I have boxes and drawers with vague categories of contents. It works well enough.
I’ve more or less forced myself to become obsessed with organization. The problem is, there’s perfect or chaos and no in between.
I either have a custom made storage solution, note keeping, etc. Or I have the pile.
The floor is the biggest shelf in your house
I feel heard
Before I was diagnosed and living with my girlfriend (now wife) I tried to explain to her why I put important things I didn’t want to leave the house with on/in my shoes. I’m amazed she’s still with me to this day.
On my keys…that’s how I remember stuff, or keys on the sliding glass door handle so I don’t leave the cat in the porch and leave.
I’ve only ever remembered to let my cat in because I’m looking for my keys, which I’ve forgotten are on the door.
I do that sometimes too. But I usually grab keys first and make sure they are in my pocket. So there is the time I can forget between then and leaving.
Shoes are always something I do as I am literally walking out the door. I also always just wear one pair of shoes usually.
Gotta do what works for your brain though lol.
There is no system, just folders, things go in the folders and there’s also a doompile which gets sorted like once every 9 months based on mood
Rarely I’ll want to do a deep clean and everything gets digitized and all my files get put in proper places and things are ✨ sparklyyyyy ✨ for like 3 weeks
Someone asked me why I put my work badge in my bag instead of leaving it at work. I couldn’t properly explain it would disrupt my process.
The building doesn’t need a work badge to enter? What else is the purpose of those things.
It is only a name badge. I have a key and an alarm code for entry.
I have 10 Trello boards and they are all overflowing and I ignore them.
Recently I started self hosting Planka which is a FOSS clone of Trello and it’s the same except less latency.
I use physical paper todolists. Sometimes I manage to get one page crossed out. Sometimes I rewrite items on a new page. When I slip I start a new page but keep old pages in the back of a notebook.
I got praised for my ability to document my failures to complete tasks. Feels like one of few genuine compliments I actually feel proud about.
Personally I use a continuous never ending to- do list, tiny writing on an A4 piece of paper folded into 16ths.
Seeing all the crossed out tasks makes me feel proud, seeing something not crossed out in an older area gives me guilt, and overall it just keeps me connected to the futility of existence. 😁
I don’t have ADHD and have been describing my system of organization as “Everything might be in piles but I know where things are in the piles,” and that means…
That’s soo my wife.
Friends coming over for dinner, and we want another two seats available at the table? I’d better make her clear off that table because otherwise there’ll be another round of “NOOOO, you moved stuff, now I’ll never be able to find anything again”. “Sweetie, it’s all on the side table. I moved the stuff pile by pile, didn’t mix the piles” “It’s forever gone!”
long response
Not taking sides here, but something we never think about in situations like this, “we” including ADHD people who create these expanses of piles AND the people who suffer them because they love the shit out of the ADHD people making the piles all over the place, is that our memory is much more linked to space than we think.
The reason we forget what we are doing when we go from one room to the other so often is because our memory, our cognition, our conceptualization of what our current quest is… is often intimately connected IN OUR BRAINS to the spatial context we are doing and thinking about those things in.
I remember a study that showed how rats actually have certain neurons devoted to certain spaces and units of space, the study wasn’t overly concerned with identifying how those mechanism worked because obviously it is super complicated, rather the study was focused on proving there was a literal relationship between certain neurons in a particular rat’s brain and the spaces they had spent time in and memorized.
In otherwords, the study proved rats have a map in their brain even though we don’t know how that map precisely works. It is reasonable to conclude our minds have some degree of that same intimacy between cognition and space especially because of how often people talk about experiencing losing their train of thought when they move from one space to another even though the thought process wasn’t necessarily spatial nor even had to do with the particular space they were in.
here is one, I don’t know if this was the original one I read an article about or not but it is in the same vein at least
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-14611-7
None of this long rant is to excuse the piles OR the pilemaker, but maybe to give some context to why it is such a point of friction… there is more energy being exerted across that conflict point than is visible on the surface. Moving the piles actually disrupts your girlfriends internal mental conception of those things even if you preserve the physical ordering of the piles, their very location in a known space was part of the way your girlfriend’s brain was cognitively encoding and interfacing with them and now that has been erased in some small way.
If your girlfriend moves the piles herself, even if the end result is precisely the same as if you had done it, her brain has had the chance to do the mental translation work of transferring the important bits to neurons that aren’t associated JUST with that particular spatial arrangement in a known space.
Think of piles placed in specific places (usually inconveniently RIGHT in the center of things I know lol) as the natural and necessary anodyne inverse to taking a walk to refresh one’s mind and escape a confining mental context. One action tears away mental scaffolding, the other shores it up. Both are necessary to cognition and problem solving.
TL;DR It is weird but memory and space aren’t seperate things for the human brain and people who struggle with executive function often exploit the ability to leverage spatial neurons/“maps” in their brain to encode and process information in order to solve complex problems that require remembering key information over medium and short periods of time.
Yep, that’s pretty close to what I’ve assumed is going on, and I’m doing what I can to accommodate.
‘Levels, Jerry!’
Evernote is a deep hole where notes go to die.
But I also keep lists of interesting historical stuff that I can quickly access via my phone so I’ve got that going for me.
I really like Logseq though I don’t necessarily trust development will focus on the non-database version (I use Syncthing to synchronize and share my task information/notes between devices, not interested in complex syncing solutions that make it anything more than simple filesharing).
I just can’t get myself to put effort into an organizational system that relies on a for-profit companies software. I know Evernote has been great but this is about the distorting effects of the tech economy not the earnestness of developers to create a useful tool.
My preferred system is Org Mode, it just hasn’t had actually viable mobile options until fairly recently (and you have to set up your own file syncing i.e. Syncthing or something else) but something I think that really helps to take into a system like Evernote or Logseq even if you never try Org mode is the wisdom of Org mode always being about a tree/a hierarchy of bullet points/headings.
A lot of people recoil at the limitation of org mode working around hierarchical heading structures, and sure the first response is that well you can make org mode work in many different ways as a non-hierarchical notes system but also the criticism that a notes system should not strictly be hierarchical because life and all the stuff in it isn’t organized in a strict hierarchy is flawed.
Hierarchical structuring of information is not a virtue because it reflects some natural reality, it is a virtue because it provides a context and flow to an unotherwise momentumless list of disparate loosely connected bits. We problem solve and think in hierarchies knowing they are imperfect representations of reality because they are useful temporary tools to help us get things done.
Maps are always lies, models are always lies, and hierarchies too are always lies. That doesn’t mean these things can’t be used as useful tools however.
The point of a hierarchy to org mode notes is not to create a tree that forces every new thing you add to find a twig to be pasted onto, it is to help you cognitively process disparate things into a progressively unifying flow.
Evernote is a deep hole where notes go to die.
I think this tends to happen when I use note systems like these because they don’t encourage you to create a unifying upstream conjoining of small tasks into bigger concepts/goals into the impacts you hope them to have on your life… whereas when you make an org file for your life or a project the presence of the first line with a single bullet point
- life
…naturally sets the intentional convergence point for the rest of your subheadings.
Me, every time I try to tidy up Notepad++ tabs and it wants me to save all my ephemeral notes,
new_2thrunew_136.Once you open a new one all others will never be used. Until you go nuclear one day and close them all. On that day you’ll remember one of them was important.
I’m on Linux now. If you ever want to switch Sublime Text is your new friend for random paste drops and notes that are only there to write but not ever read.
I’ve recently upgraded my clothes from clean pile and laundry bag to clean outer and under wear bins and a dirty laundry pile. Also beds linens have a separate bin.
The basic insight here is putting some kind of box around the pile improves organization. Lids and stacking help too.
Someday my entire life will be in bins.
The basic insight here is putting some kind of box around the pile improves organization.
Sorry if this is a super neurovanilla question, but isn’t that what your dresser drawers are for?
The sliding in and out parts also the folding make it not viable for me.
As soon as it’s outta site outta mind…I just found some shirts in storage that I forgot existed. Let alone all the shirts in the drawers I don’t open.
piles develop on top of the bins
That’s why the daily use bins don’t have lids, or well, they do, but only for when the room needs to look it’s best. And they come off the next time I need to use them.
I try for years to implement a “do later” box in my it support team. If you don’t have time to put something in a proper place, drop it in the do later box and once in a while get it sorted.
Idk what it is, maybe neurotypicals just don’t get it.
My organizational system vacillates between being something like a koan and something like a somewhat plausible cryptid.
