Coping strategy #1: Become a cyborg

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I live a very complicated, and very organized life. One that most people I know would have trouble managing. And yet I have an extremely disorganized brain and cannot keep anything straight. The (not really at all) secret: I'm a very disorganized human, but a very organized cyborg.

I figured out in middle school that I couldn't live the life I wanted without a lot of external help. With the help of my parents, I started figuring out ways to keep all the information that I needed straight outside my head. It took a long time to get anything consistent and useful, and I went through many different options, but the fact that I started depending on external resources very heavily and very young meant that I got really good at it.

I am also someone to whom small repetitive rituals are supportive and comforting. I know that this is true for some ADHD people and not others. I have ritual patterns that somewhat resemble compulsive rituals (although they are not generally connected to obsessive thoughts). They calm my brain and help me track things. I have learned to turn some of my organization strategies into these sorts of rituals, so something like reviewing my to-do list in a particular way, choosing a small task, completing it and checking it off (and I always make sure I have enough small tasks to do this with) and then picking the next thing is something I can repeat many times a day, and find soothing and productive at the same time.

I often change tools when I'm stressed out, because moving everything over to a new tool makes it less stressful, to me, because it's different now.

My current set of tools: Google calendar, todoist, Motion, and many, many google spreadsheets. I have spreadsheets for organizing my cooking, my social life, my travel, my packing, my purchases. If you are curious about the details of any of these things, I'm happy to elaborate. It's incredibly helpful to me that I can share many of these things with my partners and close friends for coordination and occasional nudges. 

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