Mecca to the Planner
I have a mountain of day planners, but to an ADDer, time is often meaningless.
Adult ADHD Blog
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Wednesday November 12th - 10:27am
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More November 2008 Blogs
There are others like me. I love this weekly group that is now on week two. I know I wonder if my interest in attending will fizzle like so many other things in my life. Sooner or later there is an annoyance that emerges and then explodes.
The group consists of other mature adults with ADD—mothers, wives, husbands. We all look professional and rush to the pow wow in our work attire of suit and ties.
The theme yesterday was planners. The word planner sends chills up my spine, mostly because I've been searching for a planner that works much in the same fashion I seek a man or a high heel that is comfortable. It's rather hopeless.
Somewhere in one of these entries I mentioned that I've purchased half of Staples. It is becoming my regular hangout, the Staples around the subway stop. I go in and am swallowed by the colors, sizes and the complexity of it all. Each slices and dices up time differently but to me, time is meaningless. I wear a watch and in fact have seven at home, but I forget to look at them. Staples should give me an ADD discount. ;)
I hauled in the mountain of planners yesterday, there were at least six, a monthly, a weekly, a Lifesaver-colored palm sized organizer, a manila folder with the Post-Its system that I thought was working (I write down stuff I'm supposed to do on one side and move the post-its to the other when I complete it). The yellow color reminds me of puke. I've literally gotten sick of it.
Our group leader turned on a light in my brain yesterday. She said that the to-do list is a bridge to the planner or scheduler. Little did I know. To date I've been operating on my hot-wired brain. I'll think of something and do it when I think of it, and everything else will slip through like water in the hand.
It might seem normal to the non-ADD world, but the to-do list, the scheduler and planner, and their purposes were as foreign as Greek until yesterday. I think I'll stay away from the fancy schmancy iPhone stuff though, lest I drop it in the pool.
It was a relief to realize that others struggled, too, with things like paying bills, managing daily work flow, the incoming stream of email, phone calls, and demands—always more, never less. I always leave feeling somewhat happier and more relieved.
I awoke this morning earlier at 7:10 (better than the 8:10), but I did make an excursion to Staples once again and arrived at work 15 minutes late, because I strolled up and down the aisles mesmerized by holiday cards and then wondering what I needed to buy everyone for Christmas. I did find a planner, a $30 leather bound black book with space to schedule daily things, and I have vowed to stick with it through thick and thin. Just hope I don't lose it.
What planner or to-do system works best for you?
 3 Comments:
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Posted by
ThunderStorm
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Nov 22 2008 @ 4:36 PM
Thanks Bigmaggie
Thanks so much bigmaggie. This was a great article. Someone else also proposed this online billing thing to me last month -- the only problem I have with it is that they only store the last eighteen months...which is a little scary. It would be nice if they would email you a PDF copy but they don't. They want you to come view it or something. What I am afraid of is that if I don't get it in time or if I need it past an 18 month period I won't have it. Has anyone come across a solution for this??
I'm also falling in love with Jane, except that she is so unattainable and I would love to figure out people like that ;)
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Posted by
Stephen1094
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Nov 18 2008 @ 11:23 PM
Planners...
Currently I use the iPhone, and a "To Do" application. I also use the calender which came with the phone. The iPhone is my fourth smartphone. I started a few years ago with paper planners, calenders etc. Then I thought a Dell PDA would be more organized and easier for work, I'm in Pharma sales so it's easier to carry around and schedule appointments and meetings.
Then I moved to smartphones to eliminate the phone and PDA combo. Now I'm using the iPhone. I go through phones like water, I guess I get bored with them easily. Anyway, I find that no one pda, planner, calender or smartphone works for too long. Just two weeks ago I too was making a Staples run. Why?! To get a leather bound planner to supplement my iphone. I thought if I had two I might do better staying on schedule, completing tasks etc. It drives me insane and I was able to resist buying one after all.
I tried five or six "To Do" applications on the iphone before settling for one. What I finally settled on was extremely simple. The other one's were cool but wow, the sensory overload made it impossible to manage the tasks, at least for me. Even with a simplified version, my list grows larger each day. When I can actually check-off a task I am so relieved, but no matter what I do the list gets longer.
The calender is good too because it has reminders, only I wish they were more annoying like and alarm clock because sometimes I miss the reminder when it goes off. My job requires that I schedule meetings every week with customers, including lunches. This is a struggle for me. Not only do I need to remember the lunch but I have to arrange for it to be delivered. Not really a hard task, but remembering to arrange and order the meal is what is difficult. My trick is to schedule an appointment on my calender one week before the lunch to remind me to order the lunch the following week. So far so good. I also force myself to look at it every time I remember to throughout the day so I don't forget a meeting, lunch or deadline.
We also get bombarded everyday with emails and voicemails. Some of them are "urgent" or "action required". Others are helpful techniques and so forth and so on. I have to constantly delete emails in order to cut out the clutter. If I don't, the "urgent" or "action required" emails get lost and I miss a deadline. Voicemails too, everyday they pile up. None of this stuff is rocket science or hard to do, but trying to prioritize and organize is a daily struggle.
I think in the end you just use whatever works for you at that moment. If a planner/calender/PDA/smartphone no longer works then get a new one that does. I would love to have one planner for the rest of my life but for some reason I can't stay with the same one for too long. I'm constantly trying to figure out a better way and maybe that's the problem. I just don't want to fall behind at work or with social gatherings. For now, I'll stick with the iPhone.
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Posted by
bigmaggie
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Nov 12 2008 @ 1:38 PM
IGoogle is the best ADHD management tool I've ever used
For the past year or so, I've been letting Google manage my life for me and it works. I have an IGoogle homepage that I set to be the homepage on every computer I regularly use. On the shared desktop PC my husband and I both use, we have two profiles for Firefox, one with my IGoogle homepage and one with his.
Using this as my homepage keeps everything I need and use regularly in one place. My homepage has my Google calendar with its reminders of upcoming meetings, appointments and events, my "Remember the Milk" to-do list application, my email, which receives most of my bills in electronic format, my most recent blogs from my Google Reader account, a link to information about local weather, a tool for quickly searching my gmail, a link to and a list of recent Google docs, which I use to keep all my work documents accessible no matter what computer I'm on, and the headlines from Reuter's "Oddly Enough" news feed.
The blogs and the Reuter's are there to keep me using the tool. I've found that the key to remembering to use our organizational tools is to link them to something we enjoy using a lot, such as my blog feed reader, or something we have to use a lot, such as the Google search engine in general. With my IGoogle homepage, I've got a both of those in the same spot. Whenever I hit my homepage to do a Google search or whenever I want to check out the Lolcats, all the tools that remind me of what I need to do and when I need to do it are right there in my view.
Also, by storing all my important documents online, I never have to worry about losing them. (I can also make them accessible to my students very easily, which saves me so much time not having to deal with getting kids physical copies of make-up work.) So long as there's a computer nearby, everything I need is right there. It's not 100% ADHD foolproof, but nothing is, and some people are squeamish about putting so much of themselves "online" so this may not be for them, but this the best system I've ever come across to manage my life.
Also, it probably wouldn't work as well if I didn't live on my computer. I don't watch TV anymore, instead I watch all the shows I like online, so I'm always on my computer at home, watching something or listening to a podcast or reading blogs. I open my homepage whenever I'm waiting for something to load, to check my blogs. I'm a teacher, and I constantly have my computer open to do my job at work. Our attendance and grading systems are online, so I'm guaranteed to check into the internet at least once an hour, though, on most days, I'm on it much more often than that. The computer is involved in nearly everything I do these days. It only makes sense to use it to manage my life.
I also do all my bill paying and manage my banking account online, which is so much easier for me to manage. For bills that are the same each month, the amount is stored for me by my bank's online bill pay application. For others, as I said before, I get e-bills or access them through online accounts. Before this technology, I constantly forgot to pay this bill or that bill. Since moving everything online, I've been on top of my finances for the first time in my life.
In short, digital tools are the way to go, in my opinion. I never could use a physical planner very well at all. It would always get lost or I'd forget to use it. There was never any motivation to keep up with it after the initial honeymoon period. But the Internet is always in my face, is full of things I enjoy that keep me coming back and is nearly impossible to lose.
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