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I have ADHD. My intended habits are very fragile, and if a single visual cue goes missing, I'll skip a step -- if my wife removes my antiperspirant from the cou
by skygazer 3y ago
I have ADHD. My intended habits are very fragile, and if a single visual cue goes missing, I'll skip a step -- if my wife removes my antiperspirant from the counter, then I just unwittingly skip that step that day. I rely on rube Goldberg machinations.
I have one trick that works, but I hate it. I build checklists with routine tasks, like morning and evening routines, or packing for a trip, etc, and automate sending them to the relentlessly annoying iOS Due.app, which can send reminder notifications about a timed task every minute once due and syncs with watch, so I can dismiss them once complete -- I have them scheduled spaced out enough to generally allow completion of one task before the next one comes due. I turn on Announce Notifications for the Due.app so the phone speaks the tasks aloud, and just wear airpods so I alone hear the announcements.
I used this successfully for 6 months to emulate being a conventional person, and it was successful, but it didn't end up building any very strong habits that could stand alone outside this system. It felt like an oppressive dystopian crutch that I was embarrassed to need. However, one situation where I do love it is "before I leave the house to go to X" checklists, if I schedule backward from the time to leave, I end up not forgetting anything and leaving on time, which is not normally easy for me, otherwise. That reduces a common stress.
Oh, and outside of habits, I do really like dictating a stream of consciousness list of things I have to do to my phone, and have a shortcut run it by GPT3.5 to extract task names, estimate on task durations, and order tasks in a reasonable way, which it is surprisingly able to do with a good prompt, and then automatically feed the results into Due.app. I haven't figured out the psychology of when I do and don't like nagging reminders.
- Terr_ 3y ago> However, one situation where I do love it is "before I leave the house to go to X" checklists Not diagnosed with anything, but I put things in my shoes, such as the occasional paper envelope that needs sending. The computer chair is another "an item is physically obstructing me I must deal with it before I continue" destination. (Example: Some dirty laundry, indicating I need to start the washing-machine I loaded earlier.)
- JohnBooty 3y agoI love it! This is a great habit. ADHD or not, it's all about reducing cognitive load.
- JohnBooty 3y agoFirst, as a fellow ADHD person... damn. I empathize. My life is a whole bunch of Rube Goldberg-ass workarounds too. It feels like nothing but workarounds sometimes. A thing held together with so much duct tape that I sometimes wonder if it's just duct tape all the way down. it didn't end up building any very strong habits that could stand alone outside this system I mean, I would say that using the system you came up with was a valuable habit and that is the kind of "hacking" I was thinking of when I wrote the parent post. Some folks interpreted it as me saying that ADHD (which I initially never even mentioned) and other problems could just be magically mindhacked away or something. I don't feel that's what I wrote, and it certainly not what I believe.