How you can start getting organised with ADHD

A supplement to the previous post

In my excitement to share my How I got better at adult-ing with ADHD by getting organised story, I forgot to actually tell people how to do it themselves.

I got some feedback

The main feedback I got was:

wow spidey, that’s… a lot to take in, I will totally do it when I have time to think about it.

Using my 20/20 vision (hindsight), it now seems quite obvious that a 10 minute read on how to be organised based on a process that’s been evolving over so many years is going to be a hard read.

How you can get started in 4 steps

1. Quick fix lists

Pick one or more small things that will save you time. Make the items time-based and detailed. Some examples:

1. People’s birthdays — (who, when)
2. Parcels in flight — (what it is, where it’s coming from, when it will arrive and where it’s being sent)
3. Shopping list — (what, from where, when you need to buy it)

2. Create the meta project

Create a top level project called being organised. Create a revision plan, an example would be:

1. First day of the week: review how the previous week went and prioritise the week coming up
2. Every fortnight: evaluate how being organised is going and adapt
3. Every month: improve, add to or create a Role

3. Pick an area of your life to improve

The roles, goals and tasks starts with roles. Pick a part of your life that is important to you and that you’d like to improve.

Create a list of things that you would like to improve and add a task to each of those things. Keep the list small, incremental improvement and revision is better than boiling the ocean.

For me it was an easy thing to just start with the being a good person role — the role and I started with:

1. Maintain contact with people— (who, how to contact, when and how often, why you want to maintain contact)
2. Books to read, movies and TV series to watch — (what it’s called, who recommended it, where it’s hosted)
3. Take out the rubbish/recycling — (when, which bins)
4. Get the air conditioner serviced, the drains cleaned — (which company, when it needs to be done)
5. Clean the car — (how often)

4. Iterate

This whole process should be practically frictionless — at the very least it should have a positive impact on your life.

Set a regular cadence of improvement and find/fix issues based on how it makes you feel.

Think of your process of being organised as growing a Bonsai tree, not a pine forest.

Top tips

Some tips to help you get started.

Start small

Don’t boil the ocean, the more detailed you make something, the more inaccuracies you will create. It is best to start with a small thing and grow it than you are to build a full solution.

Be realistic with your expectations

Set achievable goals and tweak targets as you go, if you set your goals too high, it’s easy to be demoralised.

If it’s not helping — fix it

If a task keeps coming up that you simply don’t get to, mark as done permanently. If the process is causing more trouble than it’s worth, change the process.

Keep it simple!

Use the least amount of tools and apps you can to achieve this, even if it means that parts of the process are quite manual. Once you are bedded into a process like this, the core tools are very hard to change.

No caches and limit duplication

Don’t have a list of things to add to your list, when something comes up, put it where it needs to be. Don’t have todos in your docs and in your todo list. Efficiency is key, you want this process to remove ambiguity and increase your clarity.