Why Your Plans Fall Apart

About this episode

The episode discusses the reasons plans fail, particularly for individuals with ADHD, and emphasizes moving from shame to curiosity in planning.

--- Register today for our upcoming webinar: Webinar: Stop Starting Over! Why Your Planning Keeps Falling Apart — June 15, 2026, 4 pm PT/7 pm ET https://takecontroladhd.com/gps --- This week kicks off a three-part series on planning, and it starts where every planning conversation should: with honesty about why plans fall apart in the first place. Pete opens with his own cascading construction disaster at home, where raccoon damage set off a chain reaction of disruptions that has bled directly into his work life. Nikki’s diagnosis is both simple and profound: when you make a plan, you’re trying to predict the future with the information you have right now. When that future doesn’t cooperate, the real problem isn’t the plan failing. It’s that we treat plan failure like a personal failure. From there, Nikki walks through the full spectrum of executive function challenges that make ADHD planning uniquely hard: time blindness that operates at every scale from individual task to entire month, working memory that drops the ball the moment you turn around, prioritization paralysis where everything feels equally urgent, the cognitive inflexibility that turns one bad morning into a ruined…

People in this episode

Host: Pete

Guest: Nikki

Topics covered

• planning
• ADHD
• executive function
• time management
• personal failure
• curiosity

Keywords

• ADHD
• planning
• executive function
• time blindness
• emotional regulation
• prioritization paralysis
• cognitive inflexibility

More episodes of Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast

• What It Means to Be “Good Enough” With ADHD · June 11, 2026 · 26 min
• Permission Slips You Keep Waiting For · June 4, 2026 · 32 min
• Why Advice Stops Working When You’re Tired · May 28, 2026 · 26 min
• Why “I’ll Deal With It Later” Is an Energy Leak with Ari Tuckman · May 21, 2026 · 39 min
• The Schedule That Bends Without Breaking · May 14, 2026 · 27 min
• What to Look For in a Planning Tool · May 7, 2026 · 37 min