ADHD-ADD Tips

Best ADD Tip Ever – The Only ADHD Advice You Need *

Are you ready for the best ADHD tip for overcoming ADHD symptoms? It is surprisingly easy, and once you see how this powerful attention deficit disorder tip can be for managing ADHD at work or school, you’ll want to use it all the time.

Is there a catch?

Well, did you see that asterisk up there? That means that there is a catch.

Overcoming Distraction to Get Work Done and Be Most Productive

The key concern when it comes to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is how constant distraction can be overcome in order to be more productive at school, more productive at work, and more productive at home. All the other ADHD symptoms are sort of secondary. If ADDers could just get a handle on increasing productivity in the face of having ADD, everything else would be a little easier to manage. (If you were as productive as you are capable of at work and around the house, do you think it would matter as much that you occasionally tune out or interrupt your spouse during conversations?)

To become more productive and improve your standing at work or improve your grades at school, the person with ADD needs only do just one little thing: keep working.

See, I told you there was a catch.

However, hear me out. For those of us with ADD, the symptom of distractibility is one that keeps us from focusing properly on important tasks. When a major report is due the next day, we find ourselves intrigued by something else entirely. When this happens, there are only two choices. One choice involves using all of the ADHD tips and ADD tools that one can muster to overcome one’s natural tendency to have attention wander from the important tasks at hand, to those of lesser importance, or even no importance at all. The second choice involves just going with the flow or allowing the mind’s attention to wander as it sees fit.

* The Catch: (That asterisk does indeed mean that there is a catch. Typically, it means a footnote, which is where some company uses really small fonts to explain how they are going to screw you over, and therefore cover themselves legally by “disclosing” the information that you need to realize that the whole thing is a scam. Here on Addessories, we have no reason to trick our fellow ADDers, so this explanatory asterisk is in full-size font type.) The catch is that in order to follow the path of least resistance and give into your mind’s typical urges to find ever more interesting things to focus on, you have to keep working longer than you would if you went the other route.

How much longer?

That is the essence of the catch. You have to keep working until you have finished that important task. That major report, or that semester-long project that you just started and is due tomorrow, must be finished before you stop working, whether that takes four hours or thirty-four hours. You’ll find that you are happier along the way, but the destination will end up being much further away than it should have.

Whether or not this is a good ADD trick for you depends entirely on whether you are the type of person with ADD who finds the journey more important than the destination, or whether you are the type of person with ADHD who finds crossing the finish line the most satisfying.

Which one are you?

Do One Thing – Overcoming ADHD Once

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Depression and ADHD are comorbid indicators. They often go together. Adding the apathy of not wanting to get started on anything, along with the inherent procrastination that comes with ADHD, and sprinkling on a top of distraction just waiting to happen and it is no wonder that many adults with ADHD find it difficult to get things done.

There are many methods of time management out there for people ADHD. They range from great ideas like Eating That Frog to dumb ones, like blaming everything on perfectionism. The reality, however, is that you are unique, you always were. You were unique before you realized you had ADD, you were unique when you started treating your ADD, and you’re unique now, when you are living with ADHD. It’s not wonder then that other people’s solutions don’t work for you. You need your own unique solutions to living with adult ADHD.

Just because you need to build up your own unique ADHD tips and tricks to get through a life that requires you to things and to do them on a schedule doesn’t mean that other ideas won’t work for you. You just have to find your arrows and load them up in your quiver, metaphorically speaking.

Sometimes, the stock photography gods smile upon you 🙂

Do One

One method that with my ADHD that I am tinkering around with is the idea of doing one thing. Similar to the concept detailed in Eat That Frog, the idea is to commit to doing one thing from a list of dozens or even hundreds of things. Unlike the eating that frog, where you jump in with the worst, or most dreaded task of the day, I’ve had some success working with my brain instead of trying to force it to do something it doesn’t want.

As I arrive at my desk each morning, or even upon returning from a trip to the coffee pot, or from lunch, I often find that my brain looks around and has one thing that it wants to do. Many times, that one thing is something productive. Rather than trying to save that motivation and harness it later, I jump in with both feet.

My brain feels like finally cleaning up my desk? Let’s clean my desk.

My brain feels like writing that technical writing proposal? Let’s write the proposal.

My brain feels like rescheduling the dentist, ordering my meds, or filling out this month’s writing calendar? Let’s do those things.

My brain feels like writing an article on doing one thing? Hey! Inception!

How To Do One

If I were trying to turn this one idea into a book, as so many time management, and organization self help books are wont to do, I would add a swear word and start writing the 150 pages of backstory, history about myself, and obtaining the epiphany that goes into turning an idea the length of a pamphlet into a 300 page book that you can stick on the shelf at Barnes and Noble (irritation Segway!) A name like Do One Damn Thing! or maybe One F*cuking Thing!

You’ve seen the books. You know what I’m talking about.

Instead, let’s just keep it real among fellow adults with ADHD, or those of you without ADHD who have reached the intelligent conclusion that if it works for people with ADD, imagine how well it would work for someone without ADD.

The secret to how to do one thing is to let yourself. Give yourself permission to do what your brain wants to do. Often, you will find that the one thing is not what you should be doing, or what would the the most productive thing you should be doing. That is okay. You can come back to that thing later. Heck, if if works for you, promise yourself that that will be the very next thing you do.

The point of doing one is to harness your motivation if only for a moment. Finding motivation with ADHD can be really, really, hard. Give yourself permission this one time each day (or a few times, however, you want to use this) to enjoy the motivation. You will find that much like procrastinating forward, doing one thing results in more things being crossed off your ADHD to do list than fighting against it. After all, a list with 30 things on it gets shorter whether you cross off #1 or #28.

Me?

Well, I broke my own rule.

My brain wanted to clean up my workspace and I was going to let it, but then I thought about what I was doing and got distracted (nach) by the thought of writing up an article about using your motivation to do that one thing and here we are. Writing about ADHD when you have ADHD is a nonstop adventure in inception.

Try doing just one thing and let me know how it goes for you.

BTW, I ended up cutting and pasting a bunch of what I originally wrote here into a new article where I have noticed that I can write for clients about the same topics I write about for my own websites much faster. The differing factor that I’m noticing is that I write their stuff in Word and then just send it off to them. Maybe, just maybe, there is something about writing inside of WordPress that stifles my brain or otherwise slows it down.

It might also be that without thinking, even in the back of my head, about linking, SEO, keywords, length, or finding stock photography that my brain just cranks out text further. So, I’m trying something that I am very, very nervous about. I created an “In Progress” folder where I can do the Just One Thing when it is writing something.

My fear, which I’m sure that many of my adult ADHD tribe can relate to is that many “in progress” things end up becoming “never finished” things when our ADHD brains move on. But, I crave more success than I have been having and doing more/getting better requires trying new things, so here we go.

As always, wish me luck. I do the same for you.

ADHD Tip for Time Management

Written by ADDer 1 Comment

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 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.

This post will be 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 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 helping 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.

ADHD Mind Backstop

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The ADHD mind can be a wonderful thing when fully engaged. Hyperfocus is a gift when it matches up with what you need to be doing, and the constant flow of new ideas mean your creativity never dries up. I, myself, have notebooks, notepads, and sticky notes filled with ideas that I’ll never have time to write, develop, or produce, but that beats banging your head on your keyboard with writer’s block any day of the week.

ADHD Mind Management Technique – The Backstop

One problem with the ADHD mind is that once it comes untethered from whatever it was previously doing, it can float in a meandering kind of way that breaks your productivity. It is important to have ADHD mind tricks to keep your work flowing.

One ADD mind management technique is the ADD Mind Backstop.

The way the backstop works is to provide a quick, easy to enter, task or function that you can switch to in order to re-engage your mind.

The Mental Backstop List

If you have ADHD, you are no doubt experienced in creating, and often ignoring, various types of lists. This is why the ADHD daily list is so important.

The daily list is a list of just the tasks that you must / should do today. Keep track of everything else wherever you desire, but the daily list should be a single list, on a single piece of paper, with only the tasks that you must reasonably accomplish today. This won’t work with the giant list you keep in your ADD planner.

Include on the daily list at least one backstop idea.

What Is an ADHD Backstop Idea?

An ADD backstop idea is a useful, relevant task that you can enter quickly, and easily.

To meet these criteria, the task needs to be relatively pleasant. Backstop tasks should not be those that you have to fight your own desires to accomplish, so not a project or task you dread.

A backstop task also needs to be easy to start, so not something that takes too much setup, or requires you to change locations, or engage in a multistep process to get going.

For those of us who do our productive work in front of a computer, a great backstop task is to watch a training video, relevant Ted talk, or presentation. Keep a list of these bookmarked, or favorited. If you use Microsoft Edge, this list makes for a great collection.

Just create a new collection, or bookmarks folder, titled ADHD backstop. Fill this list with useful links that you can open quickly, and without setup. When your ADHD mind wanders too far, and you can’t pull it back, open this list and click.

The mental juice you get from some stimulus, plus the potential to direct your brain into the task of your choosing during that lull that occurs after stimulating your mind with something that has a definitive end, both moves your life forward from what you watched, or learned, AND allows you to move productively on with your day.

Since you wasted no time getting into the backstop task, and you were able to get back to work after it, you avoid the ADHD guilt that comes from feeling like you wasted time from lack of focus.

Other ADHD Mental Backstop Ideas

Since I work as a freelance writer in front of a computer, most of my backstop ideas involve watching, or participating in something online, but that isn’t the only kind of ADD backstop. Be creative, and don’t forget, that even if you don’t sit in front of a computer, chances are you have access to similar things on your phone or tablet device.

TED Talks – careful not to use the really long ones, or your backstop task turns into a long project.
Training videos – Are there 20 minute training videos that can help you learn or solidify important skills?
Brainfood articles – Bookmark articles or essays that are interesting to you but you can’t take time to read when you come across them. Then get back to them when you need a backstop.
How-To articles or videos: A quick how to is great brain food and a good ADHD backstop. Remember they don’t have to just focus on your job, anything useful to your life, like how to fix your sprinkler works.
DIY articles or videos: Always wanted to do something? Don’t know how? A Do-It-Yourself session can get you started. DON’T GET DISTRACTED by pulling out materials and trying to do it during your other productivity. This is a survey so that you have an idea about where to start in the future, or maybe find out that it is too long and involved after all.
Guided meditation – If you have ADHD you should be meditating, or if you prefer using ADHD mindfulness. Either way a guided version can be uplifting and reset your mind.
Mini-Exercises: One set of pushups, or a few sun salutations are a great way to stimulate both body and mind. Remember, these are quickie, bonus exercises. Don’t try and do a workout. That isn’t what you are supposed to be doing. But, some quick exercises will make your ADD brain proud, and ready for what is next.
Go outside: but, don’t wander off. A few deep breaths. MAYBE a quick walk. Again this isn’t time for exercise, these are quick mental tasks that can take place with some sun and fresh air.

Poor ADHD Backstops

Avoid these types of things for your ADD mind backstops

TV shows or episodes – The purpose of mental ADHD backstops is to feed your mind, without the resulting ADD guilt that comes from wasting time or being distracted. Watching episodes of shows will leave you feeling empty with ADHD guilt. Restarting out of that can be tricky
YouTube Videos and TikToks – If you have bookmarked an educational YouTube video, that works. But, don’t go clicking through your subscriptions watching funny videos. That road goes straight to ADHD guilt. — And don’t even get me started on scrolling your FYP TikToks.
Crafts, or Trying New Skills – You’ll either get distracted by the joy of something new and spend way too long, or you’ll get frustrated by your lack of progress. Either way, that won’t give you the ADHD buzz you need to shift onto another task.
Anything that takes materials or setup – These are supposed to be quick hits of mental adrenaline. If you spend time pulling out supplies, or doing a lot of setup, you’ll feel the ADD guilt kick in before you can even get started.

Let me know what kind of things you use for your own ADHD backstops.