Audio Transcript:
To run my life and businesses, I do use other powerful tools like Google Drive to store and organize all kinds of projects, production protocols, prototype documentation… videos, pictures, records… it’s all there. We also use ASANA quite a bit to manage projects, project notes, quotes… In fact, through the years I’ve used many different organizational and note taking apps.
These tools are great and, in many situations, essential, but if you have ADHD or ADHD tendencies, don’t be surprised if you aren’t too successful using an app to run your daily life, to plan your day.
Why not? They don’t keep your plans in sight and in mind, and they are too complex.
See, anything online is only helpful when you have the app open. When you close the app, your mission quickly goes out of focus. Now you’ve got to remember everything and juggle ideas in your head. Ideas and plans fade, only to be replaced by more interesting things in your immediate environment. You start searching about one thing online and before long you’ve forgotten what you even set out to work on this morning, and you’re off on a tangent for the next few hours.
But that’s only part of the problem. When you open the app up to plan your day, that’s when things can get really overwhelming and distracting. At first, it’s fine. In the honeymoon phase when you first start using a particular app, things are still fairly simple, but if you are a person brimming with novel ideas –who also tends to forget what he was working on yesterday– those apps soon become superpopulated with all kinds of To-dos, plans, and ideas. And since prioritizing is difficult for folks with ADHD, all sorts of tasks and projects all seem equally important right now – which can make it difficult to even decide what to do today, which makes it hard to get started or to follow through on your most important project right now. “Wow, there’s that great idea I had last year for a new product. I never did internet research on that. Maybe I should do that today,” (even though taxes are due by the end of the week, or you committed to launching a new website this week).
Let’s be real. Starting projects is not as important as finishing them. When we look back, chances are we’ll feel a greater sense of satisfaction about the few projects we actually complete than about the hundreds of projects we started but never followed through on.
So… trying to plan your day within a complex system –for someone with ADHD– can be distracting, stressful, and very time consuming. This is because simplicity leads to clarity, and clarity leads to action. When I know what to do today, then I can get started. In order to achieve that clarity, I personally need a simple system, one without all the distractions, one that helps me to focus on one thing at a time, and that keeps my plans in sight and in mind because seeing my mission in writing is much more powerful than vague images in my head. The In-View System does that for me.
Each fresh Daily Page takes maybe 5 minutes to fill out, but it can clear away the fog. And use your Weekly Page to set your direction for the week, perhaps checking with some of those apps.