It's 7:15 AM. I'm just about to start my morning cardio when my phone buzzes with an "urgent" work notification. My brain immediately starts calculating: if I deal with this now, I'll miss my shower window, which pushes breakfast later, which means I'll hit traffic, which means...
Just like that, my carefully planned morning routine becomes a game of mental Tetris where the pieces don't all quite fit anymore. And with ADHD, that Tetris game is at level 27 and all the blocks are those Zs.
For years, I thought the solution was to build better routines: More detailed, more optimized, more rigid, better defended. It wasn't until I realized that the problem wasn't my routines themselves, but the combination of their need to flexibly flow around the things that would come up or vary from day to day and the difficulty of the mental recalculations to move all of my many blocks around. Instead of behaving like a line of perfectly-arranged dominoes – where removing a couple would end the chain's momentum if they didn't all get perfectly rearranged – they needed to move like bubbles flowing on water: around rocks and with the current.
The Old Way: Static Plans in a Dynamic World
I used to have three default modes of responding when my routine got interrupted:
Mode 1: Abandon Ship – One interruption meant the whole routine was more or less sunk for the day. "Oh well; exceptions happen. I'll pick it up again tomorrow." (Don't worry; tomorrow won't have any unexpecteds.)
Mode 2: The Replanning Trap – I'd try to rearrange all of the dominoes. Sometimes I'd attempt to do this in my head, juggling all of the moving parts of my fairly long routines. Other times, I'd sit down and move the items in my "Routine" calendar around, painstakingly rescheduling them all to still fit as many as possible. Nevermind that this wasted time could have been spent doing my routine activities or that it assumed that no other interruptions or delays would come up that would, again, require shuffling everything remaining.
Mode 3: Autopilot Mode – This is just going back to the routine after the interruption. Don't think about it. Head down, back to going through each activity, giving no consideration to the clock or the fact that time is limited. Of course, I'd end up late to the next thing after my routine... and would you look at that! I'm late by roughly the length of the interruption. Shocking how math works.
(Mode 2 tended to happen more when I used a calendar with my routines and Mode 3 when I would use a list or a routine tracking app.)
None of these modes of responding were all that helpful and I often had a feeling of being sort of disorganized and "bad at" routines.
Better: Alternative Routes and Shortcuts
Things clicked when I stopped thinking of my routine as a train that had to hit every station right on schedule. Some days called for the express route, hitting only the key stops, and I could have a plan for circling back to important stops I'd miss.
Activate Plan B:
For each of the activities that were most important to me, I identified another spot in the day where it would likely be able to fit. (For my very most important activities, I would identify a couple other spots.) If my morning routine went off the rails for one reason or another, I knew that I had another shot at my cardio during lunch, and another after dinner. Giving my most important activities more than one chance to happen each day really improved my consistency and they stopped being casualties of every minor change in plans.
"Bare Minimum" Versions:
I also had a streamlined version of my morning routine, my "just get me out the door" routine. Quick shower, grab-and-go breakfast, skip the workout, the big complicated breakfast, the quick clean-up, etc. I know that short version took less than 20 minutes, and so I knew when my drop-dead start time was for it. No recalculations required. Not my ideal routine, but it got me where I needed to be on time.
Together, these offered an easy detour when my first track was blocked. They were solid strategies, and I definitely could have stopped there and successfully managed my routines... But I've never met an over-engineered system I didn't love, so...
My Next Shift: From Rigid to Flexibly Flowing
Although those worked great, and they're absolutely good enough to keep relatively consistent with those most important activities, that still left me with times when there was just a small interruption and I didn't really need to flip my whole routine to the bare minimum version.
I "simply" wanted to... always know exactly where I stood at every moment no matter how many little delays piled up... Is that so much to ask?!
Am I 5 minutes behind? 10 minutes ahead? If I need to catch up, by how much? Which activity should I shorten or skip? How much time do I actually have for breakfast if I want to leave on time?
I wanted to have that real-time sense of how things were going and how to adjust without having to get a brain transplant, since mine didn't come with that feature.
I needed an app.
But most of the routine and habit apps that I'd tried were just lists that tracked how consistently I checked things off. They were great for a retrospective and to keep me from forgetting something outright, but not all that helpful at shuffling things around when they needed to be... so I built myself one.
My app, Time Stream, shows my routines and their activities on a timeline that also shows my calendar events and critical thresholds throughout the day (like time to leave for work or bed time). Each of my routines shows its always-up-to-date estimated completion time and whether it will run over an important threshold for that routine to keep me aware of how interruptions, procrastination, and other delays are affecting my routine's projected end time.
If I'm going to be 10 minutes over my time to leave the house, I know to shorten my run by 10 minutes or grab a to-go breakfast on the way to work and skip making something at home.
It also lets me wrap my routines' activities around calendar events, so they can continue as soon as there's time again, as default Plan Bs (and Cs, and Ds, and Es...).
Instead of my routines being a train on a track, I started seeing their activities more like bubbles on a stream, flowing and floating around rocks and fallen obstacles.
Unexpected Benefits: Much Less Friction and Decision Fatigue
Both the Plan B and Time Stream methods have welcome benefits. They reduce decision fatigue and make the day feel more spacious and like it needs to be gripped a little less tightly. When interruptions happen (and they always do), I don't waste mental energy figuring out what to do. With either method, the path forward is already clear.
Your Routine, Your Rules
Whether you use an app, a paper planner, sticky note reminders, or mental notes, the principle remains the same: routines that can bend are a lot less likely to break.
There's no "right" way; what matters is finding an approach that leaves you feeling capable instead of chaotic and lets you reduce a little of your cognitive load.
The goal isn't perfection. It's progress. Try something, see if it works for you, learn from it if it doesn't, try something else.
If you're curious about my app, Time Stream, you can read about its features here or see it on the App Store here.