6 Dead-Simple Productivity Tools To Crush ADHD.

Before I became a pathologist, I worked as a primary care doctor in the United States Navy (including a year of psychiatry residency training), treating hundreds of patients with ADHD. What the pharmaceutical representatives don’t want you to know is:

ADHD is over-diagnosed and over-treated.

Stimulant medications have side-effects such as insomnia, stifled creativity and even mania. A simple system action-focused system is your ticket to thriving as writer, artist, and working professional.

Let’s get into it:

#1 A Pages document in iOS.

Make a table in landscape view in a Pages document.

I like Pages because it’s easy to take with you on the go. On the left column, keep an exhaustive list of all your Projects. A Project is anything that takes more than 1 next-action to complete. You will update this at least once per week but ideally every couple days.

On the remaining columns to the right of your Projects list, keep a fluid lists of Next Actions.

These are specific one-off tasks you need to do, organized by site-specific actions. It’s more about the process. The mental exercise of assigning context and “state of mind” to your Actions Lists helps you prioritize.

On the right-hand side of the Pages table is a heading: “Upcoming Deadlines” which includes travel dates and important meetings which require reading and preparation. It reduces anxiety when you simply glance at a piece of paper you trust, to guide you as you sail through the week. The Pages document becomes your life Dashboard.

The more you use it, the more it is useful.

On the Footer, I put things like the Gym hours, UPS store hours, or the contact info for the Auto Shop. There are more tech-forward tools out there, but an ADHD person will easily get side-tracked into obsessing over all the bells and whistles of the technology - and avoid doing the tasks they set out to organize in the first place.

I know this because I am that person.

#2 A clean iPhone home screen.

The human eye is drawn to movement and visual stimuli.

Amplify this by 100 and you get an ADHD person’s eye. Your most precious asset in 2023 is your attention. Your iPhone home screen should have a common theme of “idea-capture”, with the following items. From left to right: Camera, Clock, Settings, and Reminders.

2nd Row: Calendar, Pages, Notes, Voice Memos. The theme of idea-capture is arranged by ease of tactical reach. Since it is cumbersome to write with both thumbs while walking, and dangerous to do so whilst driving, Voice Memos is closest to my right thumb.

The next one over is Notes and so-on.

The bottom 3 apps are Phone, Messages, and iTunes. The wallpaper is some non-distracting image or solid color. Adjust per priority. I met a comedian in Houston who kept a list of jokes on his iPhone wallpaper to jog his memory to think of good hooks for his jokes.

The second screen is where I keep everything else.

This includes all the “consumption” apps: Books, etc. Everything other than Apple Books is buried in a sub-holder block because I don’t want to see it. During the day I’ll keep Twitter and SubStack open because I am actively working on writing on these platforms. Everything else, but for perhaps Calculator and Maps, are applications designed by engineers to destroy you.

Learn to evolve away from this.

#3 3 baskets.

I learned this from David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD).

Keep 3 wire baskets in your home and work office labeled IN, IN-Processing, and OUT. The middle basket is everything with pending next-actions and will have sub-folders. Put those sub-folders on your MacBook Homescreen, in the same arrangement: IN, IN-processing, and OUT. Remember this mantra.

Chant it in the shower.

Once an item leaves your IN basket, you must give it a name. Either it’s something which can be completed in less than 2-minutes or it will take more than 2-minutes and should be assigned to a Project to be worked on at a specific time (or context) in the future. Or it needs to be delegated to someone with more expertise.

Alternatively some items from IN cannot be completed without some other piece of information or equipment.

An example would be your Tax Return which needs to wait for your brokerage house to issue a 1099 and your employer to issue a W2. This is a “Waiting For..” Item and you simply annotate this on your master Pages document. As long as its tracked on a paper you trust and will look at again on your next Weekly Review, it won’t be a nagging source of anxiety (unfinished work). Don’t underestimate the power of your unconscious.

Pressure starts to build up from the things you DON’T know what to do with rather than from the things you do.

#4 List of Accounts and Subscriptions.

The greatest disease of our time is not cancer.

It’s over-spending and consumer debt.

There are very few subscriptions you actually need. The best way to determine your needs is to ruthlessly scrutinize your master list of Accounts and Subscriptions in a locked Pages document. Track the service, the monthly/annual charge, and date of expiration.

Keep streaming services to an absolute minimum.

Popular shows and sporting events are intentionally rotated from platform to platform to create the illusion of scarcity. For example: For the recent NCAA Final Four, you had to subscribe to the Paramount App. It’s on my list to delete after a month or so. There is a chance I’ll watch an episode or two of Star Trek or perhaps the new Bryan Cranston series.

Beyond that its slowly sucking my savings which otherwise would be working for me in my sleep in a Global Index Fund. Nothing is more financially de-moralizing than to lose track of your subscriptions only to realize a year later that you were paying hundreds of dollars inadvertently for a service you impulsively signed up for 3-years ago but never use.

It’s like having something taken from you, but the only one to blame is yourself.

#5 A Someday/Maybe List in iOS Notes.

Ideas come at random times, usually when you’re on the go or in conversation with a friend.

Use iOS Notes for this one because the interface opens faster. For example: Imagine yourself at the office water-cooler on Monday morning. Your co-worker just got back from Croatia.

Wouldn’t that make a good trip some-day?

Which resort did they stay at?

You could quickly add this to your Someday/Maybe List as “Trips to Take”.

Other items in this List could be: Music to listen to, Movies to watch, Books to read, Gear/Equipment to buy, Restaurants to try, Business ideas to explore, etc.

The Someday/Maybe List is also a good place to drop items that you are thinking about buying but may not necessarily need right now.

This is clutch.

We are flooded with advertisements and tempting suggestions on our internet feeds and in our personal Amazon “suggested items” list. Whenever you see something come up that may be useful but is not needed, stash it on the Someday/Maybe List and write a couple sentence about how you felt when you had the urge to buy it.

What are the pros and cons?

What your life be like without it?

Then let it marinade for 2-weeks.

Guarantee you’ll come back with a clear head and decide you didn’t actually need it. Conversely, some products are things I saw on a YouTube video of someone who I respect. By clipping a picture of the product, I don’t have to go back and search for the YouTube video I saw it on months later when I have time to research it.

For example: The Keychron K2 keyboard is something I saw on a video by MKBHD.

Few months later I got one for home and work. I like it because it mirrors the layout of the MacBook keyboard in its minimalist layout. I end up typing faster because I don’t have to adjust to a different keyboard layout at my work computer.

Let the Someday/Maybe list distill your ideas for a productive life.

#6 The GTD Book by David Allen.

I still have the same copy of GTD I bought as a 2nd year medical student, struggling with juggling clinical work and exam dates.

GTD saved my life.

The system revolves around idea-capture and organization of Next-Actions. The idea-capture is critically important for the craft of writing. From time to time, if I’m falling off the system, I’ll take an hour and re-read sections of the book. It always gets me back on track. Over the years of working the GTD principles into your life, you will have more focus, less anxiety, and sleep better.

The most important thing out of GTD is the Weekly Review.

The more you re-visit your master Pages document with a list of all your Projects and Next Actions, the more relaxed focus on you will develop. Keep iterating on the principles of GTD and adapt them to your unique situation.

It is time well spent.