I’m particularly looking for time management/organizational stuff that helps with inattentive ADHD, but please do share anything you think could be helpful to anyone else.
“Don’t put it down. Put it away.” I say this to myself all the time. I try to follow it and it has helped with the tornado of “lost” items that clutter the house.
To-do lists unironically help me not forget stuff and also get a small feeling of achievement as I cross the items one-by-one
Same here for sure. I try to make to-do lists as much as I can because they seem to help keep me on track with things, the only hiccup is that I have not yet succeeded in making a habit out of it, so I most often just forget to make a to-do list until after it would’ve be useful
Do you use an app or some notebook dedicated to the lists? It might help with the habit formation compared to finding some random paper and writing the list there
I bought some notebooks specifically for this recently, so I’ll see how that goes.
Doing things that belong to the can’t be forgotten category as soon as they surface, no exceptions unless there has to be one. Then they go to a to-do list, but this raises the likelihood of adhd tax already a lot. These are things like bills.
Letting myself just idle sometimes if I’m very unmotivated, trusting more that the doing will happen when a deadline is close or some such thing raises my motivation.
I also pile stuff for myself on purpose for high energy moments at work. These are on a to-do list. Then I slack the rest of the time. It’s a very bursty style of doing stuff.
Trusting in my way of getting shit done is the biggest thing I suppose. Still working on it too, but I’ve noticed that I tend to still be ahead of my coworkers or end up with higher workloads even when I myself feel like most of the time I am not doing anything.
I’ve started to pay attention to how incredibly slow the normos are when doing anything and I try to compare myself to that more. If the end result is the same, who cares how we get there?
This is my long way of saying that I am going with my adhd more, on those moments or days of no motivation I just don’t do much. I’ve noticed it’s kind of pointless to force it. The motivation comes when I can feel my heels burning a bit from hitting a time limit or something. It’s probably a taxing way to exist, but adhd is. I try to remember that dopamine is released by both positives and negatives, sometimes I lean on the negatives like fear and fear of failure too, but it still works. It’s how my brain works.
The motivate-by-anxiety tactic of semi-purposefully procrastinating things until I have absolutely no choice but to get them done efficiently is how I (barely) got through high school. These days I generally try to be more proactive and self-motivating and whatnot but my success rate in doing so varies.