Making Space 2025: Day 10

Hey Everyone,

As I move towards the end of the year, I need to (almost constantly!) remind myself that I can do most things a little bit at a time.

Thanks to ADHD, my subconscious default is to put things aside – even huge projects – until I have time to finish them all at once. *

Despite the obvious flaws in that approach, if I’m not careful, I can go for ages not working on something because my brain has essentially put it on shelf for later when I have ‘the right kind of time’ to address it.

Even if you don’t get trapped in that kind of ADHD subconscious loop, I am sure that you have projects or tasks that you are trying to find time to work on all at once.

Perhaps it is an end-of-year project for work, maybe it’s cleaning the fridge, or making some phone calls, either way, if you have been consciously or subconsciously parking a task with lots of subtasks within it, this is your official permission to work on it in little bits over time.

It might take you a week to clean the fridge or get that website updated but it is better than having it haunt you from your to do list and never actually getting around to it.

For the record, cleaning my fridge is one of those tasks for me – I am pretty sure there is a jar rebellion underway on the back of the top shelf – and, today, I am going to spend 10 minutes cleaning one part. (This is where you can imagine me saying, in a goofy tone, I am SUCH a good example!)

Approaching things in this way will make some space in a lot of different ways – space in my schedule (since I don’t need a big block of time), space in my head (because the task will have some traction), and literal space in my fridge.

Not bad, hey?

So, whether you are picking a task to do bit by bit, you are planning to do one of the videos below, or you are going to do something else to make a bit of space for yourself, I wish you ease and self-kindness.

Good luck out there!

Here’s our movement video for today:

And here’s our meditation:

*Longer ADHD explanation:

To be clear, ‘all at once’ doesn’t necessarily mean on one day. My brain acknowledges that some things take longer than that so it seeks a stretch of time – a few days, a week, a month- in which I will be able to work on something repeatedly until it is done. Those stretches of time rarely appear, of course, because life doesn’t work like that. Yet, rather than bringing the project to my mental surface for reconsideration, my brain will just put the project on pause until it can find the right kind of time. I have to put in A LOT of effort to interrupt that default routine.

As you can imagine, this leads to a lot of self-frustration because some larger projects get parked without me realizing it has happened. This parking of projects thing isn’t a conscious decision, it happens on some other level and I have to check in with myself over and over to figure out why some projects have stalled.

When time is tight, like it can be this time of year, my brain tends to want to store any multi-part project away and I run the risk of it becoming late for me to do some important things.

There’s a lot more I could say about this but I just wanted to give this much explanation for now in case it is helpful for someone else!