Your Productivity Tools and ADHD Hacks are Useless Unless You Have This One Thing.

I learned the hard way, so maybe you won’t have to.

I write a lot about productivity tools and methods.

I’ve written about time management and project planning and habit formation and self reflection. I’ve reviewed the things that make these possible, apps and notebooks and timers and even wrote a book about my favorite form of meditation.

I left something very important out.

Something that happened in December made me realize that I’d done my readers a disservice: all this productrivia was worthless without one particular practices.

Come with me to the Coliseum in Madison, Wisconsin, just after the Harlem Globetrotters performance, where I learned this crucial and painful lesson.

I was absolutely, 100% positive I had parked my car in this lot.

But as I stood there shivering in the Wisconsin winter, the halogen lights showed everybody else had parked their cars there, and were having no trouble finding them.

I, on the other hand, had been wandering the rows for about half an hour, trying to find it.