ADHD Productivity Report 2024 – Personal (futile) journey of (no) improvement

I ditched technology and switched to paper planners, in particular Japanese planners with time columns and enough space to dot down daily notes/thoughts.

After years of being tethered to Slack and other productivity apps, the only ones I use now are Google calendar (coordinating meetings with other people) and email for communication/correspondence.

I think it's been helpful for coping with ADHD. Attention is a finite resource that you only get so much of in a day, and everything online is fighting for it.

Here's an example of what I mean: https://www.jetpens.com/blog/Kokuyo-Jibun-Techo-A-3-in-1-Pla...

I work great under pressure, but leaning on that long-term keeps me in a constant state of high stress, which messes with my baseline mood. I’ve found that clearing my head really helps, and I’ve been using the Sam Harris meditation app for that.

Most mornings, I’ll get a run in before work, and sometimes I do track workouts with my Garmin watch + VO2 app. The VO2 app has preset workouts e.g a warm-up mile, 4x400m at a target pace with 1-minute recoveries, then a cool-down mile. My Garmin tracks everything—the distances and the pace I actually ran—so I’m not having to think too much about it during the workout.

Afterwards, I get a summary with accuracy ratings on how close I was to my distance and pace targets. It’s awesome because I can track my performance over time and actually see that I’m hitting faster paces with less effort. That’s been great for building my confidence. I’ve been wanting something similar for desk work—a “workout plan” of timed laps to guide me through tasks and track my focus duration.

I’ve put together a rough version where I ask ChatGPT to make me a “workout plan” for desk tasks, and I made a lap-timer app on my Mac to parse it. Made a quick quick video showing an example for emails, though I'm not opening emails for the demo—just hitting the laps. https://youtu.be/tH7KFLC2640

If anyone knows of a better solution, I'm willing to try!

I will add that I also recently tried:

- Planny - interesting but has its own tasks, so not really beneficial for me.

- Arcush - Again, its own rather rudimentary tasks.

- PolyPlan - Todoist, Apple Calendar and reminders, but it either didn’t work, then worked and broke things, and then I saw no benefit in it.

- Zesfy - My god, the UI is not friendly whatsoever. Also, again, its own tasks.

- FlowSavvy - No, I don’t want my tasks to be saved as events.

- LifeStack - Interesting concept, but I can’t connect it to my calendar.

I’m probably missing some others, because I got tired of documenting myself being disappointed .

Couldn't find anything in terms of medication in their blog. But then, people who are in a very structured life and in the right position that suits our shortcomings can get quite far.