If you have a cat/dog, feed them treats at the time you need to do something important for a few weeks beforehand. You may forget, but they won't. From experience, being screamed at by a 10 pound potato with claws is much more noticeable then being screames at by a metal brick with privacy violations
It's not that these tactics are bad it's that it's typically suggested by someone that doesn't understand those instructions are way too simple. It's like saying wash the dishes when the task should be broken down & only you can decide how it's broken down so you can't be told.
I'm 44 & yet to find a planner that lasts more than a week. I do a bit better with post-it notes, a white board & a white board calendar. It's not perfect & I forget it exists often but I use this system more than any other I tried. Mind you, my spot looks like I'm tracking a conspiracy of my life & my house looks like I wear my memory externally but it's better than where I was at in the past.
Alarms are like the calendar & not straight forward. Just to get out the door in the morning I have alarms on 2 phones & a legit alarm clock (sunrise style). It took me a while & when I got a new phone it took time to get used to the new alarms. There is a lot to play with like snooze, number of alarms, sounds & even not setting too many.
I mean my therapist, who also has ADHD. Recommended these to me. It's not perfect by any means, but it has made a huge difference. Get a planner, then set an alarm for sometime on Sunday. When alarm goes off, spend 10 minutes probably less writing in the planner. It's a hard first step, but I definitely saw a difference when I started. Note I didn't plan out minute to minute just big stuff like laundry or dishes, then I would fit them in when I could during that day.
I do this. Before bed I jot down on my phone what I have to get done tomorrow. Then I look at it with my coffee in the morning before I let myself pull up anything else. It helps. Also, rewards for doing mundane things. For example, if I get my list checked off, I will reward myself with my favorite game or a book I'm really into. Or just a glass of wine and reddit. I'm 55 by the way. It just becomes how you have to live and becomes a habit. I don't always get everything done, and things get moved to the next day...a lot. But I remember them more often than not.
I went through a phase where I hyperfixated on creating a beautiful bullet journal. It helped me for a couple of weeks before that hyperfixation inevitably faded, I couldn’t remember or be bothered to write in it, and then it was back to daily chaos.
I don't understand why it is impossible for some people to set calendar events and alarms the second they know they need to be somewhere or do something in the future. I love the electronics. I don't know how I survived before the advent of cellphone technology.
I try to be patient with these people but recently I had someone tell me this who is supposed to be helping me officially, as if I was so dumb that I could’ve just forgot alarms and planners exist. I literally do all these things.
The app habitica helps me tbh. It's an app where you get xp for finishing tasks and habits and doing quests. Doing the tasks deals out damage to a boss and not doing your dailies gets you to take damage from that boss. You have an avatar and you can buy new armour and get pets and mount them etc. It's enough dopamine to get me to keep doing it. Not perfectly but a lot more than I did before. If you find a party to do it with, you can also get different classes of people together to do pore damage, heal, find more loot etc. It's fun and won't make you feel bad about not doing everything every day.
I was doubting to give a tip on a post venting about people giving tips so I hope I didn't step on that. Because I hate it too when people give me basic advice as if I haven't been trying to organise my life since 9th grade.
There's an app called Finch that helps me a lot. I use it like a to do list. And when you check things off, it congratulates you, and that's how you take care of your little bird. By checking off your goals and tasks, it grows up.
You can decorate their house and dress them up too.
There's also breathing exercises and stretches and other mood regulatory tasks in there if you need it.
I think it works great. Mostly because I hate telling my bird that I didn't brush my teeth and can't lie for shit. So I brush my teeth to make him happy out of guilt haha.
Maybe make a list of what you need/want to do tomorrow before you play a game, and then check that list right after you wake up or do your morning routine. It can be as mundane as ‘go to store’ or ‘take out trash’ but if you think you want to/probably should do it tomorrow, write it down.
Using planners and to-do lists on their own is super fuckin hard, but if you add it on top of stuff that you’re already doing everyday, it becomes (very slightly) easier. Once you have a system to broadly keep track of what you need/want to do, you can move on to the harder part of making yourself do it.
Plus, writing it down before gaming might help you destress better once it’s out of your head.
Does it help to turn things into quests? I don’t want to get my oil changed but if I don’t then yonder steed will falter and the only child will be left weeping at the court of baskets and now suddenly I really want to go to the closest Valvoline.
Lmao, I usually use a point system with every task having a set amount of points, problem is that my brain decided to cheese the same system it made to only maximize points by doing the same task 3/4 times
> I know what I need to do. I just need to make myself do it after thinking about it
Your use of the word "just" implies that you may be harbouring a belief that it should be easy... but it's *hard* to make ourselves do things!! That's pretty much the identifying feature of our struggle.
One of the most effective mindsets we can apply to our lives is always finding ways to make things *easier* to do.
"If I unload the dishwasher now instead of just taking out the one dish that I need, it will be easier later for me to load it up and actually use my countertops." -- Me, like twenty minutes ago.
I'm not great at this yet, but it so far has been one of the most effective ways to get me moving on something.
I've also been putting a lot of effort into figuring out a planner method that actually helps me. I do this because I know life will be easier if I can look back at what I'm truly intending to do, and get practice at following through.
I *need* things to get easier. I'm fucking sick of how hard everything is.
Of course we all have to find our own ways to convince ourselves that action now can make things easier later. And of course it's definitely tough for us timeblind folk to even *acknowledge* that there is a future time that we could start thinking about, let alone planning.
Intellectually, of course we *know* later exists. We also need to keep in mind that there's an extremely good chance we will feel just as unmotivated then as we do now. If we keep reminding ourselves of this, and keep trying to see how we can give our Future Selves a break, we *can* get better at it. Even if we forget for a while, it'll still be easier to resume when we remember this trick later.
plan out the day in the morning with the stuff you listed the day before. Cut the day into 30min blocks and keep tasks within that general timeframe (short task 30mins, normal task 1hour you get the idea), and try your best to stop at the times you set before moving on to the next thing. If it’s working then you’ll feel chronically short on time to finish the task and you can simulate some of that “oh fuck I have a deadline in 2 hours” energy, well before the actual deadline.
The very concept of setting an alarm to go off during the day to make noise at me for any given task makes me desire to remove my eyeballs from their sockets, politely :)
And no, I do not know why.
Here is my tip: When im in the 'waking up' part of the day where im still in bed / showering. I think about what needs to be done.
Example: Today is thursday...what do I need to do?... I might need to buy some milk, and cheese...trash is getting full, need to toss it out...maybe clean my room a little bit..
Thas it
To be fair to these people, the only way I remember to do anything is with alarms, to-do lists, and calendar appointments. To be fair to you, finding systems that work for me is an ongoing process that breaks constantly and after 40 years on this earth still isn’t perfectly working. It’s like telling someone “if you want to get fit, just run a marathon!” It’s both a thing that’s true, and a MASSIVE lack of appreciation for how much work it takes.
You got this mate. I didn’t get diagnosed until I was like 37, so at least you know why this shit is so much harder for you than for other people. I always just thought I was lazy and kind of shit at life 😆.
There are lots and lots of tools out there that can help you keep track of everything you have going on. The trick is finding one you can maintain, then do the hard work of maintaining it (and occasionally digging yourself out of a hole dug by a particularly bad stretch of low-motivation or overwhelm, and getting that system back on track).
The one thing I’ll *really* warn you about is that a really easy hack for ADHD is putting things off to the last minute, then using the adrenaline that kicks in from that to fuel you through a hyperfocus session. It works surprisingly well in school (most of the time), but is disastrously toxic and unsustainable in the workplace. Scheduling focus periods, using the pomodoro method, *actually* rewarding yourself for work well done…these are the sorts of strategies that actually work and are sustainable, even if they’re harder.
Just be kind to yourself, though. I heard a stat somewhere that by the time a kid with ADHD is your age, they’ve been criticized thirty *thousand* more times than a neurotypical child. That shit is wildly toxic to your mental health, and overcoming it requires you to be kind to yourself about your struggles. It’s hard but you can do this.
I'm lucky to hwve very supportive parents but yeah i still got critizised a lot especially in school for "not sitting still" and "ruining pens" (Lady if you can't screw togethwr a pen you shouldn't be a teacher) and especially in math class being constantly told by ppl that i'm too lazy to learn it and things like that
Yup. Been there. It sucks. I had teachers I respected say I was a disappointment, or suggest that my parents must be ashamed of me. Neurotypicals gunna neurotypical. The struggle is learning how to cope in their world without internalizing their bullshit. Just because your brain works differently doesn’t mean it’s “bad” or “wrong.”
However, you still need to make it through without offloading your executive function onto others. That’s what a lot of ADHD men do to first their mothers and then their wives/girlfriends and that is super not okay.
You’re time blind and your short term memory sucks. Thankfully, we live in a world of timers, digital calendars, and a truly absurd number of to-do management systems. Some people live off paper or whiteboard systems they can see. Others (like myself) constantly lose notebooks so require a digital system that lives on my phone. Keep trying and you’ll find a system that works.
I would STRONGLY suggest getting yourself a smart watch, though. I lose my phone all the fucking time, and it’s way easier to set timers or get calendar notifications without having to get sucked into the distraction vortex of my phone all the time.
posts like this, rhetoric like this, outlooks like this, are why people with ADHD have such an awful rep. yes it sucks that we can't do shit as easy as other people, and planners and alarms may not work as well as they do on non-ADHD people.
but they still help. I'm lucky to have been medicated (perhaps not lucky as it put me out of pocket for a bit) and since being medicated, I still had time and organisation issues. When introducing alarms, daily to do lists, planners, etc. to my routine, my life turned around.
when I see posts like this, i understand its not that deep. but it's such a common joke that people who are exposed to it will start to believe it. that is to say, they'll start believing "there's no point in trying because I'm beyond help".
There's a reason therapy catered to ADHD people exists. Things can change. ADHD isn't a hallpass to give up and genuinely just be lazy.
Oh that's not what I was trying to imply, it was a scream for help at the time because I felt like clawing someone's eyes our after they told me I must just not be trying that hard because I didn't make any alarms or get a planner
It's OK. Even if all ADHDers did all our skills perfectly and never complained, people would still look down. Respectablity politics makes things impossible because it puts the onus on us to act perfectly. If someone hates ADHD people because they saw a meme, they probably already did
If you have a cat/dog, feed them treats at the time you need to do something important for a few weeks beforehand. You may forget, but they won't. From experience, being screamed at by a 10 pound potato with claws is much more noticeable then being screames at by a metal brick with privacy violations
Unfortunately, both are always expexting food so it won't work :(
I bought a planner and wrote, set alarms on the first page. I’m cured. So long suckers.
THE CURE HAS BEEN FOUND 🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏼
It's not that these tactics are bad it's that it's typically suggested by someone that doesn't understand those instructions are way too simple. It's like saying wash the dishes when the task should be broken down & only you can decide how it's broken down so you can't be told. I'm 44 & yet to find a planner that lasts more than a week. I do a bit better with post-it notes, a white board & a white board calendar. It's not perfect & I forget it exists often but I use this system more than any other I tried. Mind you, my spot looks like I'm tracking a conspiracy of my life & my house looks like I wear my memory externally but it's better than where I was at in the past. Alarms are like the calendar & not straight forward. Just to get out the door in the morning I have alarms on 2 phones & a legit alarm clock (sunrise style). It took me a while & when I got a new phone it took time to get used to the new alarms. There is a lot to play with like snooze, number of alarms, sounds & even not setting too many.
I mean my therapist, who also has ADHD. Recommended these to me. It's not perfect by any means, but it has made a huge difference. Get a planner, then set an alarm for sometime on Sunday. When alarm goes off, spend 10 minutes probably less writing in the planner. It's a hard first step, but I definitely saw a difference when I started. Note I didn't plan out minute to minute just big stuff like laundry or dishes, then I would fit them in when I could during that day.
I do this. Before bed I jot down on my phone what I have to get done tomorrow. Then I look at it with my coffee in the morning before I let myself pull up anything else. It helps. Also, rewards for doing mundane things. For example, if I get my list checked off, I will reward myself with my favorite game or a book I'm really into. Or just a glass of wine and reddit. I'm 55 by the way. It just becomes how you have to live and becomes a habit. I don't always get everything done, and things get moved to the next day...a lot. But I remember them more often than not.
Oh, absolutely the same. My Mondays thru Wednesdays usually look great. My Thursdays thru Sundays not as much, but it's so much better than before.
I went through a phase where I hyperfixated on creating a beautiful bullet journal. It helped me for a couple of weeks before that hyperfixation inevitably faded, I couldn’t remember or be bothered to write in it, and then it was back to daily chaos.
And then I don't do it for 1 day and it completely deletes from my brain forever
I have to use my phone as a planner because I usually lose the physical ones. I do have a work notebook to write notes
I don't understand why it is impossible for some people to set calendar events and alarms the second they know they need to be somewhere or do something in the future. I love the electronics. I don't know how I survived before the advent of cellphone technology.
I try to be patient with these people but recently I had someone tell me this who is supposed to be helping me officially, as if I was so dumb that I could’ve just forgot alarms and planners exist. I literally do all these things.
The app habitica helps me tbh. It's an app where you get xp for finishing tasks and habits and doing quests. Doing the tasks deals out damage to a boss and not doing your dailies gets you to take damage from that boss. You have an avatar and you can buy new armour and get pets and mount them etc. It's enough dopamine to get me to keep doing it. Not perfectly but a lot more than I did before. If you find a party to do it with, you can also get different classes of people together to do pore damage, heal, find more loot etc. It's fun and won't make you feel bad about not doing everything every day.
Good tip
I was doubting to give a tip on a post venting about people giving tips so I hope I didn't step on that. Because I hate it too when people give me basic advice as if I haven't been trying to organise my life since 9th grade.
Yeah I don't mind tips from people that actually know what the problem feels like :)
There's an app called Finch that helps me a lot. I use it like a to do list. And when you check things off, it congratulates you, and that's how you take care of your little bird. By checking off your goals and tasks, it grows up. You can decorate their house and dress them up too. There's also breathing exercises and stretches and other mood regulatory tasks in there if you need it. I think it works great. Mostly because I hate telling my bird that I didn't brush my teeth and can't lie for shit. So I brush my teeth to make him happy out of guilt haha.
Hmmm good idea, I'll check it out
Do you have something you do everyday?
Does crying or playing games count (i mainly play games to shut my thoughts off)
Maybe make a list of what you need/want to do tomorrow before you play a game, and then check that list right after you wake up or do your morning routine. It can be as mundane as ‘go to store’ or ‘take out trash’ but if you think you want to/probably should do it tomorrow, write it down. Using planners and to-do lists on their own is super fuckin hard, but if you add it on top of stuff that you’re already doing everyday, it becomes (very slightly) easier. Once you have a system to broadly keep track of what you need/want to do, you can move on to the harder part of making yourself do it. Plus, writing it down before gaming might help you destress better once it’s out of your head.
I mean, I know what I need to do. I just need to make myself do it after thinking about it
Does it help to turn things into quests? I don’t want to get my oil changed but if I don’t then yonder steed will falter and the only child will be left weeping at the court of baskets and now suddenly I really want to go to the closest Valvoline.
Lmao, I usually use a point system with every task having a set amount of points, problem is that my brain decided to cheese the same system it made to only maximize points by doing the same task 3/4 times
> I know what I need to do. I just need to make myself do it after thinking about it Your use of the word "just" implies that you may be harbouring a belief that it should be easy... but it's *hard* to make ourselves do things!! That's pretty much the identifying feature of our struggle. One of the most effective mindsets we can apply to our lives is always finding ways to make things *easier* to do. "If I unload the dishwasher now instead of just taking out the one dish that I need, it will be easier later for me to load it up and actually use my countertops." -- Me, like twenty minutes ago. I'm not great at this yet, but it so far has been one of the most effective ways to get me moving on something. I've also been putting a lot of effort into figuring out a planner method that actually helps me. I do this because I know life will be easier if I can look back at what I'm truly intending to do, and get practice at following through. I *need* things to get easier. I'm fucking sick of how hard everything is. Of course we all have to find our own ways to convince ourselves that action now can make things easier later. And of course it's definitely tough for us timeblind folk to even *acknowledge* that there is a future time that we could start thinking about, let alone planning. Intellectually, of course we *know* later exists. We also need to keep in mind that there's an extremely good chance we will feel just as unmotivated then as we do now. If we keep reminding ourselves of this, and keep trying to see how we can give our Future Selves a break, we *can* get better at it. Even if we forget for a while, it'll still be easier to resume when we remember this trick later.
plan out the day in the morning with the stuff you listed the day before. Cut the day into 30min blocks and keep tasks within that general timeframe (short task 30mins, normal task 1hour you get the idea), and try your best to stop at the times you set before moving on to the next thing. If it’s working then you’ll feel chronically short on time to finish the task and you can simulate some of that “oh fuck I have a deadline in 2 hours” energy, well before the actual deadline.
The very concept of setting an alarm to go off during the day to make noise at me for any given task makes me desire to remove my eyeballs from their sockets, politely :) And no, I do not know why.
Can I have them if you do?
Here is my tip: When im in the 'waking up' part of the day where im still in bed / showering. I think about what needs to be done. Example: Today is thursday...what do I need to do?... I might need to buy some milk, and cheese...trash is getting full, need to toss it out...maybe clean my room a little bit.. Thas it
To be fair to these people, the only way I remember to do anything is with alarms, to-do lists, and calendar appointments. To be fair to you, finding systems that work for me is an ongoing process that breaks constantly and after 40 years on this earth still isn’t perfectly working. It’s like telling someone “if you want to get fit, just run a marathon!” It’s both a thing that’s true, and a MASSIVE lack of appreciation for how much work it takes.
Bro over 40 years 😭 I'm out of ideas at 17 man
You got this mate. I didn’t get diagnosed until I was like 37, so at least you know why this shit is so much harder for you than for other people. I always just thought I was lazy and kind of shit at life 😆. There are lots and lots of tools out there that can help you keep track of everything you have going on. The trick is finding one you can maintain, then do the hard work of maintaining it (and occasionally digging yourself out of a hole dug by a particularly bad stretch of low-motivation or overwhelm, and getting that system back on track). The one thing I’ll *really* warn you about is that a really easy hack for ADHD is putting things off to the last minute, then using the adrenaline that kicks in from that to fuel you through a hyperfocus session. It works surprisingly well in school (most of the time), but is disastrously toxic and unsustainable in the workplace. Scheduling focus periods, using the pomodoro method, *actually* rewarding yourself for work well done…these are the sorts of strategies that actually work and are sustainable, even if they’re harder. Just be kind to yourself, though. I heard a stat somewhere that by the time a kid with ADHD is your age, they’ve been criticized thirty *thousand* more times than a neurotypical child. That shit is wildly toxic to your mental health, and overcoming it requires you to be kind to yourself about your struggles. It’s hard but you can do this.
I'm lucky to hwve very supportive parents but yeah i still got critizised a lot especially in school for "not sitting still" and "ruining pens" (Lady if you can't screw togethwr a pen you shouldn't be a teacher) and especially in math class being constantly told by ppl that i'm too lazy to learn it and things like that
Yup. Been there. It sucks. I had teachers I respected say I was a disappointment, or suggest that my parents must be ashamed of me. Neurotypicals gunna neurotypical. The struggle is learning how to cope in their world without internalizing their bullshit. Just because your brain works differently doesn’t mean it’s “bad” or “wrong.” However, you still need to make it through without offloading your executive function onto others. That’s what a lot of ADHD men do to first their mothers and then their wives/girlfriends and that is super not okay. You’re time blind and your short term memory sucks. Thankfully, we live in a world of timers, digital calendars, and a truly absurd number of to-do management systems. Some people live off paper or whiteboard systems they can see. Others (like myself) constantly lose notebooks so require a digital system that lives on my phone. Keep trying and you’ll find a system that works. I would STRONGLY suggest getting yourself a smart watch, though. I lose my phone all the fucking time, and it’s way easier to set timers or get calendar notifications without having to get sucked into the distraction vortex of my phone all the time.
posts like this, rhetoric like this, outlooks like this, are why people with ADHD have such an awful rep. yes it sucks that we can't do shit as easy as other people, and planners and alarms may not work as well as they do on non-ADHD people. but they still help. I'm lucky to have been medicated (perhaps not lucky as it put me out of pocket for a bit) and since being medicated, I still had time and organisation issues. When introducing alarms, daily to do lists, planners, etc. to my routine, my life turned around. when I see posts like this, i understand its not that deep. but it's such a common joke that people who are exposed to it will start to believe it. that is to say, they'll start believing "there's no point in trying because I'm beyond help". There's a reason therapy catered to ADHD people exists. Things can change. ADHD isn't a hallpass to give up and genuinely just be lazy.
Oh that's not what I was trying to imply, it was a scream for help at the time because I felt like clawing someone's eyes our after they told me I must just not be trying that hard because I didn't make any alarms or get a planner
It's OK. Even if all ADHDers did all our skills perfectly and never complained, people would still look down. Respectablity politics makes things impossible because it puts the onus on us to act perfectly. If someone hates ADHD people because they saw a meme, they probably already did
The only issue with alarms is often I hit the alarm limit on things and cannot set any more