When school’s out for summer, and ADHD is in session

Photo by Sarah-Beth Bianchi.

My kids' school year ended last week. My typical workflow ended with it.

When the school year ends, the structure and routines we build our days around goes with it. Drop offs and pickups look different if kids have camps instead, or are doing other summer activities. And being able to transition into and out of work mode can be harder to achieve.

Even if you don't have kids, summer can shift you out of your norms too. Colleagues go on vacation, meetings get paused, the people you usually chat with during the day aren't around. You wrap things up before a long weekend, then spend the days after trying to get back on track. The flow you had before summer hit loses its anchor points.

This kind of disruption can be destabilizing if you're relying on routine to keep your focus on track. You might be spending energy renegotiating your week instead of actually doing the work in it.

The flipside is that summer can also be a time to seek the novelty that can energize us. More time outside, more social connection, and letting go of some of the meetings or obligations can give more space for creative thinking or rest.

So how do we navigate this season? One thing that helps me is to simply acknowledge that these couple of months aren’t going to look like the rest of the year. Being ok that I’m not producing the same types of output, or that my calendar looks different helps me ease the nagging feeling that things are going wrong.

I am also focusing on what I can anchor myself around. For me, it’s protecting a few periods of focus time so that I can rely on getting the most critical tasks completed, and then fit what I can into the ebbs and flows that each week presents.

I am also protecting time to go to my strength training classes twice a week. There will be weeks this isn’t possible, but making the effort to protect this time helps give me just enough structure that I can feel a certain amount of stability.

Deciding on a few anchors ahead of time means that you don’t have to re-make this decision each time you open your summer-addled calendar. And limiting yourself to just a couple of anchors means that you’re not trying to fight with your calendar to make your non-summer routine fit when the season simply doesn’t allow it.

If your summer feels less stable than the rest of your year, you're not imagining it, and you're not doing it wrong. You're not the only one quietly rebuilding your structure from scratch every June.