Maximizing Self-Awareness with Personal Trackers for ADHD Management

The Power of Tracking for Self-Awareness

Keeping track of specific behaviors, symptoms, or productivity metrics can be incredibly insightful for individuals with ADHD. Due to challenges with working memory and sometimes inconsistent self-awareness, it can be difficult to recall patterns or progress over time accurately. Tracking provides objective data, transforming vague feelings ("I feel unfocused lately") into concrete information ("My focus ratings were lower on days I slept poorly").

This increased self-awareness is fundamental for effective ADHD management. Tracking helps identify patterns related to symptoms, triggers, and productivity cycles; offers visible proof of progress, which boosts motivation; and provides valuable data to share with healthcare professionals or coaches. Essentially, personalized tracking serves as a form of meta-cognitive support, helping individuals observe their own functioning and make data-informed adjustments to their strategies.

What Can You Track To Manage Your ADHD Better?

The possibilities are broad and should be tailored to individual goals and challenges:

• Habits: Consistency with daily routines (morning/evening rituals), medication adherence, exercise frequency, water intake, sleep duration, and quality.

• Symptoms: Subjective ratings of focus levels, energy, impulsivity, emotional regulation, or the frequency/intensity of specific ADHD-related challenges throughout the day or week.

• Productivity: Number of tasks completed, Pomodoro sessions finished, time spent on specific projects, and meeting deadlines.

• Mood & Well-being: Daily mood ratings, energy levels, feelings of stress or overwhelm, identifying potential correlations with activities or events.

• Goal Progress: Monitoring steps taken towards specific personal, academic, or professional goals.

Choosing the Right Tracking Method

The "best" tracker is the one that an individual finds easy to use and can maintain consistently. Simplicity often trumps complexity. Options include:

• Dedicated Apps: Numerous apps are designed for tracking habits, tasks, mood, and more. Many offer ADHD-friendly features, such as visual progress charts, reminders, customizable interfaces, and gamification. Examples mentioned in research include

  • Notion templates

  • ClickUp templates

  • Focus To-Do

  • Timelog

  • Harvest

  • RoutineFlow

  • Finch

  • Monday

  • Habitica

• Look for features like clear design, visual organization, flexibility, and built-in reminders. Gamification elements can be particularly helpful for maintaining engagement by tapping into the ADHD brain's need for novelty and immediate feedback.

• Journals/Planners: A simple notebook, a bullet journal, or a planner with dedicated tracking sections can be highly effective and customizable. The physical act of writing can also aid reflection.

• Spreadsheets: Digital spreadsheets (like Google Sheets or Excel) allow for detailed data logging, customization, and potential analysis or charting.

• Whiteboards/Physical Charts: Placing a simple chart or whiteboard in a visible location can serve as a constant reminder and make tracking very straightforward, especially for 1-2 key habits.

Tips for Effective Tracking

• Start Simple: Avoid the temptation to track everything at once. Choose 1-3 key metrics that align with current goals. Overcomplicating the system makes it harder to maintain.

• Make it Easy: Integrate tracking into existing routines (e.g., track sleep upon waking, track tasks at the end of the workday). Choose a method with minimal friction.

• Be Consistent: Aim for daily tracking or tracking at the planned frequency. Set reminders if necessary. Consistency provides the most valuable data.

• Review Regularly: Schedule time (e.g., weekly) to look at the tracked data. What patterns emerge? What correlations are noticeable? Use these observations to adjust strategies.

• Adopt a Non-Judgmental Stance: The purpose of tracking is awareness and learning, not self-criticism. Focus on trends and understanding, rather than striving for perfect scores or streaks. If consistency slips, simply restart without shame.

• Consider Gamification: If using apps, explore those with built-in game-like elements (points, levels, rewards). Alternatively, create a simple personal reward for maintaining tracking consistency for a certain period.

Individuals with ADHD tend to enjoy novelty. You should not be surprised if using one of these tactics works in the short term, but loses its effectiveness over time. That is natural. Use a method as long as it is working, and then switch things up by trying something new. Commit to practicing more self-awareness, rather than over-obsessing about the tool that you use. The goal is to manage your ADHD more effectively, not to become an expert in any specific time-management or tracking tool.

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If ADHD is hindering your productivity, working with an executive coach can help you develop the habits, routines, and skills necessary to focus and follow through more consistently. If you are interested in learning more, schedule a discovery call. We can discuss how we can help you better manage your ADHD.

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A Guide to Delegating Effectively

Every business leader knows they need to delegate to achieve better results. The problem comes when leaders try to move from thought to action. Their beliefs about themselves, their team, and the work they are trying to accomplish prevent them from letting go of tasks and trusting others to do work they have traditionally completed. This resistance to delegation slows growth, creates workflow bottlenecks, and negatively impacts company performance.

What should a leader do?

Delegation is a skill. Like all skills, starting small and building up to more difficult tasks is best as you gain mastery. Leaders frequently get frustrated with the delegation process because they start it with the wrong mindset. They are accustomed to performing tasks at a high level and expect perfect results the first time they delegate a task. The reality is that most people do not do tasks perfectly the first time they attempt them. As a leader, you must learn to delegate effectively, and your employee or contractor must learn through practice how to do the task to your expectations. The more you delegate, the better you will get, and the more your employee does the task, the better they will perform, provided that you have a system for delegation.

How do you start?

The Power6 Leader program teaches the ACES system of delegation. ACES stands for Assess, Communication, Empower, and Support. This four-step approach to delegation reduces uncertainty and provides a systematic method for evaluating employees and tasks, setting expectations, building trust, and ensuring that employee competency is built over time.

How to assess tasks to be delegated?

To help you get started, we have developed this worksheet to help you assess the tasks you should be delegating and the people you should be delegating those tasks to.

Download this tool, read the instructions, and email Dorian Cunion if you have any questions about how to use it. dcunion@yourpathexecutivesolution.com

First Step in Delegating_ Assessing.docx

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Accelerate your business growth by delegating tasks.

Every small business owner hits a point where their business stalls. No matter how hard they work, progress slows, and they begin to feel like they are working too hard for the results they are getting. When your progress starts to stall, it is a great opportunity to reassess who is responsible for different tasks within your business.  Shifting tasks off your to-do-list, and giving them to your employees helps everyone grow within your business. Your employees can gain new skills, take on higher-level assignments, and become more invested in the company’s success. You gain more space to think strategically and allocate your energy toward activities that can accelerate business growth. 

Delegating tasks triggers business acceleration.

When I was a Business Consultant working with 7-Eleven, I had a Franchisee who was looking to expand to a second location. For this story, we will call him Tom. Tom had been a single store operator for 10 years. He wanted to expand to a second location but could not pass 7-Eleven’s multiple franchisee requirements. Within the 7-Eleven system, you must consistently operate your store at a specific level for over 6 months to qualify for an additional store and demonstrate that you have the infrastructure to support multiple locations. Tom’s biggest challenge was not trusting his employees to order products or make decisions without him being involved. Tom was intelligent and had high standards, but he did not feel his employees could be trusted to do things as well as he could. 

Get out of the trap.

At the time, Tom did not realize he had built a trap for himself. The trap was that he had to be in the store six days a week for the store to run well. The store's image and customer readiness dropped when Tom took time off of work. The leadership at 7-Eleven believed that Tom was not ready to run more than one location because of the performance inconsistency. He had to learn how to delegate and empower his team to do more. This would reduce business risk because the store performance would not be directly linked to Tom being in the store daily. It would also free up his time and energy to do things outside the store, like network with the community and spend more time with his family. He was spending too much time on low-value tasks that someone else could do. 

Change of mindset

When I first told Tom that he was not approved for a second location, he was emotional. He knew he was one of the top-performing franchisees in Baltimore. His staff was friendly, his store was clean, and he felt he did everything we asked. Tom was 90% correct. The one thing he failed to see was that he did not invest in developing his employees. It was not until he traveled overseas for two weeks and came back to a store that was a complete mess that he understood 7-Eleven’s point of view around business infrastructure. Once he accepted that he needed to build more infrastructure, it became easier for him to devise a plan for delegating more tasks to his employees.

Identify the solution

Shifting tasks to employees was a multi-step process for Tom. First, he had to assess his employees' capabilities and determine which tasks they could take on. Next, he needed to outline what he wanted them to do. Then, he had to provide them with training, communicate his expectations, and guide them on what to do if problems arose. Finally, he needed to identify how he would follow up to ensure tasks were completed. 

Solicit help

Tom and I developed a plan for transferring more tasks to his employees. I encouraged him to start small. We identified low-value tasks that people could do without harming the business. We allowed them to execute those tasks for two or three weeks before we layered in higher-value tasks. This process worked for two reasons.

1. The employees were new to making decisions and executing tasks without direction. They needed a safe learning environment, the opportunity to fail, and coaching to help them build confidence.

2. Delegating tasks was new to Tom. He had to learn how to access employees' capabilities, explain his expectations well, provide learning space, and step in when needed.

Going slow allowed Tom and his employees to become comfortable with change and build momentum towards the ultimate goal of delegating all non-financial tasks to employees. 

Reap the rewards

Delegating tasks to your employees is one of the most beneficial actions you can take as a leader. When you delegate, you have the opportunity to master new skills, free up your time, and expand the capabilities of your organization. Research shows that employees want to be developed. When you teach them something new and trust them to do it, their confidence, self-esteem, and self-efficiency grow. They will make mistakes sometimes. That is part of the learning process. However, even a mistake provides a teachable moment where you can help them grow professionally and develop a trusting relationship with your employees. Tom went on to become a 3-store multiple Franchisee. One of the first employees he developed into a store manager became a 2-store multiple Franchisee. One person can only accomplish so much. When you are willing to share your workload, teach, and inspire others, you unlock their potential and yours. 

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Thank you for reading this blog. If you have any questions about leadership, please email me at dcunion@yourpathexecutivesolutions.com. Becoming a better leader is easier when you have a guide. To learn more about my coaching and consulting programs, schedule a call.

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