The Holiday Week Problem

When you're Neurodiverse, holiday weeks can make you feel like you're going backwards

This year, the Fourth of July week really encompasses two weeks, thanks to the holiday falling on a Saturday. For me, that gives me two weeks of hell. Nobody’s emailing back. Nobody’s making decisions. Half your contacts are on a boat somewhere and the other half are pretending to be on a boat somewhere. And if you’re like me, this is one of the hardest times of the year.

Not because anything is wrong, but because nothing is happening.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it until I die: ADHD brains don’t run on normal fuel. We run on momentum. Forward motion isn’t a nice-to-have for us, it’s the thing that keeps the engine from stalling out entirely. So when the world slows down, like it does every year between July 4th and the day after Labor Day weekend (kidding, but only a little), my brain doesn’t slow down with it. It just starts spinning in place. And spinning in place feels, to an ADHD brain, exactly like going backwards.

I know logically that’s not true. Nobody is losing ground because their inbox is quiet for a week. But logic isn’t really in charge here. The feeling is in charge. And the feeling says if you’re not building something, you’re losing something.

So here’s what I do instead of white-knuckling my way through quiet weeks, because I’ve had a lot of practice and I’ve made a lot of mistakes.

Stop trying to manufacture momentum you don’t need

The first instinct is always to invent urgency. Send an email nobody asked for. Start a project nobody asked for. Pitch something half-baked just so something is moving. I’ve done this more times than I’d like to admit, and almost every time, what I built in a panic during a slow week needed to be rebuilt properly later anyway.

The move here isn’t to fake motion. Rather, it’s to make real progress on stuff that’s actually been waiting for exactly this kind of week.

The busy work pile is your friend right now

You have a list. You know you have a list. It’s the stuff that’s not urgent, not exciting, and somehow never gets touched during a normal week because something louder always shows up first. This is its week.

For me that’s things like finally reconciling expenses, updating my media kit, going through 400 unread Slack messages I’ve been avoiding, cleaning up my calendar booking links, archiving old client files. None of it is glamorous, but all of it makes me feel like I did something when I close the laptop, which is exactly the feeling I’m chasing.

The trick is to actually make the list before the week starts feeling slow, not during. When you’re already in the spin-out, you can’t think clearly enough to remember what’s been sitting there for three months.

Pick one thing you’ve been “meaning to get to”

Not five things. One. ADHD brains love a list of forty half-finished tasks because it gives us forty chances to feel behind. Pick one actual thing, something with a real start and a real end, and finish it completely this week. A draft you’ve been sitting on. A course you bought and never opened. The garage. Whatever it is, the goal isn’t the task itself, it’s the experience of finishing something cleanly, because that feeling is rare for us and worth protecting.

Use the quiet to plan the noise

Slow weeks are the only time you get to actually think about the next loud one. I use weeks like this to map out the next quarter of content, sketch keynote ideas, or just sit with a problem I haven’t had room to think about properly. This isn’t busy work, it’s the opposite. It’s the strategic thinking that never happens when everything’s on fire, which for most of us is every other week of the year.

Move your body, on purpose, not as a consolation prize

When I don’t have a deadline pulling me forward, training is what I lean on instead. A long run, a hard swim, whatever’s on the calendar that week. It’s not a substitute for productivity, it’s a different kind of forward motion, one with a finish line I can actually see. Some weeks that’s the only thing keeping me from refreshing my email forty times an hour for no reason.

Let the week be what it is

This is the one I’m worst at. The actual answer, underneath all the tips, is that some weeks are just supposed to be quiet, and that’s not a personal failure, it’s a calendar. The work will still be there in two weeks. The inbox will fill back up. The momentum will come back because it always does.

You don’t have to manufacture a crisis to feel okay. You just have to find something real, even something small, to point yourself at until the world starts moving again.

It will. It always does. Usually right around the time you’ve finally gotten used to the quiet.