I’d like to share with you how I use my computer, in a way that is (for me) ADHD friendly and well-suited for implementing my organization system. Tools are important to any organizational and productivity system, and optimizing your tools for your brain and your workflow are important. My computer is my most important productivity tool, where my work happens, and where my life/chore/errand/calendar organization happens, so it should be an interesting example of an optimized key tool.

As promised in my previous posts about organization, I will now go into some detail about my own organizational system. But before I start talking about it, and how I came to develop it, I’d like to emphasize a few points, or more specifically, three caveats, lest Zeus strike me down with a thunderbolt for my hubris:

• Caveat the First: My system is a work in progress. Even though it is overall very helpful, it’s always falling apart a little bit. Some parts of it work better than others, and it’s constantly evolving as I try to shore up the parts that fall apart more easily. Sometimes, it’s in a better state than others.
• Caveat the Second: What works for me might well not work for you, dear reader. I reckon you and I have very different brains. Even if a psychiatrist would categorize me and you with all the same formally recognized traits, we still have literally different brains, and literally different histories, cultural backgrounds, and personal struggles.
• Caveat the Third: Nothing in this system is particularly novel. It is however very tweaked to my own personality. I present this not to claim that I’ve developed anything new, but as a worked example of applying existing practices to my own life, in hopes that it will be useful to you.

And it is indeed a very personal system and a continuously evolving system. I am sensitive to minor issues. If a TODO list system is insufficiently ergonomic for me, I’ll get overwhelmed by it, or intimidated by it, disheartened, blocked out by my personal “Wall of Awful”, and I will default to not using any organizational system at all, and simply relying on my natural faculties – my naturally poor prospective memory – to make sure I do the things I need to do.

In my previous post on organization, I concluded with this statement:

As everyone’s brain works differently (whether ADHD or not), people differ tremendously in what their ideal organizational systems are. For me, I am much less productive if I have a less than ideal system – the stakes are very high. But even for people who can be productive on any system, I think that tailoring their system to their brain, their lifestyle, their job and schedule and hobbies, can have amazing results.

Memory Leak

I have an excellent memory. I have a terrible memory.

Well, which one is it?

This is a confusing state to be in. It can be frustrating to people around me. How is it – my father used to ask me when I was in high school – that I could remember all the lessons and readings for my tests in school, and get all the good grades, but couldn’t ever remember to do the simplest task or household chore, or to bring with me the simplest item? And of course the fact that I remember these conversations from so long ago is a bit of a case in point.

I’ve been feeling recently like I’ve been spinning my wheels in my personal life. I’m pressing on the metaphorical accelerator as hard as I can, probably too hard for safety, and instead of moving forward, the wheels are just spinning, spinning, spinning. I think a large part of it is my perspective of time. “Time is canceled,” my friends and I would say continuously during the lockdown. And it isn’t back, not yet, not how it used to be, not for me.

For a time, I tried to cultivate an interest in Go. Not this Go, but this Go. The interest didn’t last long – like chess, I had a hard time getting up to even a fairly basic level of competence. And I quickly developed another enthusiastic interest to replace it – sometimes, an interest just doesn’t work out, and it’s nobody’s fault, and you have to just move on and not get too sad, because there’s plenty of fish in the sea.