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.
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.
[…] publish. You get it done, THEN you add it to calendar, or your task list, or your pomodoros, your ADHD planner, or whatever you use. You add it as a cleanup task, or a polish task. When you go back it […]