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 was diagnosed in 2019, at the age of 39. So I have a lot of work to do to unravel all the ‘coping’ mechanisms I’ve taught myself over the years. But what’s been most eye-opening is my shift in perception of what ADHD is from something that naughty boys at school are told they have, to this thing that afflicts my brain which causes me to forget everything all the damn time.
And the best part is when I complain about this, and some well-meaning person will say “Have you tried using X.app?” and I’ll go to download X.app ONLY TO FIND I ALREADY FUCKING HAVE IT, THAT I USED IT THREE TIMES THEN FORGOT IT EXISTED.
And it’s all just so fucking exhausting.
I find that most of my ‘coping’ mechanisms are actually ‘tools’ that could have been developed with a therapist to help fit into society… So they’re usually a good thing, as long as it’s not just ignoring problem 🫣
When things go bad, it usually help to take a short vacation from work, take some rest and take care of my personal life.
Mistakes happen, but such it live for everybody in some way or another!
to help fit into society
While I absolutely understand what you’re saying here, part of our trouble is that we don’t easily fit into society, so we have to work twice as hard to just appear ‘normal’, by which time we’re exhausted and lose control of our cooping mechanisms.
Yeah, diagnosed at 31 here. So many coping mechanisms that do or don’t work.
Unfortunately during the summer I have to choose. My meds or decongestants to at least reduce the misery from bad seasonal allergies.
Can’t make doctor appointments, can’t remember to call a contractor to fix the porch, forget to call people on their birthdays, forget to cancel subscriptions, can’t remember to do simple task, or return things under warranty…etc I always remember things in the middle of the night, when you can’t call any of the businesses or people you need to call, or drop anything off.
Work is my hyperfocus time, so all the other tasks and todos I have vanish from my brain till after, even with meds.
It’s frustrating man, I feel ya, shit sucks.
I always remember things in the middle of the night, when you can’t call any of the businesses or people you need to call, or drop anything off.
At the risk of being the “But have you tried this app” Guy, for the problem you’ve outlined here, I use Brain Toss. Literally all it does is email your own ramblings back at you, so if you remember something in the night, tap out a message on Brain Toss, then when you check your emails the next day there will be a reminder.
When I remember I have it, it’s a brilliant little app.
That does sound exhausting, sorry you are going through that OP.
One possible option is physical lists like taping a list to your desk. Especially for things like a daily routine. You can also tape a list to your bathroom mirror for morning and night routines.
I’ve tried sticky notes on my monitor.
Know what I found the other day? A sticky node that’s hiding the start menu on my work monitor, with a task from a YEAR AGO (That was never done).
Turns out I just stopped using the start menu and just haven’t noticed till now, a bloody year later. How, really, how TF did I not notice it for that long.
It’s really weird how various tools and mechanism can break down in seemingly asinine ways. From OPs replies, they suffer quite similarly 🤔
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.
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.
Ask your doctor about adding Antidepressants. Serotonin dysfunction can mess with your sense of well-being and that can be masked by the big charges of dopamine you get from ADHD meds. Good times.
I don’t think I need antidepressants. I’ve had them in the past, and ultimately they don’t really do much because I’m not depressed. I just get frustrated by how hard I have to work just trying to be normal, you know?
Also, that suggestion would hinge on me remembering to go to the appointment…