Hey, 3 decade ADHD brain, working in the mental health field for ADHD, with ADHD kid and Autistic spouse. I have a few options that help with this that I can suggest.
For starters, goblin tasking. If it’s important enough to do, drop everything and do it when you think of it. Goblins don’t plan to go cause mischief, they see the chance to do it and seize the moment with no thought about before or after. Do that with your chores.
Second, inconvenience yourself. You can’t forget your wallet and keys when you’re leaving the house if you have to take them out of your shoes to put them on. We have a stool next to the door, if something important needs to go with us, it how’s on the stool and the stool goes in front of the door. Literally can’t leave without acknowledging it. Mop the kitchen before you game? Put the mop and bucket in your chair. Can’t sit without moving it and if you’re moving it you might as well do it.
DOOM bucket. DOOM piles are all those piles of stuff you have, it means Didn’t Organize, Only Moved. Once in a while, I push all the doom piles in a room into a giant bucket or box or laundry basket, then I go through said container and put every single thing in a permanent and appropriate place. If I can’t find that place, I decide if I actually need that thing. Normally I don’t and it goes to trash or donation.
Teamwork. The technical terms are body doubling and mirroring. Have someone hang out with you while you do the thing. They can help do the thing, or just be there to provide a stimulus outside of your head. Mine is my spouse, but you don’t have to make it a relationship thing, before her I had a pact with a budy that lived near by, we’d call each other up when we were struggling to get the thing done.
Off load it on a digital assistant. There’s a program called Home Assistant that lets you run your own local Alexa like bot that doesn’t leave your network. It’s a fun project and a helpful tool all in one, you can make it sound like GladOS from Portal, it even tells jokes. I didn’t have the time to do all the work, but I had planned to offload reminders onto the bot with a variety of variables that of would use to decide when to remind me of things.
Lastly, willpower. None of these work of ypu aren’t invested in doing better. If you imagine it as a wall you have to climb, these are ladders that will make it easier, but you still have to climb. They never get rid of the wall.
Despite what this thread may claim, writing things down is still absolutely something that someone with ADHD should try.
It helps my wife manage hers a lot. Writing things down is functionally different than typing them out, and your brain remembers the physical act of writing much better.
What works for me: e-ink notebook (like Supernote, Remarkable, Boox Note). My “todo” notebook is like 2 pages long divided into stuff for today and stuff for future. I could use a piece of paper of course but:
I erase things that are either done or no longer relevant (they don’t become visual clutter)
I can reorganize stuff on my todo page when I feel overwhelmed or move it to other pages if I don’t want to focus on it today
writing things down manually with a pen instead of using a keyboard makes it easier for me to remember
picking the device I won’t get distracted by notifications or other apps because I don’t have any
Alarms worked perfectly for me. I might have dozens of alarms going off all the time, but I never forget stuff anymore! I make them automatically now, too; sometimes I’ll even go to make one after discussing plans with someone, and find that I already did it without thinking while we were talking.
More active forms of reminders like alarms, calendar entries, date/time-based notifications (a common feature in to do list apps), or even just asking others to remind me help to keep me on top of things. It also helps to put things in a place where I will see them at the right time, if that makes sense. For example, my medication is in my bathroom because I’m there at the beginning and end of the day when I need to take my meds anyway.
At work, I have a kanban board containing a card for each task with due dates, a description, and any other info I need. The categories are various states the task can be in, including not started, in progress, waiting for someone to get back to me, on hold, etc. This works well for me because I have a single place with everything I need to keep track of and I refer to constantly, but this tool doesn’t work at all for me in my personal life.
For things like emails and texts, I will mark items as unread after reading them if they have an outstanding action I have not completed yet (this also reminds me to make a card for it on the work kanban). Nothing leaves the inbox until it is completely finished. This works for both my personal and work tasks, in large part because I already check my email frequently. Sometimes I will email myself with a task in the subject line so I don’t forget to do it.
Ive been putting all the stuff I need to remember on a cork board right above my desk. My trick for it to not become background noise is that every note I add to it is interactive in some way. I add boxes to check, lists to expand, or recently I just cut out 31 squares of grid paper and glued it to my note as a sort of calendar, just to fill in a box each day of August that I remember the importance of the note. It also helps to be constantly adding and removing things. If details relating to a note have changed, I’ll sometimes take the note down, toss it, and rewrite the note with a different color pen before sticking it back up. Constant change helps a lot.
A key is to have an ever-changing solution. Any one method for too long will inevitably fail, so you have to regularly change it up. This also plays on the “interest, challenge, novelty, urgency” way which our brains work by keeping our brain engaged instead of bored.
But still, the dilemma of having the energy (and availability creativity) to keep changing or rotating the method can be a regular pitfall.
I use a paper notebook, a page per week or month depending on how quickly I fill up the page, I scribble progress bars and check boxes all over it so I’m constantly referring back to it. Once one page fills up I’ll copy everything that wasn’t finished and is still worth tracking on the last page to the next one. The notebook stays in one spot and never moves so I can’t lose it, same with the pencil and the pencil sharpener
Just minimise the number of places where you write things down. While there is a number of note taking apps I use at home and at work, it’s a small number, so I usually find stuff after a pretty quick search.
So what’s the answer, I need solutions
Hey, 3 decade ADHD brain, working in the mental health field for ADHD, with ADHD kid and Autistic spouse. I have a few options that help with this that I can suggest.
For starters, goblin tasking. If it’s important enough to do, drop everything and do it when you think of it. Goblins don’t plan to go cause mischief, they see the chance to do it and seize the moment with no thought about before or after. Do that with your chores.
Second, inconvenience yourself. You can’t forget your wallet and keys when you’re leaving the house if you have to take them out of your shoes to put them on. We have a stool next to the door, if something important needs to go with us, it how’s on the stool and the stool goes in front of the door. Literally can’t leave without acknowledging it. Mop the kitchen before you game? Put the mop and bucket in your chair. Can’t sit without moving it and if you’re moving it you might as well do it.
DOOM bucket. DOOM piles are all those piles of stuff you have, it means Didn’t Organize, Only Moved. Once in a while, I push all the doom piles in a room into a giant bucket or box or laundry basket, then I go through said container and put every single thing in a permanent and appropriate place. If I can’t find that place, I decide if I actually need that thing. Normally I don’t and it goes to trash or donation.
Teamwork. The technical terms are body doubling and mirroring. Have someone hang out with you while you do the thing. They can help do the thing, or just be there to provide a stimulus outside of your head. Mine is my spouse, but you don’t have to make it a relationship thing, before her I had a pact with a budy that lived near by, we’d call each other up when we were struggling to get the thing done.
Off load it on a digital assistant. There’s a program called Home Assistant that lets you run your own local Alexa like bot that doesn’t leave your network. It’s a fun project and a helpful tool all in one, you can make it sound like GladOS from Portal, it even tells jokes. I didn’t have the time to do all the work, but I had planned to offload reminders onto the bot with a variety of variables that of would use to decide when to remind me of things.
Lastly, willpower. None of these work of ypu aren’t invested in doing better. If you imagine it as a wall you have to climb, these are ladders that will make it easier, but you still have to climb. They never get rid of the wall.
Despite what this thread may claim, writing things down is still absolutely something that someone with ADHD should try.
It helps my wife manage hers a lot. Writing things down is functionally different than typing them out, and your brain remembers the physical act of writing much better.
What works for me: e-ink notebook (like Supernote, Remarkable, Boox Note). My “todo” notebook is like 2 pages long divided into stuff for today and stuff for future. I could use a piece of paper of course but:
It varies a lot from person to person.
I’ve had a lot of success with setting alarms on my phone, but it’s still 80/20 if not 70/30.
You just need to try all the methods until you find one(s) that work for you
Alarms worked perfectly for me. I might have dozens of alarms going off all the time, but I never forget stuff anymore! I make them automatically now, too; sometimes I’ll even go to make one after discussing plans with someone, and find that I already did it without thinking while we were talking.
I need to write down some notes to keep track of the methods I use to write down notes of things I need to keep track of…
Ever tried traveler’s notebook? It worked for me. For a while.
More active forms of reminders like alarms, calendar entries, date/time-based notifications (a common feature in to do list apps), or even just asking others to remind me help to keep me on top of things. It also helps to put things in a place where I will see them at the right time, if that makes sense. For example, my medication is in my bathroom because I’m there at the beginning and end of the day when I need to take my meds anyway.
At work, I have a kanban board containing a card for each task with due dates, a description, and any other info I need. The categories are various states the task can be in, including not started, in progress, waiting for someone to get back to me, on hold, etc. This works well for me because I have a single place with everything I need to keep track of and I refer to constantly, but this tool doesn’t work at all for me in my personal life.
For things like emails and texts, I will mark items as unread after reading them if they have an outstanding action I have not completed yet (this also reminds me to make a card for it on the work kanban). Nothing leaves the inbox until it is completely finished. This works for both my personal and work tasks, in large part because I already check my email frequently. Sometimes I will email myself with a task in the subject line so I don’t forget to do it.
Ive been putting all the stuff I need to remember on a cork board right above my desk. My trick for it to not become background noise is that every note I add to it is interactive in some way. I add boxes to check, lists to expand, or recently I just cut out 31 squares of grid paper and glued it to my note as a sort of calendar, just to fill in a box each day of August that I remember the importance of the note. It also helps to be constantly adding and removing things. If details relating to a note have changed, I’ll sometimes take the note down, toss it, and rewrite the note with a different color pen before sticking it back up. Constant change helps a lot.
A key is to have an ever-changing solution. Any one method for too long will inevitably fail, so you have to regularly change it up. This also plays on the “interest, challenge, novelty, urgency” way which our brains work by keeping our brain engaged instead of bored.
But still, the dilemma of having the energy (and availability creativity) to keep changing or rotating the method can be a regular pitfall.
Thank you!
I use a paper notebook, a page per week or month depending on how quickly I fill up the page, I scribble progress bars and check boxes all over it so I’m constantly referring back to it. Once one page fills up I’ll copy everything that wasn’t finished and is still worth tracking on the last page to the next one. The notebook stays in one spot and never moves so I can’t lose it, same with the pencil and the pencil sharpener
Just minimise the number of places where you write things down. While there is a number of note taking apps I use at home and at work, it’s a small number, so I usually find stuff after a pretty quick search.
I use two To-Do lists, one is an app and one is good old fashioned paper. I know exactly where these are, so it works reasonably well.
I do still struggle actually writing things down on them though.