Guided Midday Reset: Overcome Procrastination & Overwhelm, Regain Focus, and Get Back on Track

Are you having an unproductive day? Are you overwhelmed or procrastinating? Do you feel like there's no point to getting on track today and you're hoping to do better tomorrow? Then this is the video for you.

Watch the video below or read on for the full transcript. (If you read the transcript, I recommend following along with the Anytime Reset PDF. Click here to download.

I'm a Productivity expert for neurodivergent spoonies. So let's dive into what I call the "Guided Midday Reset".

So here we are inside the guided Reset. It's free. If you really end up enjoying it, I would appreciate some tips in my tip jar, but this is free to you because I wish something like this existed when I was struggling the most.

It can be used anytime, you can use it every day to plan your day. Or you can use it on those days where you've been like rotting in bed forever and you feel like you haven't gotten anything done and you just want to change how today is gonna end up instead of waiting to start fresh again tomorrow.

So the first important thing to notice in this cheat sheet is the note at the top. "Please make sure to take care of yourself and either take breaks or even stop if you've gotten far enough to start taking action. Only spend around five minutes on each section so you can build momentum." We don't wanna be spending like an hour or more on this cheat sheet.

So the first section is about collecting what is on your mind and on your plate right now. So we go around to all of the places in our system or chaos system where we might have tasks or projects listed so that way we're not just writing down what is top of mind, like you're like, oh, I need to call the doctor. I need to call the doctor. I need to call the doctor. There's probably other stuff on your plate too. And making sure you have those listed down in this collection step so you can make more informed choices later is really important.

And I've set up a couple of reminders. So you remember to look in your planners calendars, email accounts, direct messages, random scraps of paper, snail mail. And don't forget any shared planners, calendars, or email accounts. And remember that you could have these either analog or digital. And it's also really important if you just have like a whole project listed, like "clean the garage" in this collection step, you wanna specify what the next one or two actions are in that project instead of just listing the whole project. And then you wanna write down anything else that might be on your mind that's stressing you out that maybe isn't already logged in your system somewhere. We basically wanna have a thoughtful brain dump of tasks that we can work with for the rest of this cheat sheet.

The next big step is prioritizing. And I know how difficult prioritizing can be for all sorts of reasons, but especially the neurodivergent executive dysfunction ones. So what I've done in this cheat sheet is included several different ways of prioritizing and you wanna pick the one that meets your needs on the day that you're using this cheat sheet.

So on one day you might be using the Eisenhower matrix, whereas on another day you'll be using gamification. Let's give you a quick rundown of all of these different prioritization tools and then we can move on to the next step.

So the first prioritization tool is the Eisenhower matrix, which I'm sure a lot of you are already familiar with. It can be really helpful for certain situations. It can be really unhelpful for others 'cause for example, if you're in the kind of overwhelm where everything is urgent and important, you're just gonna put everything in the urgent and important box and then nothing will be prioritized. So if you're in that kind of situation, you probably want to use a different prioritization method. Essentially it's a really simple grid across this top row. We've got an urgent column and a not urgent column, and the bottom two rows are an important row and a not important row. And you essentially put your tasks where they fall and then you wanna focus on the two important ones. The important and urgent and the important and not urgent. Those are the ones you wanna focus on for the rest of the day. And I've highlighted those cells to make it really easy.

The next prioritization method, which I've talked about a few times on this channel already, is the 80/20 rule. And you basically look at your list and you ask yourself this question, "which 20% of these tasks would give me 80% of the accomplishment, stress relief, fulfillment for the day or the week, whatever period of time you're working on?" You can extrapolate this cheat sheet to more than a day if you so choose. It's designed for a given day, but you could use it for like a week or a month if you wanted to do a longer reset.

The next one is called the prioritizing grid, and it's from the the nineties book. What color is Your Parachute? I had no idea. Don't necessarily recommend the book, but this is a really neat way of prioritizing tasks. And we're gonna dive on over to where this link sends us, which is a Google sheet that Shae and I have made for you. It's real fun. So in the very bottom where you can see the two tabs, I know my face is covering it, but there's a blank grid and there's an example grid that is already filled out for you so you can see how it works.

I'm gonna give you a quick tour of the blank grid first. So you end up putting your tasks in these rows and you don't have to do all 10 and you can, if you need to, do this for more than 10 tasks, you would just have to either do it on paper or build out this Google sheet so you can copy this Google doc, you can also do it with the cheat sheet, copy those into your own Google drive and then you can edit them as needed. And then what you do is you end up actually pitting one task against the other to see which one has priority. Because when we look at at all 10 tasks at once, it can be really hard to pull out which one is the highest priority and then second highest priority and yada yada yada. So what we can do is pit one task against the other and see who the winner is and then do the math to see who comes out on top. So this cell is task one versus task two, this cell is task one versus task three, this cell is task four versus task six, et cetera, et cetera. Let's move over to the example grid to see what this looks like.

So my assistant Shae, who you've all met on my last live stream, we had way too much fun coming up with these different tasks that are geeky references. So we got a Find Nemo, Destroy the One Ring, Practice Earth Bending, et cetera, et cetera. And you can see Shae and I did these 1v1. So Finding Nemo versus destroying the one ring, destroying the one ring one and so on and so forth. The only one, this is just silly, the only one Shae and I were split on was kill the six finger man versus get ET to his ship. I picked ET, Shae picked six finger man, since I'm the boss I put down six. So what you do is then in this column is you go and count how many times each task won. So finding Nemo won six of its competition, so 8. Buy a Fez won zero, and then you order your tasks in final priority order by the winners. So restore the heart of Te Fiti, which was 7 won 9 times. So it is number one. And then buy a fez won zero times. So it's number 10. So this is how you can get a much clearer priority order for your tasks. Like I think this is the most interesting thing and both Shae and I noticed this "practice earth bending" actually ended up at number five, but the verb practice, I don't know about any of you, but I struggle with those kind of consistent either practice or just like put in some butt in chair time to work on a longer project or improving a skill that takes time to improve. And usually the more finite actions end up getting prioritized just because they're cleaner in a way. There's a, there's a clear beginning, clear end, and when it's done, it's done. Whereas a task like practicing, you end up having to choose an amount of time. There's just a little bit more decision making that goes into fulfilling that kind of a task. And because of that, we might unintentionally de-prioritize it on our list. But what's cool about this system is it helps us see the true worth of a task like that because if Avatar Ang did not practice earth bending with Toff, the fire nation would've won. That's bad news.

This is an example of the prioritizing grid. I really hope you enjoy it and feel free to make your comments on Shae's and my choices of which task won, we can have those conversation in the comments below.

So back to the rest of the types of prioritizing. So as a refresher, we have looked at the Eisenhower matrix, the 80/20 rule and the prioritizing grid. Another one is using your gas tanks to help prioritize what do you have capacity for today? And if you're unfamiliar with my gas tanks analogy, here's a blog post on it. Yeah, somewhere in the cards there's, there's a link. Because of how your capacity works when you're neurodivergent or disabled (a spoonie) is you have to make your choices based on what you can accomplish that day. And dividing your capacity between physical, cognitive and emotional can be really helpful to determine what you're able to do that day. And then another way of prioritizing is by context. If you're familiar with David Allen's "Getting Things Done" Book and Framework, he's the one who created this idea. And deciding what you're going to do based on what contexts you have access to in the moment or that day can be really helpful. The easiest example is if you've got on your list of things to do, you've got five different errands and you can knock those out on one trip outside your home. It's really helpful to batch those together. Another one is your phone. If you need to make multiple phone calls, lumping those all together in one time block can be really helpful. So it's less about which task is more important and it's more about what context do you have access to that day to help you get those things done. And another thing you can do is combine the gas tanks and context prioritization methods. So like you lump all of your tasks into their various contexts and then see which context you have the gas tank capacity for that day, and then that's what you focus on. And then the last prioritization method I share is gamification. And there are lots of different ways to gamify your tasks and taking action. And even your planning can gamify pretty much anything these days. So if you want even more ideas on how to gamify, use the Googles, do the search, you'll find them, the simplest way is to number the list you made in the collect step and use a random number generator to generate your priority order. And you can also use a dice. And like I said, any other gamification method you enjoy.

Comment below and tell me which prioritization method you're most excited to try.

All right, so the next step is actually taking your prioritized task list that you created in the last step and actually schedule your day. And we're gonna be doing that with time blocking. And this is gonna happen in multiple steps because we can't just go straight to, "oh, I have to go get the car washed". We're not putting that on the calendar yet. No, we got other things to do first.

So we need to start out by determining what our time budget is. First thing you schedule on your calendar, and if you're using a digital calendar, some of these might already be scheduled for you and that just makes things easier. But if you're doing this analog style, you need to get these things written down. You need to block off your existing appointments for the remainder of the day. You need to block off meal times, including enough time for food prep and eating or going and getting the food you need to block off rest times. And remember that rest can include both relaxing and playful activating activities depending on your needs for that day. And then you wanna block off your bedtime and then we calculate what is left. We wanna block off all of these things first to actually get an accurate view of how much time we have to spend the rest of the day. If we don't do this, if we focus on tasks first, it becomes all too easy to miss appointments under undernourished ourselves and overwork ourselves. And so all we do is we look at our calendar and see how many minutes or hours we have left to spend time blocking.

Part two, the art of spending time. And this is where, even if you haven't used the gas tanks framework in your prioritizing, you definitely wanna check in with your gas tanks now. So how full is your physical gas tank, your cognitive gas tank, your emotional gas tank? And to keep it simple, do a score from zero to three, zero being empty, three being full. Based on your gas tank levels, do you have enough time and capacity for, your prioritized tasks? If yes, proceed with blocking them into your schedule and skip to step 5. If no, continue to 4c. So the real question is, is this going to be a push day? A day where we push ourselves? And it's really important to remember that push days are morally neutral and being behind is morally neutral. There is nothing wrong with you. This happens to everybody, especially in this era of hustle culture and late stage capitalism. We all have too much on our plates all the time, and usually, especially those of us who are neurodivergent, chronically ill, disabled. So please be kind to yourself. This is an opportunity for self-compassion and using our critical thinking skills to do what's best for us in the moment. So if you have decided this is a push day based on your high priority tasks, how much do you choose or need to push yourself today in order to get things done? What accommodations can you make for yourself in order to facilitate your push day? So for example, can you simplify your meals or reduce prep time? Can you lie down working on your laptop to reduce fatigue? Can you ask a friend or colleague to co-work with you? Is there a movie or musical playlist to have on in the background? Just be soothing and help you focus. I particularly love searching for ambiance videos on YouTube. My current favorite has been Medieval Lo-Fi Girl. It's fantastic. Can you delegate anything or get assistance? Can you ask for an extension on any deadlines? And then for those of you who are inside my course, The Action Navigator, you can use the spoon hunting cheat sheet to brainstorm even more accommodations for yourself.

So after accommodations, it's compromises. What compromises can you make for yourself in order to facilitate your push day? So for example, how much rest are you able and are willing to forego today? And are you able and are willing to make your bedtime later? But here's the really important part about that compromise. Will you be able to make up for that lack of rest soon, like within the next day or week at most? Can you reschedule one or more of your appointments? And then I love this question so much. This is something I've talked about on the channel before, and the question is, what are you willing to show up messy for in order to show up less messy somewhere else?

Time blocking Part three, how much time are you looking to spend for each of your prioritized tasks? How much time would it take to either accomplish the task altogether or make progress on it? And if your resistance is really high, I recommend checking out my butt in chair time Masterclass to learn how to do that. This is also really important because time estimation can be really difficult for those with executive dysfunction. Remember that there is no quote unquote "right" answer for how long to spend on a task, choose an amount of time simply to get something planned. Then when you start to follow through with your plan, you can make changes as needed.

The schedule we're creating in this time blocking process is just a roadmap to help us take action and have the motivation to do the things because we know what's important, we have them scheduled and we can move forward. But as we get into the thick of it, we may discover that we need to modify our plan, in which case we just reuse these tools from the reset to shuffle our plan around. If you remember my really old video reviewing Cal Newport's time block planner, his planner is actually set up so you can have four different iterations of your time blocking for that day. So it's really normal to need to shuffle your plan around once you get started 'cause life happens.

So then you block your time allotments onto your schedule. And as you're doing that, you can think about are you allotting mini breaks between tasks or putting your tasks in an order that allows for easier transitions between them? And then because it's really important, you just did a lot of work doing this reset. So step six is take a break, take at least five minutes, shake it off, grab a drink, go to the bathroom, allow yourself time to transition into the first thing that you have planned on your schedule.

And then after that it's following through with your plan. And a lot of you, if you're new here, I have so many videos on how to overcome that resistance and actually my course, The Action Navigator is so much about marrying the planning with the doing. And there are so many different ways to help you actually do the thing instead of just, "oh yeah, I have a plan" and then not follow through on it. Here in this cheat sheet is a list of the videos that are top of mind for helping take action. And that is the Anytime Reset.

If you liked this video, you'll love my signature course. The Action Navigator. It's packed to the brim with tools and techniques for mastering your time, getting organized and offering yourself radical compassion as a neurodivergent spoonie. If that sounds like exactly what you've been looking for, use this link to learn more. If you liked this video, hit that like button and subscribe and be sure to share it with your friends. I'll be back soon with another video. See you then. Bye.

Outtakes: Whoa. Right. I now have a remote to start and stop the camera recording and (EEEEEE!).