ADHD Versus Planners

One of the things that leaves me puzzled is all the people who claim a planner will not help an ADHD person. That we'll just give up on it quickly.

As someone with ADHD, I always scrunch up my brow when I read this and think, not me.

To be fair, I tried a variety of planners that did not work. I cannot use a weekly vertical to save my life. I look at it and all I see is a jumbled mess which gets worse when I see someone use a lot of stickers on it, especially boxes.

What I've discovered works for me best is a daily planner. I write everything I want to get done that day on the planner even if it's something I do every single day like fill in my Five-Year Diary or write. Even if it's a simple chore like wash towels. It's on the list. If I run out of time that day, I add a little > mark and then move it to the next available day that I can accomplish it.

I've tried bullet journaling. Not for me because I want the pretty but lack artistic talent.

I've tried a variety of weekly planners. Horizontal works best for me, but I prefer it with a daily set of pages for my lists. I've failed at every weekly layout I've tried except for my day job. For some reason, vertical weekly worked perfectly there. Go figure.

My current planner setup is nearly perfect for me. So close. I'm using the vertical weekly spread it comes with to track weather, words written that day, menu planning, sleep hours, water, what I'm reading, etc. You can see the nearly final layout on this blog post.

This planner also has room for a monthly overview page. Perfect! And I've added a weekly overview page in front of the vertical weekly spread. What would make this planner the absolute Patti-Perfect version would be two weekly spreads for every week. One horizontal for how I actually keep track of my weekly things and one vertical so I can have my layout with all the information. I'd also like this planner not to be hardcover because I love using stickers and washi tape through it and I'm not sure the hardcover is going to handle it well.

Actually, there are three planners that if I smashed them into ONE planner, would make my perfect planner. Sadly, they are from three different planner companies, so it isn't happening.

Which is my super long way of saying that just because I have ADHD doesn't mean I'm incapable of managing my life with a planner. It just means I needed to try a bunch of systems until I found one that worked for me.

I've been struggling with weekly tasks for a long time, but the overview page seems to be working now. More on Thursday about this.

I Would Like to Buy Some Cheeeeese

Algorithms are weird things sometimes. I have no idea why YouTube recommended this video to me, but I watched it.

This isn't the first time I found something interesting that was unexpected. I mean, I'm the person who ended up watching an hour-long TV show years ago about container ships.

I figure it's all fodder for future books.

But I was scrolling through my suggested YouTube videos and saw: Why the Mold Behind Brie Cheese is Disappearing.

For some unknown reason, I was intrigued by this question and watched the video. (Spoiler alert: It as to do with too little genetic diversity in the mold.)

It isn't only Brie at risk. There is also another cheese, Camembert. I'd never even heard of this cheese and it might disappear without my ever tasting it? That seemed wrong.

I began a quest to find Camembert.

It took two weeks and a sale at the grocery store, but I finally got my hands on the cheese. From the picture I was a little worried about one person eating all that much cheese, but I worried for nothing. It was the smallest cheese "wheel" imaginable.

So was it worth the effort to track down this cheese just to try it?

You know what? It was good and it will be a shame when they can no longer make it. I'd actually buy it again. And while I know I've had Brie before, I'm going to buy some of that, too, to remind myself of what it tastes like. Hopefully, someone can figure out how to save the cheeses!

Journal Fails

Guess who hasn't touched her media journal?

It might possibly be the same person who hasn't filled in her reading journal. :-(

The Media Journal is easy. I haven't been consuming any podcasts. Mostly. I have listened to a couple of podcasts, but I didn't actually finish any of the episodes, so I couldn't mark them on the tracker.

The reading journal is another problem entirely.

What's the problem here? It's the reading challenges I'm involved in. One of them allows you to count the same book for multiple categories and I'm also trying to use these books to count for the other reading challenge I'm doing. Which leaves me wondering how many copies of the cover do I need to print?

Is it two? Three? More? Because I want a copy of the cover in my normal book section and a copy of the cover for each of the prompts in the reading challenge that it satisfies. And I'm tracking my reading challenges on StoryGraph and the big reading challenge is broken down into so many categories, which means I need to open multiple categories to figure out the cover situation and it just feels like too much.

So, yeah. Fail. 

Cold Spray

Life comes at you fast.

A few weeks ago, I flushed the toilet and heard a weird sound in the tank. This was the first time I ever heard anything like this, but I didn't have time to investigate because I needed to go to the grocery store before it got too busy. I don't do crowds.

When I got home, I flushed it again and listened carefully, hoping that it was just a one-time thing.

No such luck.

As the tank is refilling, I life off the cover...and have water spray me in my glasses. I couldn't see much, but I could see it was spraying out of that pump thing inside the tank. Quickly, before the water could go anywhere else, I put the cover back on.

I didn't check again immediately after it finished filling up. Instead, I did an online search about the problem. I knew I didn't have two of the three potential issues because nothing new had been installed recently and the third problem seemed unlikely, too, because I just had the toilet replaced about a year ago.

This immediately had me thinking it's plumber time and I was like, no. Come on.

I decided to take a look anyway. Maybe I could see something to avoid having to pay a plumber to come out. I lifted the tank, and without water spraying in my face, I spotted the problem.

The little hose thing had become disconnected from the pump thing.

I pressed it back in, did a trial flush. No weird noise. Problem solved. 

2026 Writing Planners

Last blog post, I said I'd share some information about my writing planner situation for 2026.

There are two blog posts earlier in 2025 with information about my original writing planner ideas. Post One. Post Two. 

The planner I bought was an 18 month planner and I cut out all the 2025 pages so that all that I have in the coil now is 2026 pages. I'm still using this, but not to the extent that I thought I would when I started using it. I realized that I wasn't keeping track of as much as I thought I would.

I still like coloring in a circle for every 250 words written. I'm very results oriented and checking off boxes or filling in circles gives me a little dopamine boost, but I haven't been using the Monthly Goals or Monthly Reflection pages. I haven't used the dashboard pages and I barely use the notes page each week.

Since I am so word count focused, I am trying out a new writing planner alongside the first planner. Or maybe I should say to complement the first planner because this one doesn't have any circles to color in.

I picked up a pocket-size horizontal weekly planner. Here, I keep track of words written in which chapter. Total written that day. Total written in the book. And a brand new category--total words written this year.

I actually really like this smaller size, and if I can figure out how to add circles to the monthly calendar page that are large enough to color in, I think I'll be switching to this smaller size in 2027. At the moment, the two planners are keeping track of similar, but not identical, things, so I'm running both okay. I usually have trouble with duplicate planners.

From what I've read, a lot of people with ADHD have trouble with planners, but for me? It's literally the only way I can stay on track. My issue is being strategic about the number of planners I have. I learned in 2025 that the fewer the better, but I also learned that I like having my writing separate from my daily life.