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Quickest and Easiest ADD Planner

I’ve spent years trying to find the right planner to manage my ADD with. The right ADHD planner is tricky. It has to be featured enough to handle all the difficulties of planning with ADD, while not being something too easy to get lost in. Otherwise, your ADD planner just becomes one more thing that distracts you.

Easy ADD Planner for Quick Planning

Honestly, I’m starting to give up on the idea that I can manage my ADD life with a single planner. In order to handle everything, the planner ends up large and complex. Even worse, there typically is no good way for me to move things from long-term planning to short-term tasks, or to keep track of dreams and big plans, while at the same time ensuring that long-term necessities are not forgotten.

Sometimes you just need a really quick and easy way to plan for your ADHD life.

As someone who obsessively looks through the planners, journals, and notebooks every time I walk through an office supply store, bookstore, or stationary store, as well as browsing online stores, I think I may have finally found the easiest to use ADD planner.

Easiest ADD Planner

Obviously, the easiest ADD planner will, by virtue of being easy, leave out many overall planning needs. But, for a quick ADD planner that help keep track of your hectic life, this easy ADD planner is a great option.

Quickly optimize your week and to do list in one place with this easy planner.

This planner centers around a Weekly Planner page, which is typically my favorite way to handle tasks that need have specific date and time requirements like appointments and deadlines.

The weekly planning page has two columns, one with the traditional list of days of the week, and the second as a list style. Although it is preprinted with Goals, Priorities, and Notes as section headings, there is no reason you have to use them that way. Make a straight list, make notes about the following week, or whatever.

The best part is that as you finish each week, the page tears away. Transfer anything you need to the following week. Anything unimportant enough for you to not write on the following week goes away. It’s a self-cleaning planner.

On the facing page of the weekly planner are blank sheets that can be torn off separately from the planner pages. I like keeping my non-date specific lists over on this page. For example, I need to clean the gutters, but there is no reason that has to happen on Thursday, or even this week. So I can write it here, and if it takes a week or two to get around to it, I don’t feel the pressure of having written it on a specific date, but at the same time it doesn’t get lost in the shuffle.

Sticky Note Reminders and Bookmarks

Finally, the sticky notes are a goldmine for organization.

When closed, the planner has a plain, non-distracting cover, that is a great place to put a sticky note with info that you need front and center without opening the planner. Whether it’s a note to remember your badge, or grab your tickets, or whatever, it will be right there in your face.

You can also put notes right where you need them. A note on the fridge to remember to use the leftovers, or one on the bathroom mirror to remember to fast for your blood test in the morning.

The tiny notes can be used to bookmark important things in this planner, or in other books, or journals. They also make great don’t forget notes, with their bright colors and small footprint.

There aren’t very many sticky notes, but you can always stick a fresh stock in the empty place when you run out.

Easy ADD Planner Value

The other great thing is that this simple ADD planner is cheap, unlike that big Moleskine planner, or Franklin Covey thing that you bought and never used (or maybe used the heck out of making it too big and unwieldy to be your quick ADD planner.)

Let me know if you find success with my pick for easiest ADD planner, or let me know what you use for your own quick ADD planning.

ADD Planner 2X

Written by ADDer 7 Comments

For many people with ADD / ADHD a planner, organizer, calendar, or day timer is the first recommendation they receive. Ironically, it is probably also one of the things they have already tried a million times before.

You see, people with ADD are not dumb. Far from it. Most ADDers are actually quite intelligent, and even more are very self-aware. It doesn’t take long after you notice that you are different from everyone else before you start trying to figure out how you are different, and eventually why you are different.

For students to professionals with ADD one of the first things they’ll notice is that they are disorganized. ADHD can be manifested in many different ways, but one of the most common traits is a lack of organization, whether it is losing important papers, or just your car keys, or whether its forgetting important meetings, or forgetting to eat lunch. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to come up with the notion that if you could just get organized and keep track of all those important things better, that might change how things go down for you.

The irony is that for most ADD / ADHD adults, just remembering to actually pull out the planner and look at it is half the challenge. That is if you’ve already mastered the part about actually remembering to do the mundane easily forgotten task of writing down those important things in your planner in the first place.

Twice the Planners or Planner 2X

The frustration of having, starting, and using so many calendars or planners only to fall into the same old pattern of forgetting not just the meeting, but also to write the meeting down in the planner in the first place is one that drives some ADD / ADHD people to periodically throw their hand up in the air and just give up on the whole planner thing. Interestingly, the answer might be to take the opposite course.

Of course, everyone is different, but for ADD businesspeople who spend a majority of their workday at a desk, the solution to the organization dilemma may lie in a simple ADD trick for organization.

The first part is the same one that every ADD coach, every ADD book, and every ADD group suggests: Get a good planner that you like and is small enough that you will actually carry it around with you.

The second part is where the magic happens.

ADHD Calendar

Get a big monthly calendar to put on top of your desk. This is your 2X calendar.

The desk blotter style works great if you can handle it covering that much of your desk, but if not, a smaller calendar works just as well. The key is that it must sit on your desk in the main work area, whether that is under / in front of your keyboard, or under your mouse, or where you fill in forms. Something like this work just fine.

Do not use a calendar on the wall, a calendar across the room, or put a calendar on a table or section of desk that you don’t always use every day. This is supposed to be in your face on your main workspace.

The best calendars are plain without any pictures to take up extra room. You want a calendar that is as big as you can stand having on your desk all day every day. For me, I threw away my mouse pad and use my 2X calendar for my mouse.

The point is that you now have a paper calendar that is virtually begging to be written on, front and center on your primary work area. This will distract you.

That is right, the calendar will distract you. You have just turned your ADD traits into a strength to help you.

Using Your ADD Calendar

Imagine, you are talking on the phone. It is a long boring conversation. You look down at your blank calendar. You might as well write something on it. How about the Tuesday Morning staff meeting. It doesn’t really need to be written down since you have it every week (and are late to 1/3 of the time anyway because your forget what day of the week it is), but you will write it down because you have been distracted by the calendar.

Later, you might get distracted by the fact that you don’t have any blue on the calendar and you’ll write something else down.

When your boss calls in the middle of a detailed project and tells you about the client meeting on the 13th, you would normally go back to your task after hanging up the phone because you were in the middle of something and didn’t want to lose your thoughts by finding your new day timer (is it still in your bag that your brought from home?).

Of course, by the time you get to a stopping place, you have forgotten to write it down, and your organizer sits unused in the bottom of your drawer. But, with your 2X calendar sitting right there on top of your desk, you can just grab your pen and scribble something down really fast without having to find and pull out your planner while you are still on the phone. Then, when you finish what you were doing your wandering eyes will scan across the date, see what you scribbled and that is when you will grab your little Filofax calendar that you bought especially to get more organized and jot it down.

The 2X calendar won’t help you remember to check your little Franklin Covey planner each morning, but since it is sitting on top of your desk, IT might be what reminds you of all those important little events instead. And, if in doing so, it gets you used to checking and adding things to your real day planner more often, then so much the better.

ADHD ADD Planner Take 2

Written by ADDer 4 Comments

It’s not uncommon for everyone, whether they have ADHD or not to start the new year with a resolution to be more organized. At the heart of that endeavor is often a new planner or organizer. For people with ADD, ADHD planners have a special meaning often characterized by a love / hate relationship.

By mid-year, it has probably become very clear whether or not the planner you have is the right planner for ADD-ADHD symptoms of yours. If not, this time of year is like New Years all over again for buying organizers, planners, and calendars.

Mid-Year Planners, Calendars, and Organizers

Calendar and planner makers can’t live by selling their organizers just once a year. So, they use a variety of strategies to boost sales. There are 18-month planners that run from July to December of the following year. That’s July 2020 to December 2021 this year.

Then there are Academic planners, back to school planners, teacher’s planners and all other types of calendars and organizers filling the shelves at your local Target, Office Depot, Staples, Wal-mart, or other favorite store.

I print out blank month-view Google Calendar pages to fill in as a writing calendar.

So, if your planner can’t handle your ADD-ADHD needs, head out and take another look at planners now. Keep in mind what ways your current planner has not worked out for you.

Do you need more room for notes? Do you need longer days? Do you need a Daily ADD Planner instead of a Weekly ADD planner? Do you need better visibility for weekend days instead of them being tucked away in a corner?

Or, stop trying to make something not made specifically for those with ADHD and ADD and keep your eyes peeled to ADDessories for our upcoming customized ADD Planners and ADHD Organizers which should be ready soon!

Eat That Frog and ADD

Written by ADDer 1 Comment

People with ADD often times have issues with time management. There are almost as many books out there to help you be more organized and procrastinate less as there are books to help you lose weight. For adults with ADHD, they can have very different value.

ADHD Eat That Frog

The book Eat That Frog is an organization and time management book built around the semi-funny premise of eating a frog. The idea is that as you plan out your day, there are different tasks. Each task takes a varying degree of time and effort, but typically, there is one task that is your biggest, perhaps least pleasant task. The idea of eating that frog is that you should do that task first.

The title comes from the hypothetical situation in which your to-do list contains the task of eating a frog. Clearly this isn’t pleasant, but if it must be done, then the idea is that if you do it first, you get it out of the way, and then you can go about your day with your most onerous task already completed and done.

But, does the Eat That Frog methodology work well for people with ADD?

I believe that you should, whenever possible, play to your strengths, and when you can turn your weaknesses to your advantage. As someone with ADD, my problem isn’t that I never get to one task, or that procrastinating on a single task causes my issues.

Instead, my problem is the inability to “force” myself into most anything to-do list wise. And yet, the whole premise of this book is to go against whatever your nature is and instead suck it up and do that one big task first. In a lot of ways, this is “Just Do It” in a different wrapper, and you know how I feel about that little gem.

So, does that mean that people with ADHD can’t use the Eat That Frog book?

Not at all, but remember that where a book like Eat That Frog is asking normal people to go against their nature and do something, it might actually be asking more (too much?) of people with advanced structural organizational issues like those of us with ADD have.

There is increasing evidence that willpower is a finite resource in the human body, and if you use it all up getting through just one task, is that your best move?

I suppose like all fixed ideas, it can only do so much. For me, I suppose I might try it when I have one of those days where there really is only one thing that matters. In that case, eating that frog makes perfect sense. But for me, most days are a maze of deadlines, milestones, and projects that all need attention. Simply getting the biggest, or least pleasant one, out of the way wouldn’t make the day a success for me.

How do you feel about Eat That Frog? Success? Bust? Useful, but modified? Let me know.