How to Plan a Trip With ADHD as an Adult

Say you are at the airport. Before joining the security line you need to open your boarding pass on your phone, but the phone is at four percent and the charger is inside the suitcase, and the suitcase has gone off on the belt. There is not a single mistake in this scene. Ten small decisions, put off a week before the trip with "I'll look at it later," all came out of your pocket on the same day.

For an adult with ADHD, a trip is less the vacation itself than the sum of the jobs leading up to it. Ticket, documents, suitcase, departure time, transport, chores at home, things to leave behind. All of them are jobs that demand planning, time estimation and working memory, which is exactly where we struggle. This article is not about traveling with a child. If that is what you are wondering about, look at the article on traveling with children. Here there is only you and your own trip.

Tickets and reservations: pull decisions forward

The biggest trap in buying a ticket is leaving tabs open with "I'll look and decide." The tabs pile up, the price changes, a week passes, and in the end you hurriedly buy the flight at the worst time.

If it were up to me, I would write the selection criteria before I start looking. Three lines are enough: the latest I can leave home, whether I accept a connection, whether I want baggage included. An option that does not fit these criteria drops off the list however cheap it is. Decision fatigue grows as the number of options grows, and in ADHD this fatigue usually ends with "take the last option left open."

At the moment of purchase there is one more small detail: move the email the ticket came in to a folder or a label right then, and take a screenshot as well. Searching three weeks later for "what was that mail" is one of the most expensive searches you can make on the day of the trip.

Gather reservation numbers, addresses, check-in and check-out times and the hotel phone number in a single note. Information sitting in pieces in the mailbox cannot be found on the day of travel. A single note can. Put this note on the first screen of your phone, write it on paper too and drop it into the front pocket of the suitcase.

Think about documents separately. Look at the validity period of your ID or passport, and at the conditions of a visa or entry rule if there is one, on the day you make the decision to travel. Some countries require the passport to be valid for a certain period after the entry date. This period varies by country, and I will not give a figure here; you need to look at the official page of the country you are going to. Finding this out before buying the ticket is much cheaper than finding it out at the airport.

Write the times backwards

In this section I apply the logic in the article on chronic lateness to the flight and train time. What is called the planning fallacy (Buehler et al., 1994) exists in everyone, but in ADHD the deviation can be large. We estimate durations optimistically and do not count the preparation.

Start from the arrival time first, then go back. Say your plane departs at 14.30. Look at the baggage and check-in time recommended by the airline and find that time. Subtract the travel time from there. From there subtract the preparation for leaving home: shoes, door, checking the stove, trash, a last look. If it were up to me, I would write twice my own estimate for this preparation. The first estimate is usually the estimate for a day on which everything goes smoothly.

Then add a buffer too, and put it not on the road but on leaving. The road is already calculated in the navigation app. The time that is lost is mostly lost at home.

You should have a sequence like this, and you should write it down somewhere:

• Plane or train time
• The time you need to be at the terminal
• The time you need to leave home
• The time you need to start the last preparation (set the alarm to this)

The alarm rule matters too: let the alarm ring not at the leaving time but at the time to start preparing. An alarm that rings at the leaving time is already too late, because at that time you should have already left. Since difficulty with transitions makes it hard to drop one job and move to another, it is good to have at least fifteen minutes between the "get ready now" alarm and the "leave now" alarm.

On night flights and early morning departures there is also sleep. If your sleep routine has not settled anyway, a 05.00 departure can be the weakest link of the trip. Take this into account when choosing the ticket. A cheap but pre-dawn flight can use up your whole first day.

The suitcase: a single list, before leaving

Preparing a suitcase is a job that loads working memory. While you put one thing in, you forget another, because the number of things you must hold in mind is high. That is why the job should be written on paper, not held in memory. I explained the mechanism in the article on working memory and forgetfulness, and here I am only using the result.

My suggestion is not to make a list from scratch on every trip. Write one good list once, keep it on your phone, add what turned out to be missing after each trip and delete what was left over. For ready-made list examples you can look at the checklists page, but the best list is your own, because it knows the things you forget.

Divide the preparation into three stages:

• Two days before departure: clothes and large items. When you see something missing, there is still time to shop.
• One day before departure: chargers, medication, documents, money and cards. Put them in one by one, ticking them off in the order on the list.
• The morning of departure: only the things taken at the last moment, that is, phone, wallet, keys. Have a "departure tray" for these.

Losing things like keys and a wallet on the last day is very common. For this, use the entry point rule from the article on losing things on the trip too: one day before departure choose a single place, and put them nowhere but that place.

I mention the charger separately because this is the most classic thing to happen. Have the charger, adapter and power bank in your hand bag. A power bank is, in most airlines, among the items that have to go in cabin baggage, but check your own airline's rule. What you need when the phone runs out should not be going off on the belt inside the suitcase.

On the way: waiting, crowds and your own energy

Airports are hard places in terms of attention and sensory load: announcements, screens, crowds, a constant queue. What I described in the article on sensory overload applies here too. Have headphones, a bottle of water and a single thing to do while waiting (a book, a podcast, a note) in your bag. Waiting with nothing to do is hard for most of us, and it often ends with diving into the phone and missing the announcement.

Do not trust the phone too much. Repeating the boarding gate number and time to yourself out loud may look odd, but it works. Looking at the screen and saying "okay" is not the same as saying the gate number. Write the gate number in the notes section of your phone as well. Gates change often, so look at the screen every half hour; you can set this as an alarm too.

Make room for your own energy too. On the day of the trip the social battery also runs down. As in the article on the social battery, if you have travel companions, saying "I'm going to stay quiet for twenty minutes" to them is better than being irritable afterwards.

The unexpected: sentences from a calm day

Delay, cancellation, lost suitcase, wrong hotel reservation. One of these happens on nearly every trip. What is hard at the moment of the mishap is making the decision. Panic narrows working memory even more, and it gets hard to remember the answer to "what should I do" at that moment.

As a solution, before the trip, on a calm day, write "If ... then ..." sentences. This is an approach called implementation intentions, and there is evidence that in general it makes reaching goals easier (Gollwitzer & Sheeran, 2006). I do not know of a study specific to travel; I am adapting the principle here. I described the general pattern in the article on if-then plans. Examples for travel:

• If the flight is cancelled, first call the airline's help line, then look at the customer service page, then look at an alternative flight.
• If the suitcase does not come, before waiting at the baggage belt go to the desk and attach a photo of the baggage tag to the form.
• If the phone is lost, have a relative's number and the reservation details on paper in the suitcase.
• If the card does not work, put the spare card or some cash in another pocket.

The good thing about these sentences is that at the moment of the mishap you need to read, not think. Put them at the very top of the note.

One more thing: back up everything critical. A screenshot of the boarding pass, a photo of the documents, the reservation numbers. Let the backup sit in separate places. A backup that sits on the same phone disappears when the phone is lost.

If you use medication

I am not an expert on this, so I am keeping it short. If you use medication, definitely carry it on the trip in your hand baggage, in its original box and with your prescription. Some medications may be subject to special rules in some countries, so it makes sense to look at the official sources of the country you are going to and, if necessary, get a letter from your doctor. If the time zone changes, talk to your doctor about how to adjust the medication time. Also set the medication time as an alarm on your phone, because routine falls apart on travel days and that is usually the first thing forgotten.

What I am left with

What makes travel easier for someone with ADHD is not being more careful. Attention runs out anyway. What works is taking decisions and remembering out of the day of the trip and giving them to an earlier time, to paper and to the alarm. If it were up to me, I would turn this into a boring but solid system: a single note, a single list, times counted backwards, a written plan for mishaps.

I would like to add one more thing: the plan does not have to be perfect. You will forget something, you will be late somewhere. What matters is having a backup at that moment and saying to yourself "open the backup" instead of "I did it again." A trip does not have to be a day on which nothing is forgotten. Let it be a day on which what is forgotten does not stop you, and that is enough.