Hey - It’s Michael.
Recently I broke my kitesurf-jump record: 14,3m - pretty happy about that. Enjoy the newsletter!
The Situation
You feel overwhelmed. There are a thousand thoughts racing through your mind, jumping from one to the next. You leave work and it doesn’t stop. You talk to your partner but remember this thing you should do tomorrow. You go to get this thing and remember you should do this other thing. It never stops. So you numb yourself with videos, drinks or some other poor habit you actually wanted to stop.
Accept your ADHD Brain:
ADHD is strongly associated with working memory impairment. ¹
The working memory is your brain’s system that holds information temporarily while you think, decide or act.
Since this system is impaired, you will always struggle to hold information in your brain - no matter how smart you are.
Unfinished tasks create open loops. And in ADHD brains, open loops create a disproportional amount of mental noise.
The System
The key then is to close all mental loops for your brain.
Principle:
Externalize everything.
Store all information, thinking, ideas, goals, projects, wants, needs, decisions, dreams, plans, experiences, stories, notes, lists, work - anything in an external system.
Most of the tools & systems that I’ll share in the future will be based on this core principle. Their purpose is to create calm & peace of mind by externalizing information so that your brain is free to think instead of retaining information - something that your brain is simply not designed to do.
Environmental design:
Start designing your environment so that it holds information for you.
In Practice
Start writing down your thoughts in any situation.
Stop Rule:
Stop using your brain to remember information.
At the end of the meeting, write down the tasks you agreed to do. Somebody gives you a restaurant recommendation - write it down. This idea you had for project A, that thing you wanna do in Summer - write it all down!
I recommend collecting all notes in a single place. Avoid using 5 different tools, 4 notebooks and 3 calendars.
This will make it much easier to see all relevant information at a glance and subsequently create a system that works for you.
Again: Working memory! Remember, it’s hard for your brain to combine information if it’s stored in various places.
A quote to ponder on:
“Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them.” - David Allen
As soon as you start following this principle you’ll most likely start to have scattered notes and confusing lists that don’t fit together.
That’s good, because you moved to a better problem: how to create structured systems that reliably hold information for you. We’ll cover those systems in the next weeks. If you have a particular question, let me know.
See you next week - Michael
Barkley RA. Behavioral inhibition, sustained attention, and executive functions: constructing a unifying theory of ADHD. Psychol Bull. 1997 Jan;121(1):65-94. doi: 10.1037/0033-2909.121.1.65. PMID: 9000892.