Some people collect stamps. Others collect coins, art, or vintage records.
I collect intentions.
They’re everywhere in my life. Neatly written in journals. Carefully dated in digital calendars. Thoughtfully outlined in notes apps I downloaded and abandoned. Each one sincere. Each one rarely finished.
When you have ADHD, there’s a ghost that haunts you.
It doesn’t rattle chains or whisper at night. It lingers in the quiet space between your plans and your follow-through.
It shows up when the laundry sits unfolded.
When the email you meant to send is still sitting in drafts.
When you promise yourself you’ll start fresh again on Monday… and Monday turns into next week, and next week turns into someday.
That ghost has a name: inconsistency.
Most days follow a familiar beat. You wake up. You go to work. You pay the bills. You handle what’s urgent, and the rest quietly piles up in the background. You tell yourself, If I could just get organized…
But deep down, you know it isn’t that simple.
Your brain doesn’t move in straight lines. It jumps, loops, and rewinds, often faster than any system was built to hold. Over time, I stopped trying to force consistency and started designing systems that could tolerate inconsistency instead. That shift changed how I plan.
Why Monthly Planning With ADHD Feels Like Punishment
Mass produced planners make a lot of quiet assumptions.
They assume on January first, you already know what will matter on January twenty-seventh. They assumes your energy will hold steady. They assumes you can see time the way other people claim to see it, as a predictable, manageable resource.
But what if time doesn’t work that way for you?
What if a week from now feels like a foreign country you’ve never visited and can’t quite picture? Women with ADHD experience what researchers call “future myopia,” a kind of temporal nearsightedness where distant moments simply don’t register as real.
Consistency isn’t just hard for women with ADHD, it’s structurally stacked against you.
Picture opening a fresh planner. Thirty empty boxes. Each one waiting for the right decision.
If you’re a high achieving woman, you’re supposed to be the organized one. The planner. The one who remembers. And when ADHD makes this nearly impossible, and the shame compounds.
When Planning Becomes a Test of Who You Are
Essentially, planners are just lines and boxes. But when you open one, you’re not only being asked what you’ll do. You’re being asked who you’ll be.
Someone who knows what matters. Someone who can predict her energy. Someone who can decide, in advance, which version of herself will show up three weeks from now.
For an ADHD brain, that isn’t a planning task. It’s an identity crisis.
Every blank line quietly asks: Will you finally be consistent this time?
Every empty box carries the weight of past attempts that didn’t last.
Other people seem to sort this naturally. They filter urgency from importance. They separate the necessary from the optional. They build invisible scaffolding that holds their decisions in place.
ADHD brains don’t filter that way.
Everything arrives at once, equally loud, equally real, equally demanding. Planning becomes overwhelming because the system asks you to become someone all at once.
A Decision-Holding System for Real Life
Permission to Achieve™ System is the structure that filters the noise, holds the weight, and restores focus without forcing urgency.
The Problem Isn’t Planning. It’s the Timeframe.
That’s why the Permission to Achieve™ System follows a 90-day rhythm. Three months is long enough to make real progress, but short enough that your ADHD brain can actually see it.
You’re not mapping out a year, or even six months ahead. You’re focusing on one quarter at a time, then breaking that quarter into three simple checkpoints.
Why? Because ADHD brains are brilliant at “set it and forget it.” We set a goal, get excited… and a few weeks later, we’ve drifted onto something new.
Working memory and motivation fade faster for us.
So what’s a gal to do?
Monthly check-ins solve this quietly. When you check in monthly on the same quarterly goal, you’re giving your ADHD brain exactly what it needs: repetition, which helps with working memory challenges.
The 15-Minute ADHD Monthly Planning System
Permission to Achieve™ takes 15 minutes to set up your month.Fifteen minutes isn’t a promise of ease.
Fifteen minutes works because it limits damage. It’s short enough that perfectionism doesn’t have time to take over. Short enough that you can’t plan an entire fantasy version of your life. Short enough that you’re more likely to start.
The Monthly Structure (At a Glance)
The Permission to Achieve™ monthly planning rhythm is built around the same focused areas each time. Each section hold a specific kind of decision so it doesn’t spill everywhere else.
Inside the 15-Minute Monthly Planning Routine
You begin with one question: How do I want to feel this month? Not what you want to accomplish. The emotional orientation comes first because ADHD brains are driven by interest and feeling, not abstract importance.
Goal Focus: Breaking Down Your 90-Day Vision
One goal from your 90-day focus. One concrete milestone that matters now. Specificity matters because it removes decision fatigue later. When the next action is already defined, you don’t have to re-decide what “working on it” means.
Seeing the same goal each month is a memory tactic. ADHD brains struggle to hold long-range goals in working memory. Revisiting the same quarterly focus gives your brain repeated reminders that this goal is still real and still worth attention.
Follow-Through Anchor
This section of the planner is pure neuroscience. Habit stacking works because your brain already has established neural pathways. Instead of trying to remember your new planning routine out of thin air, you tie it to something you already do.
Maybe it’s your Sunday morning coffee. Maybe it’s the first day of the month after you pay bills. Write down your anchor and the specific habit you’re stacking onto it. “After my first cup of coffee on Sunday, I’ll spend fifteen minutes on ADHD monthly planning.”
Finance Check-In
Look at your money situation for two minutes. Have you reviewed your Money Blocks™? Are there upcoming expenses you need to prepare for? Your goal is to maintain awareness.
Studies on ADHD and financial management show that regular, brief check-ins are far more effective than trying to track every expense daily. Just looking at your money reduces impulse spending because it moves finances from “abstract future problem” to “concrete present reality.”
Why The System Works
In the Permission To Achieve Planner, the structure is the same every month, so you’re not reinventing anything. The sections have prompts, so you’re not staring at blank pages. The whole thing takes fifteen minutes, which removes the “I don’t have time” excuse.
More importantly, this approach to ADHD monthly planning honors how your brain operates. It gives your big-picture thinking space to breathe. It acknowledges that you need flexibility, especially during hormonal fluctuations when your symptoms worsen. It builds in the visual feedback and dopamine hits that keep ADHD brains engaged.
And it recognizes that planning isn’t about controlling every moment but creating just enough structure to support your goals without suffocating your spontaneity.
Everything described here exists inside the Permission to Achieve™ System as a physical, 90-day planning structure with monthly check-ins already designed. You just need fifteen minutes and a willingness to try planning in a way that actually works with your brain.
Because when the system fits the brain, consistency stops being the requirement and starts being the byproduct.
The Permission to Achieve™ System
Everything described here exists inside the Permission to Achieve™ System the as a physical, 90-day planning structure with monthly check-ins already designed. You just need fifteen minutes and a willingness to try planning in a way that actually works with your brain.
