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 have Projects, To Do List, and a wiki I’m building using Notion. I highly recommend it. Biggest one stop shop and most customizable.
I’m even working on a workout tracker and meal planner with grocery databases and stuff. It’s really comprehensive and I’m just modifying templates others have established.
I would HIGHLY recommend obsidian over Notion for knowledge management.
Mainly from a portability and data-ownership perspective.
However, I’m a dev, so I may be biased towards solutions that give me lots of freedom to utilize different technologies to get exactly what I want.
100%. I use both Notion and Obsidian, but I only ever use Notion if I need to share notes with classmates. Obsidian has been a godsend keeping me organized and managing my adhd, especially with coding projects–though I do use it for workout logs and other IRL things. Decision paralysis is so real, but it can be mitigated if you can document things you’ve done and what needs doing next.
Is there a significant difference between something like Obsidian and OneNote?
Yes, QUITE a bit.
Obsidian has a significant community plugin ecosystem to start. It also uses markdown which you have control over, simple files, so it’s entirely portable and not tied to obsidian. It has a lot of features geared towards personal knowledge management and linking knowledge together.
Two different use cases IMHO. I don’t use Obsidian for scratch notes, I use if as a 2nd brain (https://www.buildingasecondbrain.com/).
So, the second brain thing just sounds like a journal or diary but with good indexing and searchability. Is that correct? I guess I’m not understanding why it’s unique or how it’d be useful…but I suck ass at knowing what to write in journals or diaries, so this is likely at least partially just a ‘me’ thing.
I’m just not sure what I’d write into one of these things. Do you mind if I ask what types of things you out in yours?
I signed up for their emails, so maybe that’ll help me. I wish I could just snap my fingers and already have it all done, lol! It sounds so daunting and I don’t know where I’d start or what I’d put in it.
I spent weeks building a calorie tracker in Numbers to help me lose weight, which worked amazingly well. For a month.
Then I forgot to put a few meals in, got annoyed with myself, got the self loathing, decided that the tracker was now damning evidence of how flaky I am, and abandoned it.
I’ll look into Notion though.
See, I find stuff like that unbearable. That’s why mine are tools to stay ahead and prepared. Then it comes down to me delivering and puts the personal responsibility on me because I’ve solved for my deficiencies.
I’m the typical ADHD “lazy” and I’m trying to strike out against that.
I absolutely get that sentiment. That’s what killed it for me the first time even though I was doing so well. Around thanksgiving a couple years ago, I decided to top tracking because “oh it’s the holiday, I might as well enjoy it”, and then Covid hit and I really said fuck it.
I got back into it last year after I finally decided to get myself medicated. It started off rough, and I definitely missed some days, or skipped some days because “why would I count, I know I’m going to go over anyways?”, but eventually the habit stuck and it’s been almost a year since I’ve started tracking. It’s still tedious at times, but it’s become second nature to log my foods when I’m making a meal. It may be slow going at first, and it may take a few tries for it to stick, but eventually it will
What templates have you looked at?
I did sign up for Notion; I thought it would be a helpful repo for things like notes that I’d previous been writing down. However the amount of setup involved is preventing me from using it, like it did for Todoist. I would find something plug-and-play to modify and build off of very helpful.
It’s not like the service itself is complicated. It’s that I really struggle to prioritise what’s important, or categorise. My comments are miles long because I don’t know what words to cut, and I’m terrible at reducing grey spectrums down to black and white for things like NSFW filters or category sorting; I despise having to put #tags of anything I upload and I can’t estimate how long a task takes either.
The most useful thing I’ve found as of late is goblin.tools; the todo list uses Open AI to generate subtasks based on how scary/hard it feels to do. This is the part I actually struggle with; I’m extremely productive when I know exactly what I need to do.
Building a personal wiki seems like a great idea of documenting things like grounding exercises or strategies. I guess I’m hoping somebody’s done the skeleton for me, so I don’t procrastinate it for a year until I eventually close the tab.
For me, it was about finding templates that would work for me personally and then the painstaking task of filling them myself. Just Google.
I know setup can be intimidating, but it’s so worth it if it’s something you’ll actually use.