I’m sure I’m not alone in spending more time building structures to be productive than actually producing. I’m always trying to find ways to “trick” myself into getting things done, with varying levels of success.
For me, it’s always a struggle to keep going with anything once the novelty wears off. Finding new ways to structure and gamify work helps for a while, but very few things stick more than a few months. That said, every once in a while I find a thing that does become an actual tool in my toolset. I’m thinking specifically of Pomodoro timers for me. If I don’t want to spend too much time hyper focusing, the intervals help me break out and evaluate, rather than working for 9 hours and forgetting to eat.
It’s been useful and I remember to implement it, I don’t have a ton of tools of strategies like that. What tools or strategies both work for you AND you seem able to actually implement them reasonably consistently?
I print off a calendar for the year, creating a shorthand note on my current aims, I scribble in the shorthand on the calendar on what I want to do for the week and check it off as I go. Staying on top of my hydration and a healthy dose of “Doing less is doing more” has made me as productive as I can be with no prescription assistance. Best thing you can do is build a personalized toolkit with a legitimate adhd book.
Loop Habit Tracker from F-Droid (Android only). It notifies me with a yes/no question about certain habits I’m trying to maintain. I set the notifications to come back immediately if swiped away without an answer. Keeps me accountable.
I’m gonna check this out, thanks!
Going for many super short walks during the day. Office workers are supposed take a 5 minute stretch every hour to stretch, so use that. This helps me declutter the brain.
Starting a task is hard, but so is stopping! Attacking “hard” tasks with momentum instead of willpower: I don’t want to organize the freezer. I can tidy the floor in the storage room. Then empty the laundry basket. Now I have momentum and can attempt a breaching maneuver on the freezer: throw away some old food from the freezer. Usually this snowballs into sorting the freezer. If it doesn’t, then hey at least I threw out some old food.
Laundry has always been a struggle for me. I’m guilty of the classic laundry chair.
I got one of those shelves that have the square shelf things and several cloth drawers for them. I don’t really fold anything anymore. Socks in one cube, underwear in another, tank tops in their own, shorts in theirs, etc. I do hang my pants and long sleeve things. And I have a longer box thing for my tshirts to lay out semi flat in so they’re not getting too wrinkled.
It’s helped me a ton. Just throw everything in it’s box and tada. I like sorting things, but just hate the folding part so this has been a saver.
I do a simpler variant (2 bins) of this and it helps. I hope that someday I’ll get to more granular categories.
Bullet Journal — the original method described by Carrol, not the fancy spread-and-decoration bullshit. Write everything down as it occurs to you, indicate whether it’s a note or a to-do with different bullet points, and at the end of the day decide which tasks to put in tomorrow’s notes and which to discard. Date each page and list the page number in the index of it contains long-term notes (eg. quite from a contractor, birthday present ideas).
It’s easy, it’s fast, and it doesn’t break if you forget to do it for a day or two or two hundred.
