Inspired by Toyota's Kanban system, organizing tasks and ToDo items by how soon you want to do them helps plan for what is important and keeps you focused on what you chose to do.
You're trying to pay that bill, do your laundry, finish your important work project but all the workers in your head keep yelling for attention. The worker who wants you to reorganize your underwear drawer NOW is just as loud as the one responsible for making sure you eat something today and some of your workers are simply out to lunch or just didn't show up today.
You have many skills, you are good at many things, you know that reorganizing your underwear drawer isn't your top priority. So why do you find yourself with your underwear spread out all over your bed with no real recollection of how you got here? The short answer is Executive Function and Working Memory issues. The answer I'm suggesting in this post is that everything in your brain is fighting for your attention, all the time. New requests step on old requests and everyone is interrupting constantly so you can't even remember the options you are trying to consider.
This is a silly blog post metaphor but groups of people trying to get things done end up with a lot of the same problems as people with ADHD and the tools groups use can help us too.
Everyone in your head is trying to help. They don't want you to forget that one thing. They know they have something important that you should do. Your underwear drawer is a mess and you just walked by it.
Pretty much everyone's first instinct, and the advice you'll see pop up first on the internet, for how to keep all these things organized is to make a ToDo list. You dig that notebook out from under the pile of unopened mail on your desk or fire up the task tracker that is built into your phone and get started.
And everything is great. You make tasks and then you get them done. You put all the things in your head into the list. You are unstoppable. You will never forget another bill or be late on another project.
But you slowly begin to dread the moment you open that notebook or app. Things were great when you had 10 open tasks on your list but now you have 100 and you find yourself more confused each time you read through the list trying to pick the best one to do. Never fear, a quick internet search says you should give them labels by priority! Now you have your 10 high priority tasks on your list ready to go. All is well again.
Your list grows, you are a machine about meticulously labeling each task you put on your list but now you have 30 high priority tasks and it's been 3 weeks since you opened your medium priority list and you are getting a sinking feeling that there might be some important stuff in there.
Here's where it always crashes and burns for me. You miss something that was labeled medium priority that wasn't medium. You can't even look at your high priority list because it reminds you that you will never keep up with what you need to do and it will grow forever. You've thought about adding a Very High Priority category to your list but that seems wrong for reasons you can't quite put your finger on.
You ask yourself if maybe you are the problem. Maybe if you just worked harder or better you wouldn't be so behind. You resolve to work harder, to be better. Tomorrow, tomorrow is the day you'll get back on track.
ADHD makes all these problems worse but the dirty secret in the productivity world is that no one is using their ToDo list well. Don't beat yourself up. You aren't the problem. There isn't a silver bullet that will make all this go away but there are ways to manage how you make decisions and find focus without a sense of creeping dread.
If you are seriously interested in productivity you have probably heard of Kanban, and if you haven't it's much less scary than it sounds. Kanban is our first Japanese word and it comes out of the work Toyota did in their early years as an upstart car company competing against the big American car companies.
The core problem that Toyota and other car makers face is that there is a lot of stuff that goes into making a car. You can't really just make one of each part and then put the whole car together one at a time. So you make a bunch of each thing and then put a bunch of cars together. But now you have 27 steering wheels sitting in storage but no seats to finish the half-finished cars that are also now sitting in storage.
Accountants and Business Executives hate having stuff that costs money, like steering wheels and half-finished cars, sitting around, not making money. To add insult to injury, they also have to pay for warehouses to store the stuff that is sitting around not making money. What can these poor Accountants and Business Executives do? (and why are we on this huge tangent? I though this was about ADHD?)
Toyota's answer turns out to be an answer for all the questions above. Smart people in the early days of Toyota thought that maybe they can go back to that one car at a time idea while still letting a bunch of people work together to do it. They called their new tool Kanban - literally "signboard" in Japanese.
They used cards and boards. Actual, paper cards and actual, giant wooden boards to put the cards on. Everything you need to build a car had a space on the board. When you decide to build a car, as factories that build cars often do, you would put cards for all each thing that was needed for the car on the board. The people who made those things would see those cards and put cards on the board for the things they need to build their things and so on. Everyone could just look at the board and see what needs to be done based on what cards were there. They would grab the card and build the thing and then pass the card and the thing to the team that asked for it.
The idea is simple but it changed how business is done. There are famous books about it.
Now, instead of high-powered managers telling workers to please, please stop making so many steering wheels - a system where people in charge "push" workers to do stuff - workers could look at the board and see what was most important for them and "pull" the card for the work they were going to do.
This system lets workers control how much work they can handle and helped them do the most important things first. There wasn't space to put cards for 27 steering wheels on the board so workers knew to go do something else instead. The cards and boards helped workers work together without anyone having to yell at them and without having to yell at each other. Good managers also like this system because they can see on the board where things are piling up or getting stuck and help fix problems. Cards should "flow" from ToDo to done without piling up or getting stuck.
We can use these same ideas to solve our ToDo list problem by switching the way we organizing from making piles of work we push ourselves to do, to us, the workers, pulling work as fast or slow as makes sense for us. We aren't concerned with making steering wheels as fast as possible, we control where we focus our work so we can be as effective as possible. We can focus not on productivity for it's own sake but on building the cars that make up our life.
People with ADHD need help with Executive Function and Working Memory. We need structure to make good decisions and we need help remembering those decisions, all without having to think about too many options at one time.
The system I recommend, and have used for a long time is part organization and part sensibility but it works for people with ADHD because everything happens in bite-sized pieces.
You can think of this like the priority labels from our failed ToDo list but in order of when you want to do things and not simply by what's important and what's not. Important things should be sooner and less important things can be later. As you work you can look at each category and move things up or down based on what else you have to do. When you have something new for the list you put in the right place.
The trick is to think of this like building cars. You don't want to pile up steering wheels in your Now category (or any other category for that matter). You start with the idea that you are ready to do some work. If you have something in your Now category, great, you know that you have already done your planning and can just do that thing. No Executive Function battle - you can trust that your past self did good work planning. You can also trust your past self not to put 27 things in your Now category.
If you have 27 things in your Now category or you don't have any, don't panic. You just need to do some planning.
To be easy on your executive Functioning, you want to avoid infinite planning loops. This is what happens every time you look at the 30 high priority items on your failed ToDo list. You are invited to think about what is important with all 30 items each time you look at your list. That's driving the creeping dread that your task list inspires.
Instead, you can start at the Now category and work you way down. Look at each category separately. If you have too many things in a category all you have to do is pick something less important than the others and move it down. If something is extra important you can move it up. Your goal is to look at each category and decide what the most important things are in each one. As you go further into the future you can allow more items because you only have to look in this future categories occasionally when you run out of work in your sooner categories. This is how the system lets you be in control of how you take on work. You choose to grab work from future categories into nearer categories. If you have too much to think about in one of your categories you can think about priorities only for what's in that category and drop the lowest priority stuff down to a further away category, out of your way.
You can do planning in small bite size pieces as you want to take on work. It's easy to get less important tasks out of your way so you can see what's important. You know that you can just do things in your Now category (or quickly grab something from Next) so you don't get overwhelmed with planning.
When you're on al roll, you can just keep grabbing things from Now and then Next, pulling tasks up into your Now category. If you get distracted, your Now category is there to remind you what you already decided.
When things change and new tasks get added to your plate, you can take a second and put it in context with the couple items you have at the top of your list. Should you put your underwear drawer organization project in your Now category? Probably not but it's an easy decision. Is my underwear drawer more important that the 1 or two things in my Now category. Not, is it more important than any/all of my 30 High Priority Tasks.
The goal is to keep yourself focused on Doing while you can. Don't get distracted or sidetracked by things you have already decided are less important. When you're on a roll, stay on a roll. When you're struggling to get stuff done, make it as easy as possible to choose something to do.
I'll throw a second Japanese word at you now: Kaizen or roughly "continual change for the better." This is the sensibility or Practice part of my system. On top of the Kanban board workers are expected and empowered to follow Kaizen and notice when things are going wrong and to figure out how to fix them.
This process of improvement doesn't involve tearing down the whole Kanban board and starting over, we need to keep building cars after all, but instead to make changes in bite size pieces. If we ended up with too many steering wheels we should take a look at the board and the process and figure out why so we can make everything better. Being able to see mistakes and understand them is how we get better. If we hide our mistakes or pretend that our process is perfect we miss the opportunity to manage what is really happening and make it easier.
Failure is part of having ADHD. You won't be perfect. You'll forget stuff, you'll do the wrong stuff. It's just going to happen. My answer is that you should stop trying to be perfect. By pretending to be perfect, we're missing the opportunity to manage how work when things are going wrong. If you are getting overwhelmed and overcommitted, maybe you need to allow fewer tasks in your Now and Next. If something is stuck that you can't seem to do, you can see it, and think about what might make it easier.
By expecting failure to happen, we can be ready to try again. There isn't a perfect system out there. We don't need to tear down our board and try a new system. There isn't something wrong with us, we're not a failure, we just need to try again. We can get a little better, we can find out what makes our hard tasks less hard. We succeed by letting ourselves try repeatedly, by catching ourselves when we're on a roll, by being able to see what's important right now.
Put something in Now and do it. Start the process of using the system. Don't be a perfectionist. We get better by trying (and yes, also failing) and then trying again, each time seeing if we can make things a little easier.
A task system won't magically make everything easy. This is the best thing I've seen and I've used it myself and with teams big and small with great effect. It plays to your strengths as someone with ADHD and helps you through your weak areas. It survives when you use it wrong, if you neglect it, if you pile too much on yourself. You can always get back to a good place just by running the planning and doing process, and trying again. You'll find what's best for you by making little changes and seeing what works.
I have an app that is designed to use this method for your tasks and the other things you need to do to run your life but this also works great with other task apps (if you don't let them sidetrack you) or just post it notes stuck to your mirror.
Good Luck!
