The Anti-Planner is the brain-child of Dani Donovan, an artist who’s been working on support materials for ADHD and other neurodivergent types for a while.
It’s designed principally for people with ADHD, but it seems to be useful regardless of what brain type you have.
The design:
The design is hardback and spiral-bound, which makes it very easy to use over and over. I’m not constantly fighting to find the right page as I might be with a regular glued or stitch-bound book.
Open it up and the first thing you encounter is a page with the simple message: “Your worth is not measured in productivity.” Dani even writes it out twice, in bold, to make sure you appreciate the moment.
Once she’s got that out of the way, there are a series of pages that use a cartoon character relating to a small avatar called The Thing. This is what you want to do (or what you have to do), and all its subtasks. But you can’t do The Thing.
The Anti-Planner is here to help you figure out
- Why you can’t do The Thing
- What you can do, practically, to resolve that.
It’s not a book for putting in goals and filling out what you want to do every week. If, like me, you’ve bought every planner out there and still found yourself metaphorically sobbing in a corner because you can’t keep up, the Anti-Planner might help.
It has a set of six sections for each of the different reasons why you can’t start a task:
- “Stuck”
- “Overwhelmed”
- “Unmotivated”
- “Disorganised”
- “Discouraged”
There’s also a bonus section called “Extras” with a colourful index.
Within each section, there are subcategories of reasons that might provide more insight into your emotion.
The “Stuck” menu, for example, suggests options like “Difficulty getting started” or “Indecisive”. Each of these has a selection of practical activities to help.
“Indecisive” suggests “I can’t decide what to work on first” or “I’m afraid to commit. What if I pick wrong?”
On top of that, the first page of the six sections includes a list of symptoms for each type of problem. “Stuck” can look like “Chronic procrastination”, “Lack of follow-through”, “Ignoring deadlines” amongst others.
This is especially useful if, like me, you struggle with interoception and find it hard to know how you’re feeling, or why, at any given moment. If you can pause and identify a core reason why you can’t start or do a task, then the next stage is to pause again on the title page for each section to look more deeply at what might help.
Donovan provides several solutions to each problem. There are task sheets with clear examples of each exercise, which are available in pdf form or can be copied so you don’t spoil the version in the Anti-Planner itself. She also provides a clear worked example for every exercise, so that you don’t have to attempt to process instructions and attempt to make them make sense.
What I love about this is that I’m not pulled toward setting an unrealistic goal, getting bogged down, and then being angry at myself because I couldn’t do what I expected of myself.
Instead, Dani suggests such practical, hand-holding options that I feel like I can take on more. She even goes as far as suggesting wording for particular types of email, just in case that’s a sticking point preventing you from doing something.
Overall strategy:
Donovan’s prevailing attitude is that for a lot of things, perfect or even good are the enemies of done.
She provides clear ways that “finished” can be okay, without requiring too much additional work. This means that several of her solutions use a similar approach:
Identify the minimum that can be done and then do that, with a clear set of steps for approaching improved versions of “done“.
If the task is starting to feel impossible, then being able to recognise the achievement of just getting to an acceptable kind of done, even if it’s not perfect, can be helpful. And if that triggers your inner perfectionist, she has a whole set of exercises for tackling that.
What I love about the Anti-Planner is how detailed it is. It’s like the handbook for life I didn’t get when I was an autistic kid trying to understand the world. It’s beautifully drawn, colourful and, above all, empathetic. It doesn’t assume that a “scientifically-proven” strategy is necessarily going to work, since these studies often only apply to a given subsection of the population anyway.
Overall, I’ve found the tools and strategies, which deal with both the task and the often horrible emotions that go with doing a thing, so useful. I keep the Anti-Planner with me as much as I can (although it is quite bulky, it’s worth the space it takes up). There are also .pdfs available of all the sheets so you can work with it digitally if you prefer.
This planner is for anyone who needs a friendly, comforting style and wants a cosy blanket to wrap their brain in while they do The Thing.
Related Posts & Links:
Dani Donovan x ADHDOnline.com – ADHD Quiz
Interview with Dani Donovan – WBUR
Planning as Practice – JoVE
Making Decisions: planning & scheduling – JoVE
Planning for known unknowns – JoVE
This post was originally sent to the Newsletter on 12th Jan 2024.
