Your personal ADHD note system

Hey - It’s Michael.

Played chess with a dear friend yesterday - good for the soul! Enjoy the newsletter!

You walk into a room that is messy - and start noticing discomfort immediately. The same is true for your mental environment: you check your notebook and it overwhelms you: here an idea for a project, there a bunch of movies you want to watch, right next to that task you really need to get done until tomorrow.

Messy environments create excess sensory and informational input.

Your brain must continuously filter what matters and what doesn’t, which relies on working memory & inhibitory control - two things your ADHD brain is not designed to do well.

Accept your ADHD Brain:

ADHD brains benefit from external structures. ¹

After externalizing all the information you want to hold it’s time to structure that information to keep a clear & calm mind.

Principle:

Store all your notes in one single place & gradually split in lists that make sense to you.

Don’t forget: your working memory is impaired, so it’s difficult to create a system when information is scattered around places.

Keep in mind that digital notes are a lot easier to sort & structure than written notes.

I went through countless iterations of building my own system when I should have done the following:

Sort your master note for context & test your patterns over time.

Find patterns in your one master note and create lists or groups of information within that note. Don’t move those grouped parts somewhere else yet but use this subpattern for a few weeks and see whether you like it.

Only if it has proven to be successful over a longer period of time extract it to a separate note or use a digital tool.

Here are a few examples of patterns you might find:

This pattern list is endless & looks different for everybody.

“Out of clutter, find simplicity.” - Albert Einstein

There are many frameworks & systems that you could copy. Those systems are nothing but notes grouped for a particular context.

I however suggest that you build your personal master system on your own.

Your ADHD brain might be similar to others, your personality, interests & preferences however are certainly not and what works for others might not work for you.

If you still want to know how I do it and which lists I keep, let me know.

To manage expectations: it took me several years to build a system that works for me - and now I reap the benefits. I feel very calm and whatever I want to look up, I know exactly where to find it.

See you next week - Michael