How I get sh*t done with ADHD - Part 1

Chaos control to Major Shoh

Ever since being diagnosed with ADHD in my late twenties, I’ve been on a journey of self-discovery and self-understanding. Even now, almost eight years out from diagnosis, I am still making new connections about ADHD and its effects on my life.

What I’ve learned is that it affects pretty much everything. To the point where sometimes I struggle with knowing where my ADHD ends and I begin. And that can feel heavy.

Still, no amount of money would make me want to relive the years before I knew I had ADHD, when I was mired in shame and believed something was inherently wrong with me. For most of my adulthood, I was convinced that I was lazy, had issues with willpower, and simply wasn’t trying hard enough. I became a controlling perfectionist in hopes that I could “fix” my shortcomings, only to find myself crumbling under impossible expectations.

⬆️ Me for the first 27 years of my life

Those feelings and issues didn’t magically go away when I got diagnosed. My brain still pisses me off on the regular, and I have plenty of bad days. But putting together the puzzle pieces of my disorder contributed to me figuring out strategies that work with my brain instead of against it. I’ve also done a lot of work to unpack my internalized ableism (because as long as society operates under a neurotypical model, my neurodivergence is rightly categorized as a disability).

There are so many “life hacks” and bits of advice floating around out there that just do not work for folks with ADHD, so I want to share tools and strategies that have actually helped me. Turns out I have a lot of them, so I’m splitting this up into two parts to keep the length manageable (I know our attention spans aren’t the greatest 😉).

If you have ADHD or suspect that you do, I hope this information will be helpful for you. I hope you get some new ideas for things to think about, try, and tweak so that they work for you and your life. Remember that novelty-seeking is a huge component of ADHD, which means for us, tools often work until they don’t. So try to think about what strategies might be useful right now, instead of getting hung up on finding the best, most perfect strategy that will last you forever.

If you don’t have ADHD, chances are that someone you love does (even if you or they don’t know it yet)! ADHD doesn’t look the same for everyone and my struggles may look different from other people’s, but I hope this information can help you generally understand ADHD folks better and give you a window into what we’re up against on a daily basis.

With that, let’s get into it! I’m going to keep Part 1 more big picture stuff, and I’ll save the deeper specifics for Part 2.

Medication

While medication might be the most obvious ADHD tool, it’s also the thing that has had the largest positive impact on my life. So I would be remiss not to mention it right off the bat.

I put off pursuing ADHD meds for several years because I was holding on to the misguided belief that I should be able to push through without them (remember the internalized ableism I mentioned above?). I was worried about all the side effects I’d heard about, and I didn’t like the idea of “depending” on something for the rest of my life.

I know that ADHD meds are a privilege and can be prohibitively costly. I know that being able to get them often requires jumping through hoops with various providers—trust me, I’ve been there! I’ve answered the invasive, judgmental questions. I’ve taken the drug tests. I’ve had long gaps without medication while trying to deal with insurance and establish care with a new provider. My meds, thankfully, have not been a part of the ADHD med shortages, but I know folks who’ve dealt with that too.

Even still, I would wholeheartedly say: GET THE MEDS IF YOU ARE ABLE TO. There are a variety of different meds available for ADHD, not all of which are stimulants. I tried a few variations before I found what worked best for me and had the least side effects (and pretty much all of the more annoying side effects went away within a couple months of use). I’m on generic Ritalin and have only needed one dosage increase in five years of taking it.

Meds make my life infinitely better. They radically improve my concentration and quiet my brain. I also like that I can choose when I want to take them—I usually take med breaks on weekends unless there’s a project I want additional focus for, for example.

Meds are not for everyone, and that’s fine! But I often lament how much easier my life would have been if I’d gotten on them earlier. I literally went through all of law school popping caffeine pills for studying and before the 3-4 hour exams I had to take because I needed caffeine to function but I hate coffee. So if you’ve been considering trying meds, take this as my ringing endorsement!

Getting additional help

Medication is amazing, and it’s not a miraculous cure-all. In fact, if you don’t have a good foundational understanding of your ADHD, how it shows up in your life, and all the emotional baggage you’ve attached to it, medication alone may not do much for you.

I know that therapy and ADHD coaching are not financially feasible for everyone, but if you can afford to hire a professional to help you with your ADHD, it’s worth it. Therapy in general can be a wonderful tool too. I’ve worked with an ADHD coach and therapist in the past, and I also spent many years working with a therapist who wasn’t specifically helping me with ADHD but who was ADHD-knowledgeable enough to assist me with navigating issues when they did come up. It can be difficult to find a therapist who is the right fit for your needs, but if you manage it, it can help a lot with self-esteem, self-talk, and keeping the ADHD gremlins at bay.

Thankfully, there are now tons of great free resources for folks with ADHD as well, like educational Instagram and TikTok accounts (just make sure you check the person’s credentials) and online articles and webinars (ADDitude mag is a popular place to find them). Knowledge is power, and the more you learn about the disorder, the more thoughtfully you’ll be able to make decisions for yourself.

Another way you can get help is by asking for accommodations at school or work (if your workplace has 15 or more employees). Because ADHD is categorized as a disability under The Americans with Disabilities Act (the ADA), if you’re willing to disclose your disability to your school or workplace, you can request “reasonable accommodations.” You can learn more about workplace accommodations here and school accommodations here. If you’re a parent interested in ADHD accommodations for your school-age child, there is tons of info available online about that process too.

Writing everything down somewhere

People with ADHD usually have problems with working memory (the ability to turn information into action), memorization (the ability to remember things conveyed to you, like instructions), and long-term memory (memory over time). It sucks. It can make us appear forgetful and flighty. And it can get us into a lot of trouble.

The only effective solution I’ve found for dealing with this is to write down absolutely everything that is important and that I know I would like to remember. It also helps to have a detailed organizational strategy for finding and using that information later.

Here are some examples of what that looks like for me:

• I live and die by my calendar. I know a lot of folks with ADHD like to have a physical calendar, but I do not. I use Google Calendar. It’s accessible to me across all of my devices. I can easily color code labeled calendars within my overall calendar (for example, I have an individual event calendar for me, a shared one for me and Jessie, one for exercise, one for dog boarding appointments, one for birthdays and anniversaries, etc.). And the “tasks” feature is a godsend that I use for a lot of recurring tasks, including remembering to change my contacts or change out our toothbrush heads, remembering to check on our houseplants, remembering to pay off our credit cards each month, and dozens more. If I didn’t keep these things in my calendar, to my brain it would be like they didn’t exist.

• I use my phone contacts to store information I don’t want to forget about people I love. I add pronouns to the end of each person’s last name in their phone contact so I’m immediately reminded of them when they text or call. When someone gives me their mailing address, I add it to their phone contact so I’ll always have it. Same thing with birthdays. I also use the “notes” section in contacts to remember things like a friend’s usual coffee order, t-shirt size, favorite flower, etc.

• My notes app (Evernote for me) is my best friend and constant companion. I am not joking. Google Calendar and Evernote are the apps I spend the most time in. I use Evernote specifically because it allows me to organize stacks, notebooks, and notes, and tiered organization is very helpful for me visually. Again, I know a lot of people like to write physical lists, but having electronic lists allows me to access them on any device at any time, and I can use the search function to locate specific things. If I have an idea for my novel in the middle of the night? I can throw it in Evernote. If I run out of an ingredient while cooking? I can add it to my grocery list note. If I read about a really cool Colorado hike? I can put it in my CO hiking note. If I need a hex code from my branding for a design element? I can snag it from my branding cheat sheet. I have found infinite uses for my notes app, and you can pry it from cold, dead fingers.

• Google Drive folders, docs, spreadsheets, and forms are the MVPs of my life. Sensing a theme that I like for everything to be electronic and available to me whether I’m on my laptop, iPad, or iPhone? Yeah, me too. The organization I work for uses Google Drive (and I also use it for my personal and business organizing), so I have a couple of running to-do list Google docs that I use to write down every. single. task. assigned to me at work so I don’t forget. When I finish a task, I move it to a different section of the doc so I can always look back and see what I did and when I did it. I also have a Google doc for meeting notes, and I take notes during every meeting, especially about tasks assigned to me. Then, after each meeting, I move the tasks into my to-do list docs so they don’t get left behind. Outside of work, all of my old photos and videos are organized in Google folders and subfolders by year and event so I can find them easily. I keep spreadsheets for things like houseplant care (where I write down when I last watered and fertilized each plant) and my business earnings. Like notes apps, there are infinite uses for Google Drive for the ADHDer.

You don’t have to use the tools I do. If physical notebooks and sticky notes work for you, that’s great. But if you keep expecting yourself to remember things, then beat yourself up when you can’t, I promise you that getting into the habit of writing everything down somewhere will change your life. Accept that memory will never be your brain’s forte, and err on the side of writing down too much—in my experience, there’s no such thing—rather than too little.

Habit stacking and hacking

Folks with ADHD are notoriously bad at starting new habits unless it’s something we’re super excited about (which can instead lead to hyperfocusing on the new thing to the detriment of everything else in our lives until we burn out—fun!!). The best ways I’ve found to deal with the problem are to stack the new habit and hack the new habit.

Habit stacking is the act of stacking a new habit onto already existing habits. Let’s say you want to start wearing sunscreen daily. If you already have an existing morning routine of washing your face and putting on moisturizer, you could add the step of putting on sunscreen right after the moisturizer (and even place your sunscreen bottle by your moisturizer bottle to act as a visual cue) to help you remember. By taking advantage of existing brain connections, it’s easier to build the new habit.

Habit hacking is a phrase of my own making, and it means removing as many barriers as possible to making a new habit stick. It can involve a variety of different things, such as aiming for a specific time of day, clever placement of objects, reminders and timers, using helpful technology (like apps), or bringing in outside help.

To give you an example from my own life, I recently decided to start taking a magnesium glycinate supplement before bed. I originally put the pill bottle with all of my nighttime stuff in my bathroom, but more nights than not I was forgetting to take the supplement until I was already in bed. And once I was settled in bed, I had no desire to get back up and take the pills (ADHDers struggle mightily with transitions!), so I just wouldn’t take them. To fix that, I hacked the habit by putting the pill bottle in the drawer of my bedside table. Now if I forget to take them before I get into bed, there’s a much smaller barrier to me doing so.

There are tons of different ways to play around with habit stacking and hacking and what works for you will likely vary depending on the specific habit you want to establish, so don’t be afraid to experiment. Yes, you can lament that it shouldn’t be so damn hard to do things, but after that, please throw your brain a bone and try to figure out what it needs to do the thing.

That, my friends, is Part 1! In Part 2, coming soon, I’ll get into the nitty gritty of very specific things that help me survive the neurotypical hellscape my brain has found itself born into.

Queerly yours,

Shohreh

To get in touch, shoot me an email at hello@shohrehdavoodi.com. For more from me, follow me on Instagram, TikTok, and Threads.

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