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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 3 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!

Just Do It By Crashing Forward

Written by ADDer Leave a Comment

My last post here was 12 days ago. That’s not unusual here, or for other blogs. However, my goal (one of my New Year’s Resolutions, actually) was to write here (and on my other blogs) daily.

Now, in all fairness, that’s a tall order, but 12 days between posts isn’t even in the ballpark. As Jules from Pulp Fiction might say, “That’s not even the same damn sport.”

The issue, as is so often the case for us with adult ADD and ADHD, is a combination of getting started, and keeping going. Depending upon the way your personal ADD manifests, one of those two things might be harder for you. For me, it’s the former, although, at any point if some external event causes a break in the flow, it’s just as likely as not that I will not get restarted. (One might argue that this is still the issue of getting started, just from a new, unexpected, starting place.) For example, just now, I remembered that my coffee should be ready. I know that if I leave to get that coffee, this article will likely sit in an open tab in Chrome for DAYS, and that’s if I ever get back to it at all.

On the other hand, when I do get going, the results are often really good. It’s just that I can’t necessarily make myself get going. That’s really more of the whole depression/anxiety side of things, than a pure ADD trait, but it doesn’t matter where it comes from. The fact is, that it holds me up from achieving everything I am capable of achieving, and therefore, it must be dealt with.

Actually Getting Something Done

For nearly four years, we debated what to do with the little patch of land beside the sidewalk to the front of our house. It was once nicely landscaped by the previous owners, but had been let go by us. But, we made a decision to do something… four years ago. There was a plan. To execute the plan we had to go to Home Depot. Then, it turns out that plan was pretty expensive, so we put the project on hold, you know, to do some research and stuff. Then we came up with another plan. Another reason to put it on hold.

Finally, earlier this summer after literally FOUR SUMMERS of plans and no action, my daughter and I dug it up, laid down landscape fabric, covered it with wood chips, and planted three lilac bushes. It looks pretty good. It took less than half a day. Boom! Done.

add project done — Yes, I need to pull those weeds, but if I stopped to do that after taking the picture, I wouldn’t have come back to write this article.

What happened?

It came down to the fact that after all of the years of failed plans, my wife officially gave up. (I’m not blaming her, but she has the design skills and planning skills. I just copy what I see someone else do.) The other critical factor was we bought the lilac bushes and put them in big pots, but it turns out, you can’t grow lilac bushes in a pot like that, so they were dying. It was, do something now, or throw away the plants, and the $100 we spent on them. Now, I may be ADD lazy, but I’m also a former financial planner, and a world class tightwad. The reality is that I could have thrown them away and not cared, but I knew in the back of my mind that I would have to buy something else to replace them, and when it comes to spending money, I always want to spend it on Hawaii, not house stuff.

Editors note: I just went and got the coffee. That was a foolish decision, but I really wanted it. And, having mocked myself earlier in the article, I made a deal with myself that I would, for sure, come back to writing. I usually weasel out of these kinds of deals with myself (they aren’t REAL deals), but having just talked about it, I was able to see the problem coming and avoid it by rushing up, and back down before I could move my brain onto something else. — This is the point of this article, if you can see it coming, you can avoid it (sometimes).

The problem is that motivation is fleeting. So, I did two things that ended up ensuring the project would actually go. (I didn’t do either of these things intentionally. I realized after the fact, when I was trying to figure out why I can do some things –like this project– but end up not doing other things.) First, I offered my daughter allowance money for helping out. This is important. I never let my kids down. I let myself down all the time, but never my kids. Backing out of the project now, meant taking away an opportunity that I had promised her. Not going to happen if I can help it. Second, I didn’t plan. I didn’t figure it out. We measured quickly, and we went straight to home depot. We bought that red cedar mulch (it’s what they use at the Botanic Gardens), and came straight home, unloaded the bags, and started digging. Once we had part of it ready, we stopped digging and moved onto laying down the landscape fabric and wood chips. (It’s disheartening to work hard and then still have a long way to go, so “completing” parts is a good strategy if you can make it work.) Before you know it we were done.

Go! Go! Go!

Total time from initial motivation to DOING SOMETHING: Less than 10 minutes. — This is critical.

Total time from start to finish of project: Less than a day. — Not always practical, but super helpful.

Basking in my success, I announced that on Monday I would go get sod and fix the backyard. No plan, just sod the whole thing. Plus, I would figure out how to glue down the loose bricks on the back patio.

Boom! Nice yard, no more weeds, stable bricks.

Except…..

My wife gave me that look that says, not only do I not really approve of what you are doing, you should already know why I don’t approve of it.

So, I stopped. We talked… for 45 minutes. Have we really decided to keep the brick patio? Do we really want the whole thing to be grass? Do we want a deck, a platform, a pergola?

You can probably guess what happened from there.

We planned. We agreed. NEXT WEEKEND, we went to Home Depot. It would take $1000+ to execute the plan, and not just a weekend, but WEEKENDS… several actually.

Was that really the way we wanted to spend our summer?

The result?

My yard is still full of weeds and loose bricks.

Crashing Forward

The key to living successfully with ADD / ADHD, is knowing what it is and how it affects you. I don’t mean the fancy descriptions in all those ADD Books you probably already read, or about executive function, and serotonin levels. I mean, what trips you up. When does it happen, and can you see it coming, and if so, can you head it off at the pass?

Like many people with ADD, I have some level (relatively low I think) of depression and anxiety that makes forcing myself to so something very difficult. If I can just harness any motivation that does pop up, that really helps. It’s not the whole ballgame, but it helps a lot. Unfortunately, some things that need to be done I’m never motivated to do. But, for those other things, the key is to catch that momentum, get it going, and keep it going.

I’m calling this idea crashing forward. For me (and I bet for a lot of others) the main issue is letting all of those “other” things that are in the way stop us. Nike used to say, Just Do It, and that’s right, just doing something is great, but just do what? Therein lies the rub. If just doing it, means setup, prep, thinking, designing, planning, scheduling, and so on, then it’s game over. What I need is to crash through those steps and just get going. Will I make mistakes? Yes. Will things go wrong? Yes. Will I maybe do it the wrong way and have to do it over? Again, yes.

But…

I will DO IT!

This is the key. Imagine if for the backyard, I hadn’t said anything. Imagine I had just gone out and sodded the whole thing and glued down the bricks. That doesn’t mean we couldn’t have planned out something better. It doesn’t mean we couldn’t have done it the following weekend. But, if, in the very likely circumstance, it took a little while to execute, we would have a nice yard in the meantime. Now, it’s fall, and I don’t really have time, and… here we go again.

It comes down to the difference between the long-game and the short-game. I win the long game by playing the short game. I’ll never finish a full curriculum on my own, but you bet I can finish a crash course when my energy and enthusiasm is high. That’s what I need, a way to turn everything into the crash course version. Not just any crash course, but the crashiest possible course.

That’s my new project: Crashiest.

It’s a time management, organization, to-do list, motivation, all natural ADD treatment, planning, task management, completion system. — I bought the domain name a year ago. There is still no website. Why? I’ve been looking at whether to make it a blog or a regular website, researching frameworks, looking at templates, picking fonts, deciding on how to code the site, figuring out linking and design and….

You get the picture. Obviously I have work to do, both on myself, and on that website / system / program.

I’m headed there next to build it. I made a mistake coming here and blogging about it first, but I still have some motivation, so… wish me luck.

If it worked this time (09/20/2016), by the end of the day you should see something at crashiest.com when you click. I’m going to crash forward right here, right now.

I’m going to make it a regular website. I’ll add a blog. I’m going to use the Zurb Foundation framework/template thing, but I’m going to leave off all the extras. I can add them in later if I choose.

It should be ugly to start. It should have a lame design, and need some work. It should not be ready for me to use as a project sample for my web development career. Not yet.

But, what it should be is THERE, because I did something, instead of “working on it.”