Posts Tagged: adhd tools

ADD Organization Tips / ADHD-ADD Tips — No Comments
30
Aug 10

Deals On Organization Tools for ADD ADHD

I usually don’t do a lot with deals or online coupons here on ADDessories. There are a lot of deal websites and coupon websites out there that do it better, mostly because they do it 24/7. However, this time I am making an exception, because there are Target stores everywhere, and because the planning and organizing tools that they have right now are so cheap that they are a good way to test out what kind of ADD tools and ADHD organization resources might work best for you.

I’m making a big assumption here that most Targets, or at least most Super Targets have a similar layout and structure to the ones here in Denver, Colorado. If not, you might have to look around the aisles a little bit or see if they have the same deals online or maybe if there are some Target coupon codes online that you can use to get the same kind of value.

Near the entrance of our Target stores, there is a dollar area. The items in this little section are rotated in and out fairly regularly and typically cost $1 or $2.50 depending upon the item. Either way, that is a good deal for a little white board, cork board tiles, or notebooks. Don’t get me wrong this is not high quality office supply store type stuff. These are cheapo, made in China, the cheapest way possible items. However, they will work for a little while and that gives ADDers an opportunity to try them out.

Have you ever wondered if a good ADD organization tip would be to put a white board in every room of your house, or if it would be a great way for people with ADHD to remember things to have a little corkboard tile section by the front door, backdoor, and the door to your bedroom and office? It can be an expensive experiment to see if that works for you if you are shelling out $15 per whiteboard. But, with these cheap whiteboards and dry erase calendars at Target, you could put one in every room of a 10 bedroom house for less than $30. That’s a good way to try out some ideas.

Check out your local Target or pop over to Target.com and see if you can get rock bottom priced dry erase boards, dry-erase calendars, and more to help improve your organization skills and manage your ADD better without new medications or anything chemical for a change.

- Everyone have a nice– “Hey, is that something interesting over there?”   :)

ADHD Traits — No Comments
8
Jun 10

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder – Distracted By Boring Stuff

boring-wall When I first envisioned what the addessories.com website would be like, I pictured a site where both adults with ADHD and teens with ADD and even children with ADHD could get ADHD tools, products, tips and yes, accessories for ADD lifestyles. The idea was that of the many books, magazines, websites and organizations for ADHD out there, there was, and still is, a lack of actual useable tools and products for helping with ADHD symptoms and making time management and organization easier for people with ADD.

(What is with switching between ADD and ADHD all the time? – What is the difference between ADD and ADHD?)

For example, every book about ADHD or ADD article you read is going to tell you to do things like make lists, use reminders, and of course get a calendar or organizer to help you get more organized. Of course, unless you are incredibly un-self-aware (Whew, too many hyphens!) chances are that you already have tried tons of planners and calendars and lists and various organizational systems. If you were diagnosed with ADHD as an adult, chances are that you have desperately tried buying calendars and Palm Pilots and BlackBerries and the like hundreds of times in an effort to work better, organize better, and be a better husband, father, dad, wife, mother, or mom. After all, one of the symptoms of ADHD is not liking to be disorganized.

That is why I have started work (again) on the ADHD Planner which will be a calendar and organizational system specifically designed for people with ADD to use. Since no two cases of ADD are exactly alike, the ADD planner will be customizable based upon your particular case of attention deficit disorder.

What Is It Like Having ADHD or What Is ADD Really Like

Along the way, to creating my utopia of the best ADHD gadgets and top ADD tips and tricks, I’ve gotten side tracked.

Now, I know what you are thinking, and yes, I get distracted just like everyone else, both with and without ADHD. However, in this particular case, the distraction has been a bit of a good news / bad news sort of thing. The delay it has caused in making this ADHD website what I want it to be is the bad news. The good news is that much of the distraction has come in the form of increased work for my freelance writing business, which until I get all of these products created, manufactures, and sold, pays the bills.

However, there has been an unexpected distraction in the form of visitors to this website. They come here for many reasons. Almost everyone who ever lays eyes on this website for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder comes here via results for queries made on search engines. When that happens, there is a log of information that basically says what the keywords were that were used to search for ADHD or ADD. This is, of course, why I constantly shift between using ADD/ADHD and why I also try and spell out both acronyms at least once per post.

The really odd thing is that a lot of the traffic to Addessories comes from searches for things like:

  • What is ADHD really like?
  • What does ADHD feel like?
  • Is ADHD a real things?
  • How Do I Know If I Have ADHD?
  • and so on…

The weird part is that this is isn’t really a broadly covered topic. Read any of the major ADHD books out there and you will get a clinical description of ADHD as well as a handful of what I have come to call either "Me too stories," or "Sob stories," depending on my mood. These are the "examples" or "cases" that the PhDs that crank out these books write about where a patient or client of theirs relates how ADHD has affected their life in some way.

What is almost always missing from these writings is an indication of what ADHD actually feels like, or what it is like inside the ADHD brain. I don’t know if this is due to the difficulty in describing it, or if it not scientific enough to relate in formal writings, or (if I’m feeling jaded) if the authors of these books really don’t know because they don’t really have ADHD or it is something very minor to their overall life.

Whatever the reason, people keep coming for answers about what ADHD is like in the real world, outside of the clinics and counseling sessions. Therefore, I will endeavor to keep exploring this avenue in detail and welcome your help in doing so. After all, I can only tell you what it is like inside of my brain.

With all of that being said, I think I may have finally gotten into words a key concept about what ADHD is like and how ADHD is different from everyone getting distracted sometimes.

As I have said in the past, and most ADHD authorities point out, ADD involves an unusually high level of distractibility on a chronic (on-going) basis, not just getting distracted sometimes by distracting things. Which brings me to my pseudo-epiphany which we will cover in more depth in the next post.

The difference between ADHD and regular distraction is that people with ADHD get distracted all of the time by things that are NOT distracting.

Put another way, ADDers get distracted by boring stuff just as often as they do by exciting stuff.

If you have ever brought home a brand-new DVD release that you have been dying to watch and ended up cleaning the dust bunnies you noticed under your TV stand instead, you know what I’m talking about. I needed to be reminded a half-dozen times not to use up all of the already minimal time we had for "date night" because I was trying to get a laptop to play the DVD onto the TV so that I could show her some of the new features in Windows Media Center. Instead of eating popcorn, laying on the couch, and watching the movie I desperately wanted to see (and which she has no interest in, but agreed to watch for me) I was trying to find the online manual for my laptop. Instead of fun, I was troubleshooting keys, software, and S-video cables.

In other words, I got distracted by something boring. That, my friends, is what it is like to have ADD.

ADHD-ADD Tips — 1 Comment
24
May 10

ADHD Tip for Time Management

There are a lot of tips out there for time management, and even more time management advice. Most of it is aimed, of course, at the public at large. After all, time management is one of those things that plenty of people have trouble with whether they have ADHD or not. Like many other symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, the difficulties of time management with ADD are often extreme versions of the the issues non-ADD folks have with time management. However, many of the time management tricks used by the general population can be very useful ADHD tricks for ADDers as well.

adhd-tool-timer-time-management This post will be very short because, as a follow-up post will show, I have already spent way too much time "off task" today. I haven’t been screwing around, per se, nor have I been wasting my time. Most of the tasks and functions that I have tackled this morning have value and will benefit me in one way or another. However, as is often the case with focus problems, there are other very important tasks that I should be doing right now instead. In fact, when I sat down this morning there were some "must do" tasks on my plate that have not yet found their way to my fork – metaphorically speaking.

One of these many sideline tasks that have been distracting from important tasks is re-finding, downloading, and installing an old ADHD tool that I used to have on my computer that I forgot about when I did my upgrade to a newer, faster system with Windows 7 installed.

ADHD Tools Timers

One of the tough things to swallow about all of the ADHD advice and ADD tools or tricks thrown around is their mind numbing similarity. After a while of reading about attention deficit disorder and the research being done for ADD, as well as the number self-help books and other books for ADHD, you start to see a lot of the same things mentioned over and over again. Sometimes, that is for good reason. Many of the ADHD tips given by these resources are good ones that are particularly effective. Sometimes, on the other hand, it seems that the conventional wisdom is just being repeated within the mental health community echo chamber and that all innovation in the realm of helping with ADHD symptoms has ceased.

Using a timer is one of the most common suggestions for help managing ADHD time management issues. This tip occupies both of the realms mentioned above, being both a good tip, and one so rote as to be wholly unhelpful to many people. Which is why I wanted to pop up a post about one computer-based ADHD tool that has proven helpful for me to some degree.

There is a small Windows utility called Multi-Timer 1.1 which is freeware. The guy who developed it has also written a fancier, nicer looking version, but that one is not free, and as ADHD tools go, sometimes simpler is better.

What makes Multi-Timer so useful for ADHD time management is that it shows multiple timers at once. Obviously, the ADHD mind likes to do more than one thing at a time. Sometimes this stream of multitasking works well, and other times, not so much. Either way, it is very likely that while working, an adult with ADHD will encounter another task that is just as important or more important than the one being worked on. Having multiple timers allows for the original timer to keep running (or be paused) while the timer on the next task starts.

Even more useful, this timer utility allows for both count up and count down timers to be used simultaneously. This provides the ability to both time how long something takes, as well as provide a time structure for something that should take a certain amount of time. By default, Multi-timer displays 10 timers at once and each time can be selected individually via a tab. I like to set the 5 timers on the right side to my most common count down timer periods. For example, I have 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 5 minutes, and 1 hour as my count down timers. (The last timer is the one I use for variable times like 25 minutes if I need that for some reason.)  I use the timers on the left as my count up timers, starting one for each change of task or setting as appropriate.

Ironically, some of the best ADHD help comes not from the timers themselves, but from seeing the timer application on the screen counting down (or counting up) and become embarrassed, upset, or disturbed by what is showing on the timer. This can be a stunningly effective way to refocus. Imagine that you have a writing project that  should take 30 minutes. You start a timer and hammer away. Later, you get distracted by other tasks. Eventually, you close enough windows that the timer shows through and you notice that the time spent on the task so far is 55 minutes. This can make you stop looking for that Jim Croce song you just remembered you love so much and get back to finishing the writing, because you aren’t going to let it go over 1 hour!

Try downloading the timer and see if it works for you. Often the toughest part of using it is remembering to start it up in the first place and then remembering to trigger the timers themselves. Even so, it may work just often enough to make your days more productive.

ADD Medication — 2 Comments
26
Apr 10

Self-Medicating ADHD With Caffeine, Nicotine and ADD

Self Medicate ADHD symptoms caffeine nicotine sugarRecent research has suggested that some adults with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, self-medicate their ADD symptoms. In one study in particular, researchers showed that adults with ADHD smoke not just to get the “high” (clinically referred to as “for affect”) provided for nicotine, but also for its potential effects upon adult ADHD symptoms. Other studies have examined the ideas that people with ADHD self-medicate with caffeine or sugar, as well as other foods, medicinal herbs, supplements. All indicate that there is at least some truth to the idea that certain natural occurring stimulants or food products can tame certain ADD inattention difficulties to some extent. (Whew! How is that for qualifying a statement? Some truth, that certain thing, might help, somewhat.)

For medical researchers looking into ADHD, the primary motivation for conducting such studies is two-fold. One, it eliminates variables in other research studies. For example, if adults with ADD, or teens with ADHD, can be shown to be populations that have a biological reason that makes quitting smoking harder, then such groups can be excluded from research studies about the effectiveness of quit smoking techniques.

Just imagine if it turned out that ever major smoking cessation experiment over the last decade could trace its success or failure largely to the number of people with attention deficit disorder conditions who took part in the study. That would be a very big deal. It also suggests that additional treatment options for ADHD smokers might be necessary to successfully quit smoking.

The second purpose of doing ADHD research like this is that it gives additional clues to the biological effects of ADHD on the brain, as well as additional factors to consider when doing research into the cause of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in teens, adults, and to a lesser extent (for smoking studies, anyway) children with ADD. If the mechanism by which tobacco and nicotine affect the brain’s neurological pathways is well understood, and it can be shown that to some extent that the curative affect some ADDers feel from nicotine on their inattention symptoms is similar, then their is the possibility that ADHD functions by affecting the brain in a related manner.

See why real research is peer-reviewed research.

Self-Medicating ADHD Without Prescription Medication Drugs

What information about dealing with ADHD can those of us with ADD take from such research studied. While far from being the kind of research that conclusive conclusions about attention deficit disorders can be drawn, it does suggest some possible techniques for improving concentration in people with ADHD. One ADHD trick would be to conduct self-experiments to see how certain natural stimulants affect your ADHD symptoms. Excluding smoking, which is dangerous, unhealthy, and very addictive, experimenting with the affects caffeine, sugar, tuarine (or whatever that is in Red Bull) and the link can be very useful for ADDers looking for new ways to deal with their own ADHD symptoms.

For example, if a teenager with ADHD were to find out that caffeine early in the morning improves their concentration for three or four hours, then the best ADHD tip for concentrating better on an early morning geometry test would be to drink some coffee before leaving the house, or on the way to school. However, it is important to know exactly how the caffeine affects you, how much causes an improvement, as well as how much is too much. Also, teens with ADD in school would need to know how long it takes for it to “hit them”. Drinking a bunch of Cokes right before an important history test, when it turns out that it takes 45 minutes for the caffeine and sugar to really kick in, isn’t going to help much.

Please ignore this quick test ADHD Tools Advice

These ADHD tips and tricks are not for replacing your current ADD therapy regime. The idea is to have an arsenal of ADHD tools in your pocket that you can pull out for certain situations. Not just tests, but important meetings, during a critical sales call, self-medication of your ADHD symptoms for a little extra control might just be the difference between further frustration, and additional success. You might even find there are times when you would prefer to treat ADHD naturally by skipping your normal medication and using a stand-in in order to maximize certain personality traits or a specific kind of focus.

ADHD News — No Comments
10
Dec 09

ADHD Depressing State of Affairs for Attention Deficit Disorder Awareness

Over at Google, they have some new(er) features on their search engine that were rolled out this year. Some of them, like the Limit Search to Past Year feature and limiting search results to specific date range, I’ve been using since the day they came out. Others, like the different search "Views" (Related Searched, Wonder Wheel, Timeline) and the ability to add More shopping sites, or list Fewer shopping sites, have gone mostly unnoticed and unused by me.

This morning, however, I was playing around with some of these new Google search options. (Kudos, to Google, by the way, for carefully choosing the way the offer these additional features. Instead of calling them "advanced" or something like that, they are simply called "more options." That makes them much more likely to be checked out and used by non-techie search engine users.) One of the particularly interesting "More Options" that Google now has is the Wonder Wheel.

Google Wonder Wheel, Related Searches, and Suggested Searches

The Wonder Wheel is basically a visual representation of the Related Searches function, which is sort of an extension of the Suggested Searches that has been a feature on the main Google search page for some time now. As you type in your search, the search program tries to guess what it is you might be searching for based on the words you have already entered. This not only saves some potential typing, but it also generates phrases and keywords that are more likely to lead to successful search engine results instead of those far corners of the Internet where ad-filled junk pages await to ambush visitors.

For example, if you are wondering about the latest ADHD medications, you might go to Google.com intending to type in add drugs or something similar. However, as you type in the words, suggestions appear below the search box. Sometimes, this is very helpful, and sometimes not, depending upon what exactly you are searching for. In this case, it is likely to be very useful provided you were looking for something more specific than you intended to type.

google-suggested-search-function Notice that most of the suggested terms are actually for adhd and not add. This is because:

Furthermore, if you were looking for specific information, such as updates about the side effects of ADHD medications, the suggestion will get you to the data you were looking for faster, because you won’t have to sort through all of the webpages that, while about ADD drugs, are not necessarily about their potential side effects.

The Wonder Wheel takes off on this concept by not just showing you longer phrases that might be what you are looking for based upon being an exact match for what you have already typed in, plus additional words or letters, but by displaying related searches that might be more relevant to what you are looking for. Or, more importantly for doing in-depth research or analysis, related topics or searches that might have valuable information about what you are really looking for. This avoids the problem caused when you are searching based on what makes sense to you, but might not match up quite right with the information you are looking for.

Use Google Wonder Wheel to Find More Related Information

When you type a search term into Google and then select More Options –> Wonder Wheel, what you get is a graphical view of other search phrases that might be related to what you are searching for. This image is essentially a "wheel" composed of your original search as the hub, with "spokes" going out to each related search. Depending upon the initial search, there can be a lot of spokes, or just a few.

The best part is that each related spoke can also be clicked on. When you click on one of the related spoke links, the wheel moves with the related topic you clicked on becoming the center of the main wheel and the original wheel and spokes dropping into a secondary place. You can keep repeating this process to get closer and closer to the data you want.

If you start going in the wrong direction you can click on previous wheels. Although only the immediately preceding wheel and spokes are visible, previous hubs are represented by a series of disappearing circles. Each of these circles can be clicked to bring back up that wheel. So, if you know you want to go back three wheels, you can just click the 3rd circle. If you aren’t sure which one you want, hovering the mouse over a circle pops up the name of the search in the center of the hub.

It works remarkably well for numerous topics. It is especially useful for topics you don’t know much about. For example, if you want to search for a Christmas toy for a youngster and you know they want something like a robot hamster, you can search for robot hamster toy, and then use the wheels until you get to the specific Zsu Zsu Hamster thing that is Hot Toy for Christmas 2009. (No, I don’t get it either.)

However, using it to look at topics related to ADHD-ADD is depressing. Results showing "related" searches linked to some of the more unfortunate mental illnesses can lead people with little ADD experience into making some unfounded conclusions about their relationship to ADHD. Even worse, is that no matter how many links on the Wonder Wheel you click, ADHD solutions never appear. There are no links displayed that go to ADHD organization tricks or to ADHD tips for time management or even an ADD exercises. You can’t even get to the ubiquitous ADD Coaching that is so promoted within the community. Instead, you can go off and find out about bipolar disorder. Sigh.

adhd-information-reliable-search-graphic I think that this one seems pretty reasonable. Certainly these would be the most likely concerns of such searches.

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bad-adhd-information-search-results

This one is unfortunate. Looking for tips to manage ADHD? Well, instead, how about suggestions linking ADHD to bipolar disorder and OCD? Maybe, boosting the ADDer’s
self-esteem would be helpful? Hmm…I don’t think those suggestions are making me feel any better.

It isn’t anything to get bent out of shape about, and I know that the nature of Internet searching is that Google search rankings are necessarily geared toward the lowest common denominator of knowledge, but it would be nice to see such a powerful tool at least be able to point toward one or two "positive" websites about ADHD.

Maybe as awareness grows and the fad-ishness of ADD continues to fade, there will be less demand for all things alarmist and conspiracy, and more demand for the answers to ADHD’s challenges. Until then, keep coming back here, or grab the Addessories RSS Feed to have the latest updates come directly to you.

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