ADD Tips – Page 4

Organization With ADD Getting Started

Whether you were just diagnosed with ADD / ADHD, or if you were diagnosed a long time ago, organization is an ongoing challenge. Knowing yourself and reading about your ADHD is a good start. Whether you are taking ADD medication, or trying some alternative ADD therapies, you know that medicine alone won’t change your organization and time management habits.

So, what will?

Fake It Until You Make It

If you are an adult with ADD, chances are that you have owned more than your fair share of planners, calendars and organizers in your life. You may have even looked for a specific planner for people with ADD. The truth is that an organizer or calendar is essential for time management and organization. Just because it hasn’t worked before doesn’t mean it never will.

If you are successfully using an electronic organizer like your cell phone or Microsoft Outlook, or the like, then don’t mess with success. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

On the other hand, if you are still struggling with ADD organization and time management, I recommend getting a physical, paper calendar, organizer, or just a notebook. The reason is that you are trying to change an established habit. The best way to do that is to do something new. If you aren’t used to carrying around a planner, then starting to do so, is something new.

The catch, as you probably know, is that it won’t take right away. You’ll forget your planner at home; you’ll leave it sitting on your desk. Even worse, you’ll write things in it and then forget all about it, or you’ll forget to write important things in it in the first place. It doesn’t matter. Keep at it.

New ADHD Organization Habits

They say it takes six weeks to turn something into a habit. I don’t know if that is a solid number, but I do know that it takes time. The trick to developing an organizer, calendar, planner habit is to keep trying to use it.

Start by taking it with you. Throw it in your work bag. Carry it out and set it on the front seat of your car. Take it into a restaurant. Bring it with you to meetings. First, you might be developing nothing more than the habit of having it with you, even if you forget to read it, or write in it. But, don’t worry, that is step one.

Once you have a habit of carrying it with you, you will slowly develop a habit of using it. Maybe it will be when you have forgotten all about it, but you need a piece of paper and realize, “Wait! I have my planner right here.”

Maybe, you’ll need to remember something, or find a piece of information, and you’ll realize that you have your planner with you, and the data you need is right at your fingertips.

The key is to keep taking it with you, even if you don’t use it. Do TRY and use it, but make your focus just having it with you.

Just today, I realized that I needed a website that I had looked at but forgot all about. As a shot in the dark, I flipped through my notebook (and noticed TONS of great stuff that I forgot about. Need to remember to pull this thing out more often.) There it was, a quick note about the website, and it’s address. It saved me tons of online searching and wasted time.

The best part is, that’s one reward for my unconscious brain about the value of my notebook organizer. Enough of those, and instead of subconsciously forgetting about it all of the time, I’ll start subconsciously remembering it.

BTW, my latest notebook (not calendar, just notebook) is a Miquelrius. It has the subject sections broken out not by tabs, but by colors at the edge of the sheets. Not that I don’t have 50 other types sitting on my shelf right now. Perhaps a blog post about all my empty, and just barely started notebooks is in order 🙂

ADD More Energy Less Tired

Written by ADDer 1 Comment

People with ADD often take medical stimulants or other prescription medications to help control their ADHD symptoms. Ironically, adults with ADD often complain of being tired or having low energy. While the various ADD medications can alleviate some of these symptoms, thanks to their stimulating effect, many times the boost can be short lived. Furthermore, for those ADDers who are currently not taking any medication or looking for alternative, natural ADD treatments, the stimulant solution offers little help.

As regular readers of this ADD tips blog know, I’m not one to really go in for pseudo-science or even limited empirical evidence. On the other hand, when I find something that helps me, I like to pass it along, just in case it would help others as well. I’ve stumbled upon something that helps with my energy in the morning and throughout the day that I wanted to share. Keep in mind that this is something that works on my ADHD and may or may not work on yours, although there is no down side if it doesn’t.

More Energy from Nutrition

When it comes to attention deficit disorder, or any other medical condition, the one almost universal constant is that better diet and nutrition, and regular exercise is helpful. While not a cure, exercise and diet make almost anything better, from diabetes, to cancer symptoms, to yes, ADD/ADHD, better nutrition and healthful exercise are always beneficial.

There is a trick to better nutrition, however, Like most folks, when I think of eating better I think about all of the things I should STOP eating. However, real nutrition comes from not just reducing the amount of junk food you eat, but also from increasing the amount of healthy things you eat. It turns out that eating more healthy stuff is actually harder for me than cutting out things. That’s because I actively dislike many healthy foods.

Stop eating nachos? Well… OK, if I must.

Eat this bowl of spinach? Eww, yuck.

Recently, however, I stumbled upon a wonderful little trick that lets me not only eat better nutrition, but do it quickly and painlessly, first thing in the morning when my nutrition needs the biggest boost.

There is a book out there, actually two books, about increasing health by reducing inflammation in the digestive track. One is called Clean, and the other is Clean Diet, I believe. (I’ll do a quick write up about them in a subsequent post.) These books greatly overreach in my opinion. However, my wife wanted to try out some of the concepts, and being a supportive husband, who frankly could stand to be in better shape, I went along.

One of the main things you do with this diet plan is to make nutritious shakes. The basic shake consists of nutrient rich leafy greens like spinach, kale, chard, and so on, some coconut or almond milk, combined with protein powder, some coconut oil (for taste and fat), and some fruit like bananas, apples or berries, along with a bit of ground flax seed.If you’re doing the math, you can see some pretty nice nutrition in this combination. You can also see that to actually eat this every day would not be fun. Eating it for breakfast would be even worse. But, by blending it into a shake, you can chug it down with your morning coffee.

Here is where it gets interesting. When I was doing this diet plan I never really thought much about it. However, when I stopped I noticed a sharp drop in my energy levels in the morning. These low energy levels are the reason I pound coffee like a camel gearing up for two weeks walking across the desert. (Camels drink a lot, right?) However, the energy is never really all the way there even if my mind is racing a bit. I always blamed my ADHD. After all, if it takes a boatload of Adderall to affect this brain, how much is coffee really going to help?

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As it turn out, I might just need a little more in the nutrition department. I tried just the shake, and blew off everything else from the diet and the energy returned. It’s gotten so I can actually feel the difference. I find that the secret ingredient is kale (specifically baby kale). While the shakes made with spinach and other greens are good, the ones with kale seem to be particularly effective. Experiment with your own combinations and see what works for you.

Healthy ADD Energy Shake Tips

Use plenty of liquid. The difference between a juicer and a blender is pulp. Unfortunately, when making these kinds of shakes, the pulp is all the good stuff. That means this drink will not be smooth or pulp free. I said it was easy, not that it was yummy. I don’t like these shakes per se, but for just a few minutes of effort, the result it worth it. The more liquid you use, the thinner, and more drinkable your shakes will be.
If you really don’t like the pulp, don’t use apples. Apples seem to resist blending the most of any fruit.
If you don’t like the taste, add bananas. Bananas flavor is apparently pretty powerful. Throw a banana in your shake and most of the taste will be banana.
Chug – this isn’t for pleasure. The taste isn’t phenomenal and the thickness isn’t fun either. But, if you chug your shake, you can be done with it in just a few seconds and go back to drinking your morning coffee.
You’ll need a decent blender. — The gold standard in blenders is the Vitamix. However, at around $400, that’s the same price as a new TV. While a different blender will be louder and maybe not as perfect, it will do just fine as long as it isn’t some $40 Target blender. I shelled out for a Ninja blender which means that there is something in my kitchen named Ninja, and it does a nice enough job whacking all of this nutrition together.

Try out the shake idea with your favorite recipes and let me know what you find works (or doesn’t) for you.

Little ADD Tricks

Written by ADDer 1 Comment

Sometimes, all it takes is a little tweak to make your life with ADD more successful and easier to manage. Unfortunately, we ADDers often spend all of our time looking for those big life adjustments. While it is true that having ADHD can require big lifestyle changes, the little day-to-day things that get lost are actually the ones that can have the greatest immediate impact on our lives.

Small ADHD Tricks and Adjustments

As you go through your day, think about little things you could do to help you remember, focus, and manage your daily life just a little better. Today’s tip from yours truly is on the tip of my brain because I’m heading to the grocery store.

add-tips-tricks graphic Of course, no ADDer gets through the grocery store without some distraction. I find a list to be very helpful. I actually have two lists. One list contains the ingredients that I need for the meals I’ve planned out. The other list contains all of those little lifestyle things that you end up needing, things like batteries, shampoo, coffee filters, and so on. The second list, I keep on a whiteboard in the kitchen where I can write those things down right away so I don’t forget them between when I think of it, and when I end up with a piece of paper. I just take a picture of the list on the whiteboard when I head out. That way, whether I end up at Target or Safeway, or whatever, I can be sure to remember the toilet paper.

Today’s ADD trick is about coupons. I have one of those educational coupon books you buy from your kids as a fundraiser at school. Some of the most valuable coupons in the book are for $5 off of groceries. Each one is good for a certain two month time period. The problem is that I always forget to use them. First, I leave them at home. Then, when I finally put them in my wallet, I forget to give it to the cashier. After a while, I forget it is even in my wallet at all, and I find it months later after it is already expired.

ADD Tip for Coupons

Fortunately, a little ADHD tip occurred to me not too long ago. I always use the same credit card to pay for my groceries. This is both habit and it helps with money management. Now, when I remember the coupon and head to the store, I fold it around the card I use to pay. That way, I CAN’T forget it. It is in the way when I go to pay.

The result?

I actually use the $5 off coupon every two months and end up saving $30 over the course of the year, more than offsetting the $10 I paid for the coupon book. Everything else in there ends up just being money saving gravy!

What little tips do you use in your daily life?

Living With ADD – Productive Procrastination?

Written by ADDer 2 Comments

The guys over at the website MakeUseOf.com usually write articles about software, websites, and other utilities. For those of us with ADD and technical skills, it’s a productivity nightmare. Not because they do anything bad, but because they offer up so many electronic goodies in the form of free software and tools that it is hard not to get distracted and end up spending hours tracking down all of the great new distraction free writing programs and testing them out when you should be working.

When an article showed up in my RSS feed from the site regarding “productive procrastination” I figured it was a typo, or more likely, a targeted SEO keyword phrase that they were aiming for with the article. I do the same thing here and on other blogs and websites in order to court Google’s SERP favor. Every title I write on this blog, for example, I end up trying to shoehorn in either ADD or ADHD plus some other useful keyword in order to not torpedo my own posts.

In this case, it was neither. It turns out that the article’s premise is that there are ways in which one can procrastinate in a productive manner. The idea being that if you are going to procrastinate anyway (not a bad premise), then you may as well do it in a way that is beneficial to improve your overall time management. For example, if there is a way you can network or otherwise build your professional contacts network while you are not writing that report that is due Monday, at least the time being wasted is building up something that you need anyway, maybe sooner than you think if you don’t finish up that report!

Like many good ideas, nothing in the article is earth shattering, but the concept could be used to one’s advantage.

After thinking about it for a few minutes I considered my own list of ways to procrastinate productively:

Return phone calls – Everyone procrastinates using email, so that doesn’t count. Actual phone calls, however, are usually important enough to count as productivity.
Pay Bills – If you are an adult with ADD, you know that paying bills can get lost in the shuffle. If you aren’t writing that 1,000 word article due in two hours, you might as well avoid some late fees while you are not doing it.
Blog – If you have a professional blog, or a website that makes money from your writing it, then write and post an update. It might not be the most productive thing you could be doing, nor the one that would earn the most money (Ahem!) but it could pay off in the long-term and it might make you feel better to get something off your distracted mind so that it can focus on what it should be doing.
Read – Not fiction, not websites, real, live, knowledge building reading. If you can’t focus on what you should be focusing on, then try and get smarter.
Nap – If you aren’t getting enough sleep, or you are just tired, getting distracted is too easy. Procrastinating when you are tired is just as easy. Try a 20 minute snoozer and see if it restores your productivity. If it works, that “wasted” 20 minutes will probably make the remaining hours and minutes of your day more productive enough to make up for the nap. Just don’t get sucked into laying in bed all day.

Anyone else have ideas for productive procrastination?