It’s been quite some time now since I discovered that my particular brand of organisation has a name; attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Now, I could fill tomes with how and why this name is not only inappropriate, but also fundamentally misleading, if not to say downright offensive. If there is any glimmer of helpful information therein, it is that, yes, we do tend to have issues with regulating our attention. And this can lead to organisational models that not only stray off the beaten track, but out of the beaten universe.
Much like the Universe, this flavour of organisation can look much like chaos to the untrained eye. When I first started poking into the research in 2020, the most common resources around organisation skills and resources for ADHDers focused on Executive Dysfunction, impaired working memory and cognitive inflexibility.
Before learning that label, there were others. “Day dreamer”, “away with the faeries”, “head like a sieve”; a head that I would forget if it wasn’t screwed on, to name but a few. And it’s true, with the working memory of a carrot, I had to find ways to get organised that looked very different to those of pretty much everyone around me. I tried lists, I tried charts, I tried trying harder. I got used to the yelling.
To this day, there’s nothing that will send me into orbit faster than the innocuous phrase “Just use a planner”, or it’s first cousins, “Put it in the calendar”, “Set a reminder” and “Use the Pomodoro technique.”
Listen, the one thing I know about ADHD with a great degree of certainty, is that if you’ve met one person with ADHD, you’ve met one person with ADHD. Some of my sparkly friends swear by bullet journals, some by setting alarms. Some of them even use the Pomodora technique, albeit with maverick timings. Some lean into the disorganisation and some have become militant in their routines, but every single one of them has challenges around being organised in a world that runs by neurotypical standards of timeliness and cleanliness and orderliness.
One common issue is working memory, or lack thereof. Researching for this piece, I LOL-ed at the sheer number of comments that begin:
- If I didn’t write it down, you didn’t tell me.
- I forgot what I was going to say.
Or:
- Don’t sit down.
- Don’t you dare sit down.
- I wrote this 50 minutes ago and forgot to post it.
So with that disclaimer in mind, here are some hacks that work for me. And before you recoil in horror at what I am about to share, let’s remember that ADHD isn’t “just” an attention deficit disorder, or a tendency to move about a lot. It is a complex mental disability or difference, depending on the context, replete with a panoply of hyper-emotions and unruly hyper-focus.
Disclaimer: there is no order to the following methods for staying organised. And I’ll probably forget some.
- For peak organisation, it is essential for me to have everything in plain sight. If not, it vanishes permanently from my mind. Books I need to read, lessons I need to write, tests I need to grade; all of this must remain somewhere within my field of vision. The same is true of my kitchen. Recently, a friend was waxing lyrical about their new kitchen robot and the revolution of culinary ease that followed in the wake of its purchase. And I remembered, “Hey! I have one of those. In the cupboard”. Sacrificing the counterspace and visual pleasure of having a clean and tidy work area can, and will diminish the efficiency of my process. I do try to keep things relatively orderly, despite their abundance, but inevitably this looks like the ADHD pile of piles. Nonetheless, it works, and in the disorder, I can achieve organisation.
- When these piles become unruly, one nifty little life hack is to invite people over. Those piles disappear faster than “a thing I’ll do later” from my short-term memory. Can I ever find them again? Well, they do enter the vortex, which is why the next pro-hack is so beautiful, and again, paradoxical.
- Never own only one of an essential item. Computer chargers, water bottles, spectacles, headphones, earphones, scissors, guitars, keys; if it is essential to my well being and functionality, there must be a multiplicity. The vortex is real. Once I realised that sometimes it claims things as its own and learned to solve for that, both my stress levels and my ability to stay organised improved exponentially. Everything eventually re-emerges. This morning, I found the corn-starch in the tea-towel drawer. There are no why’s or wherefores as to how it came about to be there. We just accept the chaos and learn to live with it.
- And speaking of headphones or earphones, the better the noise cancellation, the more effective in eliminating distractions and getting on with the work at hand.
- Launch/landing pads. These are strategically placed receptacles for all things necessary for worldly adventures- keys, phones, chargers etc., near the door. Dump all essential items in there upon arrival, and grab them again before you leave. People often (always) laugh at my gargantuan handbag, but rarely, if ever, do I forget my necessaries anymore. Of course, the inevitable may still occur when said item disappears, refer to item 3. above when this comes to pass.
- Post-its. Some of my neurosparkly friends rely on tech, but I can ignore that as easily as alarms of calendar reminders. A post-it, however, has a compelling magic about it; a tiny nugget of organisation that I can stick anywhere, on the bathroom mirror, my MacBook, other peoples’ desks, other people. Sticky fabulousness.
- Easy in, hard out. This hack was a real game changer. Based on the principle that certain documents are necessary to move through the world; passport, birth certificate, rental contract, etc. but that storing these bits of paper in any kind of coherent filing system is not the strongest suit in the ADHD skillset, an easy-in storage system is not only helpful, it’s almost divine. Sure, it may be easy to chuck all of these documents into a box or drawer, and sure, it may take half an hour to fish it back out again. But you know where it is. Even if it is a little harder to retrieve than from a carefully organised, colour coded set of folders, which we would never keep up to date anyway, it’s certainly not as hard as searching the entire house, multiple times.
- And finally, the one that has soothed my soul and given me solace is this, and I quote, “Half-ass is better than no-ass.” Be kind to yourself. It’s ok to be different. It’s ok that your organisational style may look like you’ve just been burgled and just moved in at the same time. It’s ok to be imperfect. Having ADHD means figuring out a way to do things that’s not standard. Probably the greatest boon has been finding like-minded people who understand that the struggle is real.
October is ADHD Awareness month, this year and every year. What chaotic life hacks have you discovered to maintain a sense of organised chaos?