I have ADHD, and no advice about finding more time has ever helped me.
I’m Courtnay, one of CARL’s co-founders. I was diagnosed at 29, which means I spent my twenties assuming everyone found the start of a task this taxing and nobody talked about it.
One thing before anything else, because it changes what the rest of this is worth. I’m not a classroom teacher. I won’t pretend to know what it feels like to plan for thirty students while tracking outcomes, materials, and which parent is waiting on a call back. What I do know is the cost of managing complicated work with a brain that charges extra for every act of executive function.
Most planning advice is written as though that surcharge doesn’t exist.
A free block doesn’t turn into a planned lesson
Our laundry gets washed. Sometimes twice, because I forgot about it. Then it lives in the dryer for the week, and eventually makes its way to the floset (read: the closet floor).
Nothing in that sequence is difficult. Washing isn’t hard. Folding isn’t hard either. In fact, every time I finally manage to do it, I think to myself, that didn’t take as long as I thought. What fails is the handoff between them, the small unglamorous business of starting the next thing when nothing outside your head is telling you to.
Planning has the same shape. You know the unit. You know roughly where the class landed last week. You have a prep block Wednesday. Then Wednesday arrives, it goes to admin and report card comments, and the lesson is exactly where you left it.
The time was there.
Starting is the part that costs
When I look at where planning actually stalls for me, it’s almost never the middle. It’s three places.
Starting from nothing, where a blank page asks you to make forty decisions in an order nobody specified. Sequencing, which asks you to hold next week and the week after in your head while you work on Tuesday. And keeping hold of detail across time, because if I can’t see the whole picture, parts of it tend to disappear from my brain.
The middle one is the one people underestimate. My brain has two settings for time, and they are now and not now.
Teachers already do all of this. They do it well, under conditions that would flatten most professions. The thing I got stuck on was why the tools around them make each of those three parts harder than they need to be.
We built around the parts I kept losing
That question is most of why CARL and Compass look the way they do.
You never have to start from nothing. A topic, a document you already have, a curriculum outcome, an existing lesson, a library resource, or a half-formed idea typed at 11 p.m. can all be a beginning. The hardest version of the blank page is the one where you also have to decide how to begin.
The lesson stays connected. The worksheet, supports, assessment, and Facilitator Guide come from the same plan, so there’s no second pass where you reconcile four things assembled separately.
And the year stays visible. Compass holds what’s taught, what’s planned, and what’s still to come, because “I think we did that?” isn’t a reliable tracking system. Nothing breaks if you disappear for two weeks. There are no streaks, no lost work, and no empty-state pressure trying to pull you back every day.
The point is a system that’s easier to keep up than, say, a colour-coded one. (I have never once managed to maintain a colour-coded anything. I get as far as choosing the colours, because look how pretty, and that’s reliably where the project ends.)
A tool can’t do the executive function for you
It can hold some of it outside your head.
And it won’t fit every teacher with ADHD, because there’s no single ADHD brain. Mine likes a workflow that’s satisfying to move through: a clear place to enter, a clear place to stop, and something to show for it at the end.
That preference is most of why Compass exists alongside CARL instead of inside it. “What am I teaching next?” is a different question from “how do I build it,” and having somewhere to answer the first one is what makes the second one startable. Not sure what’s next? That’s the question Compass is for.
Someone else’s brain wants fewer options on the screen and one thing at a time. The best I can do is build for the version I understand, keep asking teachers where it fails, and change it.
The bottom line
- Planning can stall at starting, sequencing, and holding detail, not only at finding time
- Advice to be more organized does nothing about those barriers
- A tool can lower the cost of beginning and keep the whole picture in view
- It can’t decide what your students need
- You still read the room, choose the entry point, and cut what doesn’t fit
If you’ve spent years being told you’d be fine if you just planned ahead, I’d rather build you something that assumes you already tried.
See how CARL supports planning for ADHD brains.
