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ADHD Mind Backstop

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.

ADHD ADD Organization Tip

Written by ADDer 1 Comment

Some tips and techniques to help adults with ADHD-ADD or kids with ADHD-ADD are complicated. Others are little tricks that are so easy that they might seem like they couldn’t possibly help, but they do.

One trick that many people with ADHD-ADD find helpful is to add color to standard organization tools.

Customizing ADHD-ADD Planners

If you have a planner you use as your ADD planner, try adding some color to it and see how the planner’s organizational effectiveness increases.

There are some requirements.

First, the colors must be mutable, that is they must change from page to page, weekly, monthly, or whatever. Having a colored block or area pre-printed on your planner won’t help, because your mind will eventually block it out.

Essentially, the ADHD-ADD mind begins to ignore things it perceives as common, boring, or rote. The first time it encounters a colorful page in your planner, it will gleefully pay attention to all of the colors (perhaps at the same time).

But, as each page goes on, the brain becomes more used to the colors and perceives them not as new and novel, but as the same old thing. As such, the ADHD mind will not divert its attention from whatever else is occupying it to make anything other than a cursory note of those colors.

Instead of getting pre-colored pages or sheets, use highlighters or markers to add your own dynamic colors.

For example, highlight your most critical task in the to-do list in yellow. Highlight that critical can’t miss meeting in orange. Highlight your spouse’s birthday in blue. Write that important website to check out in purple ink.

Be sure to not overdo the color. Too many colors becomes just so much noise to any brain, especially the ADHD-ADD brain. Try and have just four or five colors (not including your usual black or blue ink) and use them sparingly.

Lastly, do not highlight the same things the same way each time. Again, the key is to make the page look new and different, not to always have a 9:00am staff meeting highlighted in orange.

Change the color used to highlight your critical to-do item with the color you used to highlight your critical meeting. Also, experiment with thick highlighting, think highlighting, highlighting a whole line and highlighting just a few key words.

You’ll find that there are two major benefits.

One benefit is that you have to actually go through that list you only half-read anymore in order to find the items that you want to highlight which means you will get more exposure to your whole list.

The second benefit is that your mind’s eye will constantly pop to each colored item because they are constantly in different locations and different colors which means you might actually not ignore that super-critical-top-of-the-list item that somehow normally just seems to blend in with things so instead you end up focusing on something like setting the Tivo to record So You Think You Can Dance.

ADD ADHD and the Failure of the Important Pile

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Important Papers People with ADD/ADHD are no different than other people when it comes to paperwork. A never ending flow of documents arrives into our lives via mail, email, printers, copiers, and of course, paperwork that is simply handed to us. In this blizzard of documents is everything from receipts, to bills, to warranties, to contracts, to instructions, and the list goes on and on and on.

To deal with this avalanche of important papers, many people, including many ADDers create an “important” pile in which they place those pieces of paper that flow into their lives that are meaningful for one reason or another. For some people, this results in some form of organization because at least when they remember the important reason they needed that paperwork, they know right where it will be.

Unfortunately, the same method of organization spells nothing but trouble for many people with ADD. The key element to making the important pile work is remembering what is in it, and then doing something about it. For plenty of men and women with ADHD, the important pile becomes too much like Las Vegas. What’s in the important pile stays in the important pile.

Organization Tip For People With ADD-ADHD

The first step in better organization is understanding where the faults lie in organizing efforts you have made before.

When it comes to the important file, the flaw for many with ADD/ADHD is that the pile encompasses too many things. Receipts are important, so are instruction manuals, children’s immunization records, and bills. But, some of the things in the important pile are important simply because they should not be lost, while other things are important because something needs to be done with them. Mixing the two together spells trouble for those with ADD trying to get organized.

People with ADD are likely to remember again and again that their credit card bill is sitting in the important pile. Unfortunately, most of those times, they will not be in a place where they can do anything about it. Remembering in a restaurant or at a movie theater doesn’t help. Even when they do remember when they are standing right by it, they might be in the middle of doing something else, and just plan on doing it in “just a minute.” Next thing you know, something else is running around the brain, and the credit card bill has been forgotten again.

A technique that can help is to create two important pile. One important pile is for paperwork that has to be kept, either of a specific reason, or “just in case.” The other important pile is for papers that something has to happen with. This includes things like bills, offers, things that require a response, and so on.

Once you’ve created two important piles, it becomes less critical to remember specific elements of the pile. You don’t have to remember your credit card bill is due, all you have to remember is that you have a important to-do pile.

Why It Works for ADD/ADHD People

People with ADD-ADHD are perfectly capable of paying bills, filling out forms, and returning messages and emails. It’s just that other things keep coming up. Those things lead to a response to do it later that gets forgotten about.

However, everyone, whether they have ADD or not, has those times when paying bills or doing paperwork doesn’t sound too bad. In fact, there may be some times when you actually want to do those activities. But, if you walk over to a huge pile of everything important, you might change your mind. Or, worse, you might get half way through, pat yourself on the back for how much paperwork you just took care of, and then not notice that the really important thing that is due in a day or two is two more pieces of paper down. By the time you get back to the stack, it is too late.

Even more treacherous, is going through old paperwork that needs to be filed, has a tendency to create is own distractions. “Oh yeah, I keep meaning to alphabetize these things.” “I can’t do this until I get a new paper shredder. Maybe I should do some research online really quickly.”

But, if you have an important to do something with pile, the dynamic changes. First, the pile will be smaller. Second, such a pile is less likely to distract someone. A Visa bill offers little compelling entertainment. Third, if you do get distracted, at least everything you have done up to that point is something that needed to be done right away, instead of having spent 60% of your time filing.

Try making yourself two important piles and dividing them out. You might just find that you are less prone to miss important deadlines and due dates with things like mail and forms and bills.

ADD/ADHD, ADD, ADHD, ADD Organization, Organization Tips, ADD Tips