Tips for staying on top of care tasks

Getting Things Done

By Hadassah Eventsur

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or some people, planners are an excellent tool to create a schedule for themselves and get things done. For others, the planners they purchase just pile up, unused. Here are some strategies for those kinds of people:

Google Calendar: If you are someone who carries your phone around with you, Google Calendar is a great app for scheduling appointments and meetings. It allows you to program widgets to appear on your phone’s home screen to alert you the day before and the day of an appointment. You can also preset custom reminder alerts to act as prompts in the hours or minutes leading up to your appointment. Prompts and alerts are powerful tools to compensate for working memory deficits common to people with ADHD.

Opening and Closing Duties: These duties involve spending 20-30 minutes either in the beginning or end of the day to accomplish predetermined tasks, like preparing school lunches, to help for a smoother day. This is a powerful tool that can be woven into your morning or evening, but doesn’t necessitate that you schedule a specific block of time to complete it in.

Body Doubling: Use the presence of a family member or friend in person, on the phone, or virtually to act as a “body double” to help you stay focused and motivated to complete a specific task. The other person need not be doing the same task, you simply report to them that you plan on doing something, which gives you a level of accountability to actually get it done. A great time to do this is Sunday morning for meal planning or Thursday night for Shabbos prep but can vary depending on your weekly needs or the availability of a body double.

Pattern Building. Instead of tackling care tasks using routines, which are attached to a specific time frame, try using patterns. An example of a pattern is the “Five Things Tidying Method” by Casey Davis. When straightening up a room, always do the same five things: Throw out the garbage, put the laundry in a basket, put the dishes in the sink, put away things that have a place, and then separate things that don’t have a place to tackle at a later time. People who have ADHD find that doing care tasks via pattern usage helps with motivation and minimizes task paralysis caused by not knowing where to start. With patterns, you’re not bound by a time frame and you can do a longer or shorter version of each pattern depending on your emotional state or time availability.

Work with Your Energy Levels:  Are you a morning person? Try tackling certain tasks at the start of the day. Are you the type whose creative juices flow in the evening? Tap into those late hours to complete those projects. Paying attention to the ebb and flow of your energy levels creates fertile ground for increasing efficiency with task completion.

Stubby To-Do List: This is a daily sticky note list of no more than five tasks to complete that day. Attach it to a location in your line of vision and cross off a task as you accomplish it. Whatever wasn’t accomplished gets carried over to tomorrow’s To-Do list.

Hadassah Eventsur, MS, OTR/L is a licensed occupational therapist with over 20 years of experience, and a certified life coach in the Baltimore, MD area.

Panda Parenting

By Shona Kaisman-Schwartz

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e’ve all heard of Tiger Moms, the overbearing parent looking to micromanage their children’s lives. Or the Snowplow Parent — the parent constantly clearing away obstacles for their kids. And we’re all familiar with the Helicopter — the parent who hovers, waiting to swoop down when the going seems tough.

What should we be if not a Tiger, Helicopter, or Snowplow?

My favorite parenting philosophy, coined by Esther Wojcicki (journalist, educator, and Jewish mom to some famous and successful kids involved in Google’s founding), is Panda Parenting, a style marked by encouraging children to develop independence within a supportive framework.

At its core, Panda Parenting is built on Wojcicki’s “TRICK” principles: trust, respect, independence, collaboration, and kindness. “Panda moms aren’t lazy,” Wojcicki emphasizes. “What they do is give children scaffolding to let them go free. Instead of always intervening, you only help when they need it.”

When challenges arise, Panda Parents resist the urge to solve problems immediately. Instead, they encourage children to tackle obstacles independently, while knowing parental assistance remains available when truly needed. Panda Parents don’t call their child’s friend’s mother; they help their child work through social situations. Panda Parents don’t intervene with the teacher; they empower their children to self-advocate. Panda Parents don’t entertain kids; they recommend activities but ultimately leave it up to the children to work it out.

Panda Parents don’t “fix;” they “support.”

Rooted in deep connection between child and parent, Panda Parenting is a framework that helps give our kids what they need: resilience. This kind of parenting ensures that kids develop tools for independent coping, self-assessed risk management, problem-solving, and creative thinking while maintaining a consistent relationship of trust and connection.

Shona Kaisman-Schwartz is an educational consultant.She is the author of How To Stop Caring What Others Think: For Real and the upcoming book, Always On: An Interactive Parents’ Guide to the (Dis)Connected Generation.

Take Financial Advice with Discernment

By Rivky Rothenberg and Tsippy Gross

IT’S

easy to get overwhelmed when you start looking for financial advice. Everywhere you turn, there’s someone telling you the “one right way” to do things: “You must shop only once a week to save money.” “Never buy coffee from a coffee shop.” And maybe you try to follow this advice, but it doesn’t work for you. Grocery shopping once a week might sound ideal, but with your unpredictable schedule, it’s not feasible.

It’s tempting to just dismiss all the advice. But just because one piece of advice doesn’t fit doesn’t mean the entire picture is irrelevant. Financial advice isn’t meant to be a set of rigid rules — it’s a starting point. It’s about finding what works for your family and your situation. Maybe you can’t follow every piece of advice exactly as it’s given, but with a little tweaking, you can find a version that fits your needs just right.

So don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater. Keep listening, keep learning, and keep tweaking.

Tsippi Gross is a business consultant and Rivky Rothenberg is a CPA. Together they started Ashir, a nonprofit that provides financial training for communities and families.

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 944)