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Beeminder is a website where you can make promises to yourself that come with real stakes. You track your success or progress with a certain goal, and if you fall off the wagon, you will get ‘stung’. This punishment can involve losing a fixed amount of your real, actual money, which can also be linked up to be given to an ‘anti-charity’: a cause you can’t stand, like a political party you don’t support.

So, this uses negative reinforcement rather than positive to motivate people, and it can work. However, I have since stopped using it because it caused me quite a lot of stress, and I would urge users to be very careful to not be too harsh on themselves: set only one goal, make it a very easy one, and don’t tie yourself to the worst types of punishment available. If you have doubts about how you would feel about using it, steer clear.

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An unusual app that I use to help myself cope with life is called WhatsMock. (This app looks like a similar one for iPhones.) WhatsMock is used to create fake WhatsApp conversations, which you can then screenshot and share as memes or pranks.

However, I use it as a journaling tool. I act as if I’m messaging a friend, writing down everything that is on my mind, and then I take a moment to read back what I’ve said, trying to act as if I really am an external friend figure, and message back what I would say to them. Even just sympathy or open ‘listening’ can help, although sometimes I will also come up with new ideas for how to tackle the problem and send them back as ‘advice.’ I find it increases the effectiveness of a normal stream-of-consciousness journal session because it encourages that back-and-forth between the distressed and the calmer, wiser parts of my mind, as well as being in the very natural-feeling format of messaging, rather than writing onto a blank piece of paper.

I adapted this idea from an experiment I heard about that was done using virtual reality. In the VR world, the participant would find themselves sitting in a therapist’s office, and they would be encouraged to say what was on their mind. They would then be ‘transported’ into the therapist’s place, and then they would watch back the recording of themselves talking about their problem. They would then respond to themselves as if they were the therapist, which seemed to help people to tap into their empathy for themselves, and to reframe their problems as something worthy of help.

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I am using the Freedom app right now, in order to keep focused on writing this blog post. It lets you block whatever apps and websites you need to, across all the devices you need to, for whichever times you need to. The free version doesn’t let you schedule the times when the blocking will happen, and I have found it well worth paying for the subscription to have that feature. I use it to block me from continuing to distract myself with my phone at bed-time, or wandering off onto social media during work hours.

Unlike the Forest app, the Freedom app does not rely on your willpower to start a session, or to keep it going. You can’t turn it off during a blocking session, and so it can provide a crucial element of structure in my environment that I can’t get from anything else.

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You don’t need any technology or tools to practise mindfulness (although the meditation apps Headspace or Balance are good places to start learning about it). When I was trying to think of things besides Home Scrum which have helped me to tackle life, I know that my mental health and my whole perspective on the world would be much worse without having done periods of meditation practice in the past. I know of no better way to work on fully separating yourself from your own addictions and beliefs in order to access the world as it truly is. The only time I have actually been able to ‘live in the present’ was for about three days after I finished a long weekend at a silent meditation retreat, but the experience proved to me that being mindful truly is the way towards peace of mind and contentment.

Meditation is both easy to start and hard to establish as a long-term habit in your life. I myself have not yet succeeded in doing it on a regular, consistent basis. But even doing it on an ad hoc, occasional basis is still worth doing.

Recently, my friend Alex and I did quite well for a while holding each other accountable with a nightly mindfulness call. We would do some simple everyday action, like drinking a cup of tea, but while trying to hold our attention on the sensations and movements involved.

There is also an added complication that there are many types of meditation, and not all of them are actually focused on mindfulness. Some are more for relaxation, and some have been entirely co-opted for the purposes of spirituality. There are many great free guided meditations on YouTube, including ones specifically for people with ADHD, as well as the apps above, but do keep in mind whether it is helping you to train to focus on the present moment, or more for general relaxation.

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The Habitica website is a wonderful community of people who all struggle to get things done, but often do a lot better by putting everything they need to do through the world of Habitica. You are a little pixel-art character in a pseudo-role-playing fantasy game, and the tasks and habits that you complete (and streaks that you maintain) keep your character strong and help you equip them with better armour and weapons.

It is incredibly pleasing to ‘play’ your life as a video game. It becomes even more engrossing when you join up with others in forums and small groups called parties to fight monsters together, and you can also earn in-game money to collect trinkets, power-ups and costumes for your character.

If Home Scrum or bullet journaling aren’t working out for you, and Habitica appeals, I would definitely give it a shot! Even if it only works for you for a few months, it should still be a few months of enjoyable productivity.

Loresome

I haven’t tried Loresome myself, but it is similar to Habitica in that it also involves a role-playing game. However, this time your character does things by themselves, and completing your tasks helps them along their journey. You get to read about their accomplishments in their journal and watch their progress on a map as they gradually become more and more bad-ass. This would probably be good if you want a more low-key version of Habitica.

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Bullet journaling both suffers and benefits (like mind-mapping) from a community making artistic, showy examples which can feel extremely intimidating. It has become an art-form in its own right and there is a large chunk of YouTube devoted to people making stunning ‘month spreads’. By the time you’ve coloured one in the next month is already upon you.

If making your bullet journal beautiful brings you genuine joy, then go for it, but if not, then deliberately ban all signs of beauty and go full utilitarian to fend off any encroaching sense of perfectionism.

I will not attempt to explain the ins and outs of how bullet journaling works, as the introduction video on the website above does a very good job, but just to give you some idea, it involves keeping daily (refreshed) to-do lists as well as monthly calendars all inside one notebook. The notebook can also store anything else you want it to. It is an incredibly powerful and flexible system and, like Scrum, can be adapted to how you would like to do it.

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The idea of creating habits out of micro-behaviours has gained traction and popularity with the more recent book Atomic Habits by James Clear, but well before that there was BJ Fogg and his Tiny Habits website. This applies the science of habit-making by getting you to add extremely small pieces of behaviour by attaching them to an existing ‘trigger’ in your routine. For instance, you could do five press-ups immediately after you put your toothbrush down after brushing your teeth.

The whole technique is very powerful and realistic, but still, I have never managed to fully and truly ‘automate’ these new behaviours to the point where I would do them without thinking. This might partly be because I have always tried to introduce too many of these changes at once: always pick only one thing at a time! Still, you have a better chance sticking to some new habit for a good few weeks or months by following this method than by following many other guides which promise ‘habit change’, and even doing a beneficial habit for a few weeks at a time can do a lot of good.

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If I could give people with ADHD one website to help them, it would be Focusmate. For a very reasonable monthly fee of $5, you can link up with another person online to complete a fifty minute block of work (again, a little pomodoro-like), and you keep your webcams on the whole time so the other person can see that you’re doing it. You can also share your screen so they can see what you’re working on, and even keep your microphones on (this is rare, most people prefer to keep them off, but can definitely boost focus with the feeling that someone really is sat next to you working). 

I have used it for years, and although over time I have gradually become more lax with actually knuckling down to work once I’m on the Focusmate, it is still one of the best ways I have to guarantee that I will actually sit down in front of my computer at a certain time to meet my Focusmate appointment, which sometimes is at least half the battle.

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One of the problems with doing any task (although particularly something technical like coding) is simply how to hold the steps of a task in mind, and remembering what you intend to do next. As we learned when looking at executive functions, having a good ‘working memory’ for what you’re currently doing is a separate process from coming up with these steps in the first place (and both are directly impaired by ADHD). It can be incredibly frustrating to come up with ideas about how to solve a problem and then not be able to remember all the threads at once, and thus lose your direction and have to wait until you can bring your mind to regenerate all the parts under consideration again.

What we need to do is to make sure that we can tackle one thing at a time, so that we can plan out our next steps without losing anything that we were thinking about. This is why I often keep a piece of paper in front of me while I’m working or coding in order to map out all the steps I’m considering taking. I connect these all loosely together like a flowchart (a mind-map could work too, but I find that usually I need something a bit more linear for steps to do in a task), and as I do them I can cross them off in the same way as a to-do list. I often make a little avatar of myself (usually a little stick figure on a scrap of paper with blu-tack on the back) which I can put next to the task or question I am currently doing. This really helps me to reorientate my attention quickly when I am interrupted or my concentration lapses for a moment.

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