Standard task lists get overwhelming and confusing quickly. This is especially true for people with ADHD who have more limited working memory. This workflow is designed to help you get your tasks out of your head and then zero in on the most important couple things all without forgetting or trying to hold 100 things in your brain at once.
The ADHDAlly app is set up to do this planning by default. There's a generous free trial if you want to give it a try. You can also do this with cards, sticky notes, or a notebook, though it will work best with things you can move around.
This process is designed to help you calm anxiety and feel good about the choices you make so when you are ready to do work you can jump right in without wondering if you are making the right choices or forgetting something vital. Going through the steps is as important as having your list so I'd recommend not trying to cut corners or skipping anything. It will get really quick once you have a little practice.
At the end of your planning, you'll have a couple tasks that are ready to go and you'll know that all the other, less important things are safely hidden away where they won't distract you and also won't be forgotten.
There are a couple steps but don't worry, each one is simple and helps you to get more focused and less confused. Each step is nice and bite-sized so you won't overwhelm your working memory.
"What if I forget about something?" This is one of the hardest things for people with ADHD to manage. We've all forgotten something important and paid the price for it. The anxiety around having some mystery task that is critically important but that we just can't quite remember hangs over us. Limited working memory means it's easy for important things to get knocked out of our brains where they lurk, ready to cause trouble for us.
This step is about managing that fear.
The key is to stop trying to remember. It just doesn't work for us even if we try really, really hard this time. We have to get all those things out of our brains into a place where they won't be forgotten.
Create a task for everything that is on your mind. Don't worry about being perfect or if you're adding too much. It's fine to use short hand just make sure you include enough that you'll remember what it is when you look at it a bit later. Making sure you don't have anything still on your mind is the most important part of this step. Put all these tasks in the "Everything Else" category. This category is our catch all for anything you could want to do.
At the end of this process, you shouldn't have anything that is hanging over you. It's all safely on your list.
With everything safely on your list, you can solve the next problem: "What should I do?" A normal task list forces you to prioritize every time you look at the list and it's exhausting. You have to consider too many possibilities and you have to do it again each time you have to look at the list. You want to set yourself up so you've already answered the question when you look at your list to pick something new to do.
Look through your "Everything Else" category, move any tasks that you think would be important to finish in the next week up one category. If you added a task that doesn't matter or otherwise doesn't actually need to be done, you can send it down into the Archive. Ideally, you want to send 10 or 15 tasks up to the Soon category. You should be able to ignore most of the tasks in Everything Else because you should do them but not this week.
Now, you can close your "Everything Else" category and go to the "Soon" group. Do the same process again, except you want to send things up that should be done in the next day or two. If you end up with more than about 15 tasks in Soon, you should probably send some down again. This prioritization is much easier because instead of all of your tasks you only have to think about 10 or so. Still too many to hold in your head but you can think about them one or two at a time and know that they are all reasonably important.
If you caught onto the pattern you'll know that we're going to look at "Next" next. Here's where things get interesting. We should only have 3-5 tasks here and they are all actually important. The great thing is that even with our limited working memory, we can actually consider 3-5 things to make good decisions. At each step, we've been reducing the number of items we have to consider until we have a small enough number we actually can hold them in our brains. If you follow the process, you can also feel comfortable that you don't have any lurking important items. We've also solved the problem of overwhelming ourselves with too many choices when we are ready to work. Just look at our 3-5 and pick the most relevant one to do.
When you are ready to do something, you grab one from the Next category and move it up to Now. Resist the urge to put a lot of tasks in Now. This is how you keep yourself from starting 12 different things and not finishing anything. The task in Now is the one you've decided to do now. If you find yourself confused or doing random things, take another look at your Now list as a reminder.
Now is such an important concept for people with ADHD there's a whole page for it in the ADHDAlly app. This is how time works for us - there are things that need immediate attention and there's things that don't. Now and not now. We need help controlling what we are focusing on.
The Now category and Now page are about helping you control your focus. You can use it to control what you want to be paying attention to. Everything else is invisible and won't distract you. Try not to multi-task, it doesn't work.
You also have the most important things ready to use on your Now page. For tasks, you can see all the notes you've made and quickly add more. This is great for keeping track of where you are on the task and any important info you might otherwise forget.
When you finish something you can jump over to the planning page and grab the next most relevant thing from your Next category. No confusing reprioritization of your list required.
The process stays the same as you keep going. If you have a new task, throw it in Everything Else. If you run out of things to do in Next, grab some from Soon. If you're worried about missing something, go through each section like before.
The goal is to get yourself out of confusion and worry mode and feel good about your list. When you're ready to go, there's nothing to stop you from grabbing something from Next and doing it.
With a little practice, you should be able to do this planning in bite size bits so it's never much work.
If you get overwhelmed and stop using the system, you just run the process again to get back to a good place.
ADHD makes it hard to control what we're focused on. We end up with too little or too much focus and on whatever caught our attention last. This process is designed to put you in charge of what catches your attention and what you forget about.
Fighting against your natural tendency to get excited about what's right in front of you is a losing battle. Trying harder won't make you better at remembering things. Don't fall into the trap of believing that you can willpower your way into being able to focus.
This process works because it helps you control what you forget about. If something isn't a priority, it's fine if you forget. That task will stay in the app (or written on your card) until you decide it's important. Setting yourself up by putting the task you want to do in Now let's you get excited (or at least tolerant) about that task. If you're going to get distracted, make sure it's by the things you want to get done.
Ultimately, empowering yourself to make choices in a way that you are in charge of will help you to feel in control and much less anxious.
The last, and maybe most important, reason that this works is you don't have to do it perfectly for it to help. Jump in and give it a try. You can't really mess it up. You'll get better at using the system as you run it but it will be helpful right away.
