To survive everyday life with adult ADHD, I need a system for everything. My brain remembers next to nothing on its own. Trying to think through a multi-step process is super overwhelming unless I write everything down. Basically, I can’t wing it. I need tools and supports, even for things most people seem to do on autopilot.
This creates problems in situations that should feel casual — where a simple request shouldn’t require a formal process.
Only without the formal process, I’ll forget to do the things I’ve promised. Especially if I need to remember those things at a particular time and place.
Even with a great system, sometimes none of our tools will help us remember.
For example: I offered to donate a restaurant gift card toward the prize pool for our neighborhood’s holiday decorating contest. We’ve ordered from our favorite local pizza place once a week during the pandemic anyway. It seems simple enough to tack a gift card onto our regular order — no need to make a special trip! — but how the heck will I remember to do it?
I have a well-organized to-do list, but that only helps if I remember to look at the list at the exact moment I order the pizza. Not happening.
I also rely heavily on my calendar, and I could write a reminder on the appropriate day. However, at the moment I say, “sure, I can pick up a gift card to donate,” I don’t yet know the date of our next pizza night. Even if I did, I often swap which meals happen on which days after I make our meal plan. There’s no way I’d remember to move a calendar item.
There’s always the trusty sticky note stuck to a desk or kitchen counter or the bottom of my computer screen, but I can’t guarantee I’ll see that either. Sometimes I order pizza from my desk in my office. Other times I order it from my laptop at the dining room table. Other times I stand in the kitchen with the iPad. There’s no one good place to put a sticky note.
When I go to order pizza, the only place I’m looking is the pizza place’s ToastTab menu.
Lack of self-trust breeds anxiety. Winging it breeds anxiety.
Here’s where my anxiety picks up. The contest organizer is counting on me to get this gift card to her by Christmas so she can distribute prizes. I like her, and I don’t want to disappoint her or put her out. I also really like this pizza place, and I don’t want to miss an opportunity to support them during the pandemic. Though not exactly a high-stakes situation, this is a time I really want to come through and be reliable, and I’d feel ashamed for failing.
We ADHDers have a lot of these situations. Others can have a hard time understanding why we get so stressed. To them, forgetting the gift card might create a minor inconvenience, but it wouldn’t be the end of the world. This stuff happens.
ADHDers feel these little slip-ups harder. We don’t view them as an isolated mistake anyone could make. We see them as yet another time we’ve let someone down.
This chips away at our self-worth and makes us feel incapable of being who we want to be in the world. Even if we manage to mask our struggles to others — maybe I forget to add the gift card to our order, in fact forget I even offered to buy it, but quickly order it and make a special trip to the pizza place after receiving a reminder email — that masking has a cost. In this example, the cost would be my time. However, forgetfulness and inefficiency often have a financial cost, too. Some of us call that the “ADHD tax.”
It’s important to figure this stuff out. Yes, it’s just a pizza gift card, but I want to feel I can trust myself — this time and every time after it. It’s worth practicing and troubleshooting this process to get it right.
Think it through: where will I already be looking when I need to do this thing?
With that in mind, I paused for a moment to think it all the way through. To remember to grab that gift card at the exact moment I ordered pizza for my family, I needed to answer one question:
No matter what else happened that day, where would I already be looking right before starting my pizza order?
For me, having ADHD means I will not see a reminder unless it forces itself in front of my face. This is the classic “I would use a to-do list if I ever remembered to look at it” problem. We need to work with and within the reality of how our brains function.
I literally walked my way through the process of ordering pizza. How did I get started? Well, first I would need to know it was pizza night, right? How would I remember that?
Every day, when it’s time to think about dinner, I consult the little dry-erase menu board in our kitchen. I make a menu at the start of each week and no, I do not remember what’s on it without looking.
That was my answer. Maybe I would stand in the kitchen with the iPad or sit at my desk or the dining room table to make the actual order, but I would only begin the order if I knew it was pizza night. Things often get a little off the rails on a busy day, but if I felt extra scattered I’d be more likely, not less likely, to check in with my menu board before ordering pizza.
Put reminders where they work, not in a single “good place.”
I don’t generally use my menu board for to-do items or reminders. I write the name of a meal on the day I plan to eat it. That’s all.
It doesn’t matter. In this one specific case, I needed to leave a reminder there. I hadn’t planned that week’s meals yet, but that didn’t matter either. I use a little space at the top of the board to jot down ideas for the next week’s menu. There was already an ideal spot to write a note for our next pizza order.
So that’s what I did. I wrote a little note in the idea space. When I made the next menu, I transferred that note — “order pizza gift card” — to the day I designated for pizza night. And, miracle of miracles, I remembered to order the gift card with our pizza!
It’s the little things, really.
I just spent a lot of words talking about a twenty-five-dollar gift card to my favorite pizza joint. Also, how I avoided a massive meltdown by remembering to purchase it when I said I would. I know this sounds ridiculous.
It’s not. The way we live in these moments establishes our reputation with others and ourselves. We build self-confidence through repeated success with the little stuff. On the flip side, we feel demoralized and ashamed when we consistently fail at it.
It’s worth taking a moment to pause and think through how we will accomplish the things we want and need to do. Others may not understand how hard life’s little details can feel for us, or why we need to put so much effort into our organizational systems. They also don’t understand how good it feels to get it right. That feeling is truly a gift, and it’s one we owe ourselves whenever we can make it happen.
When I actually remembered to buy that gift card, you better believe I paused to savor the moment.
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