How an ADHD coach uses Timeular to maintain focus and prevent burnout

Paula Engebretson is a certified life coach and host of the podcast, I’m Busy Being Awesome. Supporting adults with ADHD, she empowers them to let go of perfectionism, take decisive action, and work with their ADHD to achieve their goals. Through personalized one-on-one coaching and small group sessions, Paula collaborates with her clients, helping them embrace their strengths and thrive.

The challenge: battling burnout

Paula was struggling with burnout and was working all the time with no idea where all of her time was going. She needed a way to keep track of her time so that she could be intentional with how she spent it.

The solution: using Timeular to be intentional with time

Paula tracks her time using activities including: podcasting, creative work, email, client work, admin, self coaching. Paula uses Timeular with the time management cube to accurately track how long it takes her to complete a task. She creates her schedule around this and finds that Timeular helps give her structure.

She explains that the Tracker helps her because: “it’s great for an ADHD brain. I can see it so I can turn it.”

Paula tends to do lots of batch work so she allocates podcasts to Mondays, calls and admin to Tuesdays and then she coaches her clients on Wednesday and Thursday. She finds that this approach helps her maintain focus as less context switching is favorable for her brain. She breaks her tasks into really small activities so that she doesn’t procrastinate.

“Timeular helps highlight where the time is actually going, where energy leaks happen, and identify patterns in productivity peaks and valleys to create a more effective schedule.“

Paula emphasizes the importance of taking breaks between activities to allow the brain time for transition. She explains that breaks are restorative and important when maintaining productivity: “we are humans and not robots.”

Timeular has helped Paula identify tasks that are taking up a lot of her time and she makes the data-informed decision to delegate based on the insights and hire a freelancer. A task that was taking her 90 minutes could take a freelancer 25 minutes, freeing up more time for Paula.

Paula makes decisions to delegate tasks based on the insights that Timeular provides.

“I knew I needed to hire a virtual assistant to help with designing my social media posts and inbox management. The data in Timeular helped inform which type of virtual assistant I needed as I could see that I was spending a lot of time responding to emails and in Slack. I was able to identify what sort of assistant I needed and for how many hours.”

She reviews her data on a Friday using David Allen’s approach. At the end of the month she maps out goals using the data from Timeular to inform what she does next.

The outcome: surprising insights 

Paula has been surprised by some of Timeular’s insights. She admits that she puts off writing emails as she thinks they will take lots of time. When she then commits to the task, she finds that the email takes three minutes of her time. At the other end of the scale, she starts a design task that she thinks will take no time at all and 40 minutes later she finds that she is still looking for a specific color.

“Timeular is supportive in allowing me to be intentional with my time.”