How To Remain Productive While Coping with Adult ADHD (Part 2)

If I owned a robot vacuum, making a second cup of coffee this morning wouldn’t turn into noticing the kitchen floor needs to be mopped, which means it needs to be swept first. Well, I may as well wipe off the counters since you should clean from top to bottom. You can’t just leave crumbs all over the stovetop, so that chore gets included alongside the cookware needing washing. Fast forward 105 minutes after running and unloading the dishwasher, taking apart its insides for an overdue deep-clean, and a slew of other “very important” tasks…I’m finally ready to do what I came in here for.

Hmm, what was that?

Since I don’t have a spare $1,000+ lying around, I have to rely on other technologies to keep me focused when I’m working, have to meet a deadline, or just need to unplug from my smartphone. Whether or not you’re among the countless number of people struggling to fill their ADHD prescriptions in the United States, these productivity and time management tools can help avoid the procrastination that gets in the way of what needs to get done.

Balance: Meditation & Sleep

Although it's listed as a Health & Fitness app, this is a great weapon to have in your arsenal to help boost your focus, acutely and over time. According to researchers at Harvard University, the average person finds themselves lost in thought 47% of the time. That’s for the average person – never mind those of us living with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder!

Meditation as a means of practicing mindfulness can have amazing benefits for ADHD. Those of us that suffer from – no, are gifted and living with – this, especially “combined type” or “impulsive/hyperactive type” can especially find this modality useful, as it “helps you to become more aware of your emotions and develop the skill of pausing before acting,” as explained by CHADD.org. Dedicating just 10 minutes out of your day can be enough to help organize thoughts and give you a tool to help regain focus for the more important tasks at hand (think: completing your client’s complicated IRS tax return by the promised deadline or their money back vs. creating a backstory for the stray dog you just saw dart past your window).

Upword.ai

Upword is an artificial intelligence (AI) powered summarization tool that extracts the key takeaways of web pages, PDF documents, and YouTube videos, ultimately reducing reading time up to 85% and assisting you to read content 10x faster. BONUS ALERT, it can help eliminate visual stimuli such as hyperlinks and illustrations that can make your prefrontal cortex constantly inadvertently susceptible to distraction. Upward’s ability to quickly summarize texts, save abstracts to your personal library, share them via Slack, and even read them aloud makes it a must-have productivity tool for students, business and marketing professionals, team leaders, and beyond.

Picture this: you’re attending university full time, just finished waiting tables for 10 hours at the local greasy spoon to pay the rest of your rent and maybe buy a couple of instant ramen noodle packages for dinner, and just remembered you need to finish the final draft of your X-Y-Z research paper within the next 5 hours. You have so many websites and articles bookmarked that you don’t know where to start. Upword to the rescue to eliminate hours of reading and provide you with the content that matters most in your hour of need.

Flora

Flora has a 4.7/5 rating and over 63,000 reviews in the Apple App Store for good reason. It is a Pomodoro timer, to-do list, and bonus social responsibility tool wrapped up in one nifty free app available on iOS, Android, and via Chrome extension.

The Pomodoro technique is easy: set your task, start a 25-minute timer, get to work, take a short break (traditionally 5 minutes) when the timer ends; and repeat until your task is complete. Flora makes it fun and interactive with a cute, clean, and simple gameplay-like interface: as you complete focus sessions you grow a virtual plant in your garden, but if you switch apps or break your session the plant dies.

Friends can collaborate in the same session, but be careful: if the Host leaves or breaks focus, the plant dies for everyone; however if a Guest leaves, it only kills their plant. Flora also offers opt-in subscriptions starting at $1.99/month that plants trees and creates change, helping to turn your virtual trees into an economic resource for impoverished communities. To date, over 105,000 real trees have been planted thanks to Flora users.

The year 2023 has your back like never before. You have a multitude of productivity apps to manage your focus and meet deadlines, AI solutions to sift through and condense infinite pages of research documentation, and resources to help you relax and organize that pretty little brain of yours so you can obtain that next big win!