This morning I’m mostly grumpy about my ADHD.
Firstly, I didn’t get around to taking my pill until an hour after I got up, because I straight up forgot, despite remembering as I was pouring my coffee.
Then I just realised that I missed a Dr appointment yesterday, because it was made two fucking weeks ago, and despite being in the fucking calendar I can’t be trusted to fucking remember anything.
I’m particularly angry about that, because it was to review (and hopefully increase) my meds…
I’m angry about that because it could have been a sodding phone appointment, but every drs surgery is run by old guys who are massively averse to anything beyond sitting in front of their patients so they can chastise them for being fat.
And I really want to practice the mindfulness I’ve been taught, to consider that this is a spiral, and that ultimately no harm has been done, I’ll just be increasing (hopefully) my dosage a couple of weeks later.
But I’m frustrated that there’s so much stuff I have to remember that I just can’t. Other people manage to juggle all the needs on them, but I feel like I always fail, or at the very least that I can’t be trusted to be consistent.
I am (slowly) developing techniques to help myself.
While I’m not good at list keeping (for a number of reasons), one thing I am experimenting with is automations. In short, I’ve set my work Mac to automatically open a daily schedule in Numbers, and a daily reminders/affirmation document in Pages. These open up when an automation triggers a Shortcut at 7am every work day. As time goes on, I’ll fine tune these documents to contain information I need, while hopefully not just tuning them out as they become a constant on my desktop.
Automations are a good idea 🤔
How do you get around the problem of having too many places for them? I appear to have installed and tried every Todo/reminder app in existence, and have tasks scattered between them.
Do you have a way to sync things to your work device? That’s probably the biggest loss of memory for me.
The automations I’m talking about here pretty much only relate to work, so they’re set up to run on my work Mac, meaning no need to worry about syncing across devices.
That said, the calendar event I use to trigger them is on an iCloud calendar I’ve set up just for them, which is available on my other things, so I could set them up to work on my personal MacBook too.
In terms of remembering stuff when I’m not at my work Mac, I use an app called Brain Toss which just takes something you say to it, transcribes it, and emails it to you. So if I suddenly remember something I need to do at work, I can yell at my watch, then it’ll email it to me for me to pick up when I’m at my desk.
I don’t really use many reminders / to do apps, because I know that they’ll eventually just become white noise to me, or go completely forgotten about.