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Forgetfulness & ADHD? How This Simple App Saved My Workday (And My Sanity)
Ubiquitous reminders are sometimes what it takes.
My working memory is basically shit.
I can be introduced to you and thirty seconds later have no clue about your name. My partner tells me what kind of breakfast sandwich she’d like, and in the time it takes me to get to the drive-thru I’ve forgotten.
After decades of fighting it and feeling guilty, stupid, and ridiculously inadequate, I learned about my ADHD brain, and things changed.
Most people have a bucket for their memory, I realized. I have a colander.
Once I stopped treating my colander-head like a bucket, things got better. I learned to make up little songs about people’s names (Dan, Dan, the Airplane Man! Oh, Ben, Wa Kenobi!). I didn’t ask my partner to tell me what she wanted; I had her text it to me on the way.
That’s not my hack, nor is it peculiar to ADHD. Everybody forgets things some of the time; that’s the whole reason the sticky-note industry exists.
There aren’t enough sticky notes in the world for my ADHD brain, though, and to add to the problem, I work best when I work in multiple locations. So putting a sticky note on my desk won’t be very useful, because I’m only working at my desk about 30% of the time.
Defining the Problem: Easy, Obvious, and Inevitable
In order to find the right system, I needed three things to happen, things that were similar to the Voweling My Habits framework:
- It needed to be as easy to use as a scribbled piece of paper
- It needed to be really obvious about what needed to be done (no subtle clues or elaborate color-coding; hit me over the head with a clue-by-four, please).
- It needed to inevitably show up somewhere that I would see it, no matter where I was working.
That third one had a pretty obvious answer: my watch. It remains the most useful tool to externalize my various executive functions, and it’s something I put on first thing in the morning and don’t take off until I go to bed.
