Personally I’d like hear some of your experiences with different types of organizational software, no matter if it runs on a PC, phone or the cloud:

  • What are you using and in what ways does it help you with the troubles you are facing with your ADHD?

  • Do you use different tools for different use cases (e.g. one to organize and track bigger projects, one just for reminders or one as a knowledge base etc.)?

  • Is there any software you would specifically avoid and how so (e.g. cause it is distracting, pricey or you due to lack of data privacy)?

  • Or is there things you’d really recommend to try out, because it helped you immensely in a way?

To start it off: Personally I got diagnosed as an adult rather recently. I somehow have haphazardly kept my life together without meds and ADHD-Therapy/Counseling/Coaching so far, but got no idea how. I made use of all sorts of organization methods and tools without it ever occurring to me that I could have ADHD.

Looking back it became painfully clear, I never consciously took my brain being different into account at any point. Therefore I failed very often and very spectacularly with my organization. I still do, especially at work.

Personally I use synched calendars (Thunderbird & Fairmail synched over Nextcloud) on my phone and PC at the moment. I also found I use ToDoList-Apps a lot (currently TickTick) to put at least some structure to my chaos. I am really awful with reminders though: I have too many and not enough at the same time. There is no structure to the types of reminders I have and I geht them from too many different sources. And sometimes they are too distracting or worse yet, sometimes not noticeable enough (Looking at you there, Outlook).

What have your experiences been like?

  • AddLemmusEnglish
    1·
    3 months ago

    I use plain old mindmaps for many things. When they are related to tasks and todos, I use a tool where it has little checkmarks, possibly completion progress bars, failed-icons, blocker-icons etc.

    For understanding a topic, e. g. from a textbook or a job problem, hand-drawn works better with the additional freedoms it provides, such as this one: https://www.uni-frankfurt.de/53571999/Mindmapping

    It fits in nicely with how I work through a text:

    • Think about what I want to get out of this
    • Flip through & glance over everything. Whatever draws my personal attention, be it drawings, graphs, tables, the headers - different for everybody. Might occasionally look at one of those things for a bit longer.
    • Read the TOC
    • Do the actual reading start to end and draw a mindmap
    • Possible do-over the mindmap once I understand where I did it “wrong” due to my previous assumption of how things categorise and relate