A blog post adapted from the Grandma Has ADHD podcast episode 113 with Anna Kornick, time management coach, host of the It's About Time podcast, and author of Time Management Essentials (McGraw-Hill).
Anna Kornick was written up for being late to work seventeen times.
This is a woman who now teaches time management for a living. She has a top-ranked podcast about time. She wrote a book about time, published by McGraw-Hill. And when she worked in crisis communications in New Orleans, handling oil spills, hurricanes, and product recalls, she could not get to the office on time.
I don't pre-interview my guests. I like to keep things spontaneous (the ADHD in me loves the dopamine of a brand-new conversation). So when I shared Anna's bio with her before we hit record, she made sure to mention something: "I don't have ADHD, but I just wanted you to be aware."
Within about five minutes, I said, "Anna, we have to have this conversation while recording."
"Your bio reads like someone with ADHD"
I'll say up front what I said on the show: I'm not a doctor, and I don't diagnose anyone. But I've interviewed a lot of late-diagnosed women, and Anna's bio reads like so many of their stories. The strong sense of justice. The overachievement. The burnout. The career pivot. The way we cobble life together to make it work because we don't know any different.
Then Anna told me a story I'd never heard before.
When she was about ten, she couldn't sleep. She couldn't shut her brain off at night. (She'll admit the 16 ounces of Dr Pepper with dinner probably didn't help.) A doctor in her small North Louisiana town recommended she be evaluated, which meant sending forms to her teachers. Anna was in the gifted program. Her mom, who was a teacher in that same school system, said absolutely not. She didn't want her daughter unfairly labeled.
Anna's grades were always fine. She was the chatterbox, the one who talked too much to her neighbors. In first grade, she finished her work early, walked over to the free reading station, and was dragged back to her desk by the arm. She was so confused. She was done. Wasn't it free reading?
I hear versions of this story all the time. A diagnosis was suggested, or even made, and it was never shared with the girl. Everyone assumed it was a little-boy thing, or that she'd outgrow it. And it was so stigmatized that a lot of parents simply said no.
I also hear this one constantly: "You can't have ADHD. You graduated with honors." I started a business, graduated college with high honors, and served as president of more organizations than I can count, all with ADHD. I learned I had it about eleven years ago, and honestly didn't do anything with that information until about three years ago. Doctors, lawyers, authors, and gifted kids can have ADHD. Achievement doesn't rule it out. Sometimes it's the mask.
Anna mentioned that she's always been involved in a million things, splitting her attention across a dozen student organizations in college. And then she asked the question so many of us have asked: "But if I had ADHD, wouldn't it be hard to navigate all of those things?"
Not necessarily. We often go hardest at the things that interest us. Anna told me that when she struggles with something she doesn't understand, she goes all in on understanding it. I think of it like the little boy who can tell you every dinosaur, when it roamed the earth, and what it ate. For me, that's ADHD. For Anna, it's time.
And here's the part that made me laugh out loud. In a crisis, Anna says she feels unusually calm, like everything around her gets a little sharper. I told her, "That was life being your Ritalin." So many of us with ADHD do our best work under pressure because the stimulation finally brings our brains online. It's also why we procrastinate.
Kim Holderness, co-author of ADHD Is Awesome with her husband Penn, wrote that book from the perspective of the supportive spouse and mom. Then she discovered she had ADHD too. It can look a lot like perfectionism and anxiety. Anna said she's told herself for years she should go through an evaluation, just to have a definitive answer. Whether she does or not is completely up to her. Either way, she understands our brains really well.
Time management doesn't start on the calendar
When most of us think about time management, we picture a calendar, a clock, or a to-do list. Anna says that's not where it starts.
"Time management actually starts by getting crystal clear about what matters most to us," she told me. "And that's typically the work that we don't like to do."
We want to skip straight to the good part. How do I get more done? How do I get to the bottom of my list? But if we haven't asked what matters, our calendars fill up with things we said yes to out of obligation, habit, or guilt.
Anna admitted that for years she'd buy a new planner, flip past the vision questions at the front (What do you want your year to look like?), and go straight to filling in dates. And every year, she lived the same reactive year over and over again.
I had to stop her right there. She had just described every planner I have ever bought. It also explains something I learned in my ADHD coach training. A lot of us don't want to read the instructions. We just want to plug it in and have it work. Those vision questions are the instructions.
Anna suggests picturing your life one year from now. Not five years, not ten. One year is far enough out to make real change, and close enough to actually imagine. What do your days feel like? How are you moving your body? What do your relationships look like? What does your home look like? Once you can picture it, you can figure out the habits and routines that will get you there.
First, you have to be the navigator
Here's the catch, and Anna named it herself. Sometimes life is so overwhelming, with tasks spread across sixteen notebooks and phone apps, that you can't picture next week, let alone next year.
So before you can be the visionary in your life, Anna says, you have to be the navigator. You need a way to handle overwhelm when it hits, whether it's a bad day or a hard season. Part of that is knowing your own personality. Are you a checklist person or a Kanban board person? Do you need social time on your calendar, or quiet buffer time after meetings to recharge?
Anna is a certified Myers-Briggs practitioner, and this is where she really shines. Her point is that two people with ADHD can need completely different systems. As I always say, if you've met one person with ADHD, you've met one person with ADHD. Copying someone else's strategy, one that was never built for you, rarely works.
From there, Anna walks clients through becoming:
The Navigator, who can steer through overwhelm
The Visionary, who gets clear on what life should look like
The Designer, who builds routines and what she calls a "Best Week Ever," a template so you walk into Monday already knowing how your week will go, without feeling boxed in
The Pace Setter, who sustains it over time
The pace setter idea comes from Anna's half-marathon days. At big races, there are runners carrying flags that show the pace they'll hold, so if you're aiming for an eight-minute mile, you just stay with the eight-minute flag. In our lives, we have to be our own pace setter.
When something isn't working, Anna has you reach into your toolbox and ask: Is this a habit issue? An energy issue, where I'm doing the wrong thing at the wrong time of day? An attention issue, where I need to clear my space, do a digital declutter, or have a conversation with my people distractions? A recharge issue, where I need more sleep, more friends, or more fun? Or is it truly a time issue?
When I asked about mapping your energy across the day, which is the question I think a lot of us with ADHD want to jump to, Anna smiled. She called energy mapping "sprinkles on the icing on the cake." The cake is your vision. The icing is your routines and your best week. A new app or a new planner is a sprinkle. Without the cake, the sprinkles have nothing to hold on to.
Or, as she put it: mapping your energy is like picking paint colors. If the walls aren't up yet, it won't get you anywhere worthwhile.
Circle brains, square brains, triangle brains
At this point in every episode, I ask my guests: If you could push a button and not have ADHD, would you? Since Anna doesn't have a diagnosis, I told her she didn't have to answer. During the break, she started to answer anyway, and I made her save it for the microphone.
"If I do have ADHD, which, come on, all signs are pointing to it," she said, "why would I want to think any differently? The brain that I have been given was given to me for a reason. And it's gotten me this far."
Preach.
Then she shared something she'd said to her husband just a day or two earlier. Why do we have "neurotypical" and "neurodivergent," with everyone starting as typical until proven otherwise? Why can't there just be circle thinkers, square thinkers, and triangle thinkers, all considered neutral? Think back to hunter-gatherer days. We needed people whose minds moved fast and jumped between many things, and we needed people who could do the same steady task over and over. A functioning society needs every shape.
"Or disordered, by the way," I added. That word gets me every time.
It reminded me of a rabbi I once heard talk about religions like musical instruments. If everyone played the same instrument, we'd lose the music. I believe I was born with this brain for a reason, and I couldn't do what I'm here to do without it.
When the schedule disappears
Most of my listeners are 45 and older, and a lot of us are in a season where life is slowing down. Kids leave home. Careers wind down. (I'm a recent empty nester myself. My youngest went to college, and her empty bedroom is now my podcast studio.)
For many of us with ADHD, a full, chaotic life actually helped. I had three kids partly because, with two, the house got too quiet. So what happens when all that structure goes away?
Anna pointed out that from childhood into our twenties, someone hands us a schedule. School, then college, then a job tells us where to be and when. Her mom retired after more than thirty years of teaching, and going from a schedule to no schedule felt like hitting a brick wall. At first it feels like freedom. Then the days start to blur.
Her advice:
Give yourself three weeks to a month with no structure. Truly do whatever you want.
Then ask what you'd enjoy doing regularly. Revisit an old hobby. Take a theater class. Join the book club you never had time for.
Build yourself a "class schedule." Swim at noon on Mondays. Mahjong on Tuesday afternoons. Anna's mother-in-law rides her bike to Pilates every Thursday morning, and everyone knows where to find her.
These aren't rigid rules. They're anchors. "We're just grown-up toddlers," Anna said. Babies and toddlers thrive on routine, and so do we. When our bodies know what's coming next, we stop constantly scanning for what we're supposed to be doing, and our stress goes down.
I know this firsthand. When I went through my divorce while starting my business, I felt like I was in free fall. What helped most was creating anchor points in my week. Anna also talked about the early days of COVID, when so many of our habits disappeared overnight. Our brains had to think through every tiny thing we used to do on autopilot, which is exhausting. And when your brain is busy deciding small things, there's no room left for the big ones.
Why this matters for the work we do
When I heard Anna describe COVID wiping out our habits, I thought, that's a move.
When someone downsizes or moves into a new community, nearly every habit they have changes at once. Where the coffee mugs live. Which way to turn out of the driveway. Where the keys go. What day the trash goes out. For anyone, that's draining. For someone with ADHD, diagnosed or not, it can be completely overwhelming, especially on top of the grief of leaving a home full of memories.
That's why at Silver Linings Transitions, we think about more than boxes. We set up the new home so the most important things are easy to find from day one. We help clients recreate familiar routines in a new space. And everything Anna said about what matters most applies to downsizing too. When you're clear about what matters, deciding what to keep gets so much easier.
Find Anna
Free time management call: Anna works with clients one-on-one and in groups. Start at FreeTimeCall.com.
Her podcast: It's About Time, wherever you listen.
Her book: Time Management Essentials: The Tools You Need to Maximize Your Attention, Energy and Productivity (McGraw-Hill).
Your one assignment
Anna left us with one thing to do after this episode. Whether you're grabbing a pen, driving, or walking the neighborhood in your weighted vest, take one minute and answer this:
What matters most to me? And how do I want to spend my time?
Not how should I. How do I want to.
"When you are clear about what matters most to you," Anna said, "every single decision about time management becomes easier. That is the cheat code."
Ready for support?
Listen to the full episode of Grandma Has ADHD wherever you get your podcasts. If it resonated, please share it. That's how we spread awareness and reduce the stigma.
Read my book, This Explains So Much, available on Amazon in print and audio.
Talk to me. I offer a free 15-minute discovery call for ADHD and clutter coaching.
Planning a move in San Diego or the Coachella Valley? Silver Linings Transitions is here to help, and we understand executive function.
It is never too late to make the rest of your life the best of your life.
— Jami Shapiro, CSMM, CSA, Founder of Silver Linings Transitions, ADHD Coach, and host of the Grandma Has ADHD podcast
