivator was was a really difficult position to continue to put myself in because I was pulling all night or I've pulled all nighters at every job I've ever had. And that's not normal. You know, I mean, depending on the industry, but I a lot of times it was self-inflicted and that hurts. That cycle perpetuates itself. Anxiety is the only thing you can burn for fuel and wind up with more of it when you're done is what I like to say. And that's what the that's what the procrastination is. It's like I'm going to just not do this until the anxiety gets so intense that I can activate. And eventually my nervous system is only activated by anxiety. And if I'm not anxious, I don't know how to start. And this provides solutions for that. In fact, you call it a procrastination fire extinguisher. And if we think of anxiety as the fire, we're putting out that anxiety fire so that we can just in a healthy way start. Whatever it is that we have to start, whether it's the dishes in email or I don't know, maybe maybe I'm writing a book that I'm going to call the anti-planter. Segway, what was the process of writing this like? Were you using these strategies as you wrote it? Yes, yes, I was. Throughout the book, that's one of the other things that I always need. If you're going to have me write in something, you better give me an example because I'm going to spend so much time like worrying that I'm not going to do it right if I can't see, you know, what it looks like when it's done. So throughout the book, there are examples. Most of those examples are about finishing the anti-planter. And they're not made like ones that I just like made up to be cute to put in that, no, they're real. They're real ones that I actually that I actually did. It was this excellent cycle because I get so frustrated that I couldn't get something done. I would go, wait, it's almost like I'm making a book about this. Take a second, identify the feeling, go to the section, do the thing. It would work. And then my brain would go, yay, this is totally worth it. I'm really happy that this is working. And every single time it happened, it works every time because it was doing a different thing every time, you know, I wasn't continually trying to do the same thing over and over again. And every single time it works, it helped to build up this idea that I had of like this is actually going to help people. Like getting started at like, out the gate, it was very much like, are these going to be too weird for people? Like are people going to be really off put by like, I've got paper football in there, right? Like where I've got it where if you can't decide between a bunch of things you need to work on, they're all pretty much like equal importance. I'll like write it on a few different pieces of paper, make a bunch of paper footballs, and then like punt them with your, you know, flick them with your finger and then whichever one goes the furthest is the one that I start on. The people in my old co-working space would literally see me like, flicking paper footballs down the hallway by myself, probably like, what is wrong with this chick? But it's really great when like the decision is made for you, right? And I'm like, oh, I'm not going to argue with it. This is, it has been foretold, right? And so being able to, to do that was great. But the fun part was getting to figure out what the sections were going to be, the emotions were going to be because I didn't come up with the sections and then come up with the exercises. I brainstormed on a bunch of note cards, a bunch of different exercises I like, brain uped as many as I thought possible and then kind of sorted them into ones that seemed like they were addressing the same sort of thing and then post it notes on top of all of those of like, okay, these seem to be the major emotions and then realizing, okay, those emotions actually all sort of clustered together. And so that was how I ended up with the sections and the subsections. But I'm really happy about that because otherwise, like if you would have given me a book with 165 different things to do in it, I would have been so overwhelmed trying to decide what to do that I would have really struggled to flip. I would have wanted to see, you know, all the options versus picking a little section and going, okay, this one has 10 things in it. I only have to, you know, flip through 10 things to kind of look at it. And as well as things I have, you might also like on all of the sections because a lot of these exercises will apply to different, to different parts. The initial book that I was going to publish, I actually had duplicate pages in different sections where exercises would be repeated. But I kind of figured out, you know what, I need to do like the little Amazon thing where it's like, you might also like recommended products. I kind of did that with exercises as well as little footnotes at the bottom of like things that pair well with other things. So, be like, try pairing this with this on this page so that people can kind of see the inner workings of how this stuff all can kind of fit together. And I have like one example that I'm particularly thinking of that's like a conbound board, labeling and batching. And it's on, what is it, page 250? And it's where you take, and I'm like, here is how labeling works. Where, you know, you kind of assign, oh, you know, maybe red post it's on my work tasks and blue post it's on my home tasks. And then, you know, I've got little icons for this means, you know, a little email icon means I need to contact somebody or like little doodle of a calendar means I need to schedule something. And I kind of do that for everything. Put them into the conbound board categories of like to do in progress, on hold or done. And move things across, but the batching part of it is, okay, I have all of these post it's now what? And I go, here are a bunch of ones that have a little dollar sign that means purchase. I'm going to knock out all of my purchasing things all the one time. I'm going to grab all the things with little dollar sign. I'm going to do all of those at once. And then I get that like the good hit of, oh my god, I accomplished a thing. Not just accomplished one thing, I accomplished, you know, three things at the same time. So being able to show people not just hear some different strategies, but here's how those strategies can work together. And here's how I've been using them. I think is hopefully pretty beneficial for people. The conbound board is great because it's interactive. You're actually moving the sticky notes across. Yes. I have one right here to my right on the window. I use my monitor. Posting notes on the bottom of my monitor are to do's. On the right side of my monitor are in progress. On the right side of my monitor are on hold and then the top is done. The nice thing is that it really limits the amount of space that I have to put to do items. So I can't continually add stuff. I like only allow for that. Anyways, I could talk about conbound boards literally all day. It's my favorite thing. But when I tell people it's my favorite thing, I use it the most often, but I don't use it all of the time. I use it when I've got a ton of stuff I need to do or a big project. And then when those things are done, I just don't do it for a long period of time. And I think that that's one of the things that makes this book helpful. And I mentioned it so many times throughout the book. Even if you lose this for a year and you pick it back up, it doesn't have calendars or dates. It's not going to go bad. It's going to be just as helpful as when you bought it, even if you procrastinate using it, right? Even if you only use it two times a year. If those two times a year, it helps you get something done that's a net positive. Being able to pick and choose as well as I tried really hard to use that my like, authentic voice that people are really used to hearing online. It very much is your authentic voice. Heron set of goals where I'm like doing little call outs where I will make comments to them. And they're like, it feels like a friend is sitting here talking to me about it, not like a teacher. And they're not even it's so much better than a parenthetical because you use the different font color. And they might even be smaller, but it's like a little wider and it's yeah. So it's like it's even more of an aside because graphically it's a little bit different. My character style in InDesign is called Danny Thoughts. But it was it was a lot of fun, especially I found this I found this PowerPoint presentation the other day at my parents that I made an eighth grade and it was called How to Write a Book is hilarious. It's the graphic design is so bad I was mortified. But throughout the presentation, I have these parentheticals where I'm making like metahumor and I go, wow, I've been doing this since I was like 14 since I was younger. Like this is not a thing that I just picked up, but like the thoughts inside of other thoughts and making sure people know that that's that they're not alone. That's one of the biggest things where I want people to know like, you know, I would be such a hypocrite. I know we talked about the fire extinguisher, right? So that would be such a hypocrite if I try to tell you not to procrastinate or let things catch on fire in the first place. You know, I am the mayor of procrastination town. I remember when you beat me in that election in the May in the procrastination bill. I don't know man, it's bleak here sometimes, but it's been really great because the big thing I try to tell people to when they're like in the moments where we get all worked up and we get really frustrated, get really overwhelmed and we forget that we have a tool like this. Really early on in the book, I've got a page that's like RE self defeating bull crap. The thing I like to call out is if you're worried that you're going to forget about it, to tell a loved one, to tell a friend, to tell a partner, to tell whoever that family member that you have this book that this is the resource. So that if they hear you venting about being overwhelmed or stressed or anything like that, that they can remind you gently that you have a resource to deal with it and empower you to solve your own problems instead of them feeling like responsible for like solving them for you. Because a lot of times when they try to give us advice, it's so unhelpful anyway because they're trying to tell us, well, just do you just need to, you just need to get started. I'm like, oh my god, I never thought of that. Thank you so much. How much, how, send my bill in the mail. This has been wonderful. Are there any strategies that you were like, yeah, no, that one's nonsense. Like that can't possibly work. That's not a thing. It's not good. Like that one stinks and then tried it and it ended up being useful. The one that comes to mind, I almost cut it from the book, but it's been, it's been helpful for me once and I know that it is helpful for other people that I isn't how are matrix where it's, that's one of the ones that I struggle with. The like do decide, delegate and delete. I feel like that one, it can be really helpful if it's for a specific project, but oftentimes I feel like I write a bunch of stuff down and I do maybe like one of the things and then I never come back to look at it. But again, it's helpful for me. I asked a couple of people, they're like, oh, I find help. I'm like, all right, I'm going to, I'm going to include it because it's a, it's a good strategy where you're kind of comparing the urgent versus the important. And that one's tricky because for ADHD folks, urgency feels like importance and we have trouble distinguishing the two. So I, yeah, I can get that. I had to put little definitions for what they made over in the science group. Yeah. The most benefit I've gotten out of the Eisenhower matrix is the delete part. It's helped me just not even consider stuff to be like, that is neither urgent nor important. I'm not going to worry about it. I think that some of the exercises that I worried that maybe, you know, because it's like how to get stuff done when you don't feel like it. I've got to spread about ideas to feed yourself when you just can't anymore. It's in the burnt out section. And it's a, there's space for you to put your like easy go to meals. But there's a giant list of foods broken down by, you know, section of the grocery store. I think that are things that don't require cooking or cleaning or dishes. And then over on the left side, there's a bunch of snack ideas and they are broken up by shelf. life. So it's like these things will go bad very quickly. These things will stick around for quite a while. These things will be with you until you die. You know, and so I think I missed that one. Yeah, it's a very end of the burnout section. And it's my one of my favorites, because I use it for grocery shopping. When I'm like, oh, we have nothing in the house, I will open up to that page. And I'll just kind of scan down. I'm like, Oh, I want that. I want that. I want that. I didn't realize how often I was going to turn to that page, because you think, you know, I eat these things all the time. I would remember how much I like Greek yogurt. Or you'd think I'd remember how much I like pistachios. But once I run out, my brain like deletes it somehow. So being able to have a sort of resource and that I can look and think, okay, I'm not going to get anything with a short shelf life. It's going to rot in the fridge. Like that whole section is literally just for the, hey, I know you, I know that some of this stuff is going to rot in your fridge. So if you're worried about that, you know, you can kind of come back and look at the longer shelf life. And then if you don't, then you can go to the thing in the disorganized section that talks about how to clean out your refrigerator when it's full of moldy food and you don't want to. One of my favorite parts of the book. I don't know if it's a meta joke on purpose or not. I'm kind of asking page 172 and 173. 172 is how to function when you're sleepy AF. And then 173 is trick yourself into becoming a morning person. So it's like now that you know how to operate on less sleep. Here's how you're going to get up early and you'll be able to handle having less sleep because you won't got earlier than usual. This is in it's in that unmotivated section and the waiting to feel like it because the, how to take yourself into a morning person was one of my like most viral ticked talks. And I initially wasn't going to, wasn't going to put it in here. But I went back and read through the comments and I have people who were commenting on that ticked talk like five months after it was posted and they're like, I'm still doing this. Like I can't believe this works. And so because right how to trick yourself into a morning person. So many people set a bunch of alarms and you know, like snooze them. And so I won't go through the entire strategy. But it really kind of focuses around giving yourself permission to be on your phone early. So many of us are told like, don't get on your phone for staying in the morning. That's the last thing you want to do. I'm like, no, it will make my eyeballs stay open. So I will skip that. I'm going to set an alarm for when my phone time is over. And that will prompt me to get out of bed because if I wake up and then just sit there on my phone, I don't, if I don't have another alarm that's going to go off, it's so easy to fall down the rabbit hole. And then how to function when you're sleepy AF is just more about, ah, well, this didn't work or, or I'm having a day where it's just not kicking in. And so one of the best ones on there is like a cold compress on your eyes, like getting a cold washcloth and just like pushing it onto my eyeballs. I cannot believe how much that works for me. And so I'm, I feel really happy to be able to share these types of like firsthand experience with people. So as we kind of bring this in for a landing, like good 80 HD folks, it took us a little while to get around to doing this interview. We'd like tried back in November. So the book has been out for a little while. What has been the most meaningful feedback that you've gotten from people? It's really hard to pick. Um, I have heard, I've gotten so much amazing feedback that I, like every time I'm having a bad day, I just go and like read the reviews for my own book because, because people, they're people out there who are really struggling. My favorite thing that stuck with me though, well, there's a couple of things. You know, I've had people who have reached out from working at a veterans affairs place and they're like, Hey, I have patients who have traumatic brain injuries. And this is helping. And I want to, you know, talk about getting this as a regularly occurring thing that I can like prescribe people who are having struggles with the same thing, you know, the people with ADHD struggle with. And I've, but I had someone who reached out also who someone closer than passed away and them and their kid having a really hard time talking about anything that didn't feel like it was too deep and hurt, like hurt too much to talk about or was so shallow that it didn't matter. And they're like, your, your book has given us a bridge. We like sit at the coffee table, like in the mornings and discuss, you know, what things we've been trying. And we have one extra book and we talk daily about like who we're going to be able to give this to because it's like such a gift that we're, you know, really looking forward to being able to like share whoever gets it needs to be special because this book is, you know, so special. And so being able to hear really real stories of a lot of parents with their kids. I have a lot of parents with their kids and speaking of which I have a, I haven't told anybody yet this, but tomorrow I'm launching a kid-friendly version. Nice. That's going to be open for, yeah, no cuss words. So you've got a kid-friendly audience. And so being able to have parents connect with their kids because it's not just adults who have a hard time getting stuff done, being able to have that connection where you can talk to your kids about you having a hard time getting stuff done can help them feel like, oh, it's not just me. And so from a very young age there, I think going to be able to get that feedback of it's normal to feel this way. It's okay. And here's how I can step forward. Here's how I look forward, you know. And just being mindful of time, do you have any ending essentials that you'd like to share with our audience? The thing that I immediately want to do when I think about a task that's unpleasant is how much I hate it, right? And how annoying it is and how time consuming it's going to be or how I don't have what I need to make it happen. And I assign a lot of negative emotions to the task itself. I've got a little story at the beginning of the book about the thing and how to take care of the thing. And the reality is that thing is like, it's a neutral task. I'm assigning it all of these emotions because of my existing fears and anxieties and insecurities. I'm projecting them onto this thing, but the thing itself is not those things. And as soon as I can start to deal with those emotions and see them for what they are, the thing becomes less and less scary. And so I think that all of us figuring out what the thing is in our lives and that we don't have to be afraid is going to be, it's going to be really helpful. So I'm so excited for the future and to keep continuing this conversation because I think that we have needed, needed an answer for a long time that wasn't planners or to do lists. Hey, you're still here? Nice. Thanks for staying focused all the way through. If you have any thoughts or questions about today's episode, feel free to email me at [email protected]. And don't forget to check out the website, ADHDessentials.com. And visit our Facebook community. I'm looking forward to talking to you again next week. In the meantime, keep focusing on improvement over perfection. 10% better is all you need. [Music]