I have spent years wondering why I can build the most beautiful structure for my life on a Monday, create detailed plans, color-code them, feel completely aligned with them… and then abandon them by Wednesday. As if they never existed.

By Wednesday, I am often onto something entirely different, making brand-new plans again.

The strange thing is, I actually love making structures for myself. Over the years, I have tried all kinds of systems, with varying degrees of success and failure. I have tried Scrum for One. I have tried forward motion maps. I do mind maps. I do meditative ideation. I do Tiny Experiments. I do sprint plans.

All of these have worked, to varying degrees.

And yet in spite of all of that, it still felt like a tug of war. I would create a plan and then very often abandon it.

One day, I read something that made me stop short and think, Wow, this feels familiar. It was a meme someone had posted on social media:

Autism: I follow the plan
ADHD: I follow my mood
AuDHD: I create structure, then immediately abandon it for vibes

That last line really landed. It made me wonder if what I had been experiencing all along had a name. Or at least a shape. I started to think that maybe what I had always called being “mood-driven” or “inconsistent” looked a lot like AuDHD patterns.

For years the story I told myself was simple and unkind. I start things and do not finish them. I get excited, then I quit. I assumed the problem was me.

But that story was not actually true. What looked like inconsistency was actually something else entirely. It was a pattern.

I could see myself moving back and forth between two poles. On one side, I genuinely love planning, structure, and systems. On the other, I feel pulled toward mood, curiosity, and whatever feels meaningful or alive in the moment.

Once I noticed that rhythm, I could not unsee it.

A small example shows up almost daily. I will start the day by making a mind map. Six, seven, maybe eight things appear on the page. As I look at it, my attention naturally gravitates toward one of them. I create a little plan. I tell myself, today is the day. This is the thing I am going to do.

Sometimes that works.

But often by the end of the day, after finishing client work and settling into the evening, my mind has latched onto something entirely different. The plan that felt so solid in the morning no longer has any pull. That is the moment that used to confuse me the most.

The real shift came when I stopped trying to explain this behavior through discipline or willpower and instead looked at how my mind actually works.

I have always tested as an INFP. When I started reading deeper descriptions of that type, especially at the Personality Hacker website*, something clicked. My brain is not disorganized. It is value-driven and possibility-seeking.

I make decisions based on whether something truly matters to me. If it does not my energy naturally drifts away. That sense of what matters can change over time, and sometimes it changes quickly. At the same time my mind constantly explores ideas, connections, and possibilities. It is drawn to what feels exciting or alive in the moment.

Seen through that lens, what once looked like mood-driven chaos started to look like a cognitive rhythm. This understanding changed how I see myself.

Before, I treated my inability to follow my own structures as a personal failure. Now I see that I was never abandoning anything. I was shifting toward what felt more meaningful at the time.

That reframing softened something deep inside me. I stopped calling myself a quitter. I stopped assuming that structure was something I was bad at. I began to understand that structure, for me, only works when it stays connected to meaning.

Looking at AuDHD patterns helped me recognize the shape of motivation and distraction in my life. Understanding my INFP wiring helped me understand why only some plans ever truly matter to me. When a plan connects to my inner sense of meaning and energy, my focus follows naturally.

These days I start with a simple morning check-in. Sometimes it is morning pages. Sometimes it is a quick mind map. I check in because I know that sleep resets my inner landscape. By the time I am fully awake, I usually already know what wants my attention that day.

I no longer see my mood as a barrier. I see it as a compass. Learning how my mind works has cast all of this in a much kinder light.

So I will leave you with these questions: Where do your mind and mood pull you, and how do you navigate that space? If you create structures and then leave them behind, what if that is not failure at all, but information? What might change if you treated your attention as guidance instead of a flaw?

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