Paul’s Personal Productivity Practices

Dealing with ADHD, one reminder alarm at a time.

I was diagnosed with ADHD a little over a year ago. It’s what I joke is more of a “light ADHD”. I don’t have hyperactivity issues, always performed well in school, and my mother is still shocked that she and my dad never picked up on this as I grew up.

Nonetheless, I had significant issues creating order in my life. Projects would get started and then dropped as soon as I lost the initial enthusiasm for them. Anything that didn’t provide novelty of experience was quickly discarded.

Receiving the diagnosis (and all the research I did before then) revealed all the areas in life that I needed to improve in order to be as successful as I always assumed I could be. Since then, I’ve devoted myself to learning more about productivity and how I could train myself to accomplish more.

The key to successfully dealing with ADHD is establishing routines and habits for all the little things that trip one up throughout a typical day. Below are some of my personal habits, mostly established in the last year, that have helped me become one of the most productive people I know.

The moment you have a thought that starts with “I should do…” write it down, preferably with a reminder alarm attached to it.

• I usually keep a sticky notepad near me so that I can write down notes and then stick them somewhere really conspicuous like my monitor. If no sticky pad, Clear app is great.

Write down everything.

• Use Evernote. Make a notebook for everything. Follow this Lifehacker guide.

Accept imperfection.

• This is the most important tip of all.
• Before my ADHD diagnosis, I struggled with this because I never believed that I would return to a task after “finishing” it. It was important to make it as perfect as possible the first time because that was the only chance I would get. But it turns out that I very rarely finished things that way, and ended up with unfinished and imperfect projects. I’d rather finish an imperfect project, and approach it later when I’m interested or excited about it again.

Keep a personal calendar as well as a shared calendar with your partner.

• Set a default alarm for calendar events. Mine is “Alert 2 hours before event”.
• My favorite calendar app is Fantastical. The interface is slick and easy to use, and the best feature is its natural language processing. I can type “Lunch with John at McDonalds fri at 130” and it will auto populate all the metadata correctly. Dealing with ADHD means having to act on thoughts as quickly as possible, and saving time on entering all the details of an event with finicky UI elements is a real winning feature.

Wear a watch.

• Get in the habit of checking it regularly.
• I’m a very visual thinker, so I prefer analog clocks.

Learn to understand how different chemicals affect your mental and physical acuity.

• Adderall makes my brain feel focused and powerful.
• Coffee makes me want to go running and can help with mental tasks. Too much, or in combination with Adderall, and my mind (not to mention my heart) starts racing and I don’t accomplish as much.
• Alcohol slows me down and makes working a laborious task.
• Sugar and wheat make me slower and groggier. It’s like my brain is dragging a 50lb weight behind it.
• Cannabis makes me more creative and empathetic, but less likely to finish tasks.
• A diet of meat and vegetables (high fat, high protein) sets me up best. A protein-dense breakfast is critical for starting my day right.

Try to segment your work and personal time.

• We use timeboxing at work and it’s applicable in personal life too. If you sit down to work on something, look at the clock and set an alarm for a specified time in the future when you will stop. If you’re really in a groove when the alarm goes off and you want to keep going, that’s fine. Just set another alarm. This is similar to Pomodoro, though I don’t actually use Pomodoro. It’s too rigid for my taste.
• My home is for home and personal things. The office is for working. I only work from home when I’m sick, and that’s not really “working”. I don’t check email and don’t answer phone calls after hours. Doing so tells people that they can expect you to be available at all hours. They will take advantage of that. Don’t let them.

Exercise as regularly as possible.

• The more often I work out, the sharper my mind is, and everything in life becomes easier.
• Healthy sleep is critical to high-functioning performance.

Finish small things first, then move on to bigger tasks.

• There’s a real emotional tie to finishing things. When I feel that I’m disorganized and running around with my head cut off, I seek out a few small tasks that take no more than a minute or two each. Write them down on a list and then start knocking them out. Each additional line you can cross off the list adds momentum to your ability to finish more complex tasks. This is reminiscent of Dave Ramsey’s Debt Snowball method for repaying multiple debts.
• ADHD people have taught themselves their whole lives that they have a difficult time finishing things. You have to retrain yourself into believing that you’re capable of finishing and accomplishing complex things.

I don’t have a favorite task tracker, and you probably won’t be able to stick to just one either.

• I’ve tried Clear, Trello, personal kanban, Mailbox, and more. I go through phases with each of them and still use all of them in different ways. They serve different functions in varying situations.
• The most consistently useful thing I’ve found is reminder alarms. I estimate when I need I need to think about that item, set an alarm for that date/time, and then put it out of mind to focus on something else.

Learn to recognize your mood and how that affects your work.

• There are occasions that I’ve blocked out on my calendar for “personal project” time and I sit down and realize that I’m just not in the right frame of mind to work then. That’s fine; find something better to do with your time.
• I’d rather be “successful” at relaxing with a video game than “fail” at trying to work on a programming project. Struggling to work means I end up wasting time screwing around on Facebook and reddit.

Was this useful to you? If so, would you please recommend this article so that others can benefit from it too? I tend to write a lot about productivity, and you can find more by me here.