App helping an ADHD-Student
Day Plans
Internalizing routines
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I used to lose hours of effective learning time in the morning, because I just did not have a routine to follow. I’m talking about waking up and realizing 3-4 hours later, that I’d barely had breakfast. I would trust to internally arrange my tasks, but that just never resulted in anything, but stress.
When I first started using the app, I would assign tasks for all the little steps, and it was really helpful. This is one of the things occupational therapists do with children (and adults) with ADHD. I went to one as an adult and we made those kinds of step-by-step-plans on paper, which I got really excited about.
Unfortunately, they ended up not being adaptable enough to be modified in an instance and multiplied for different occasions. I would lose time creating the plans and they weren’t handy to use.
Goalist changed that for me
I've gone from using those very precise plans, to now noticing I do not need them to be that precise anymore. I do not need a reminder of all the small tasks in my Morning-routine, some of them I have already automatized internally! This also means I’m faster with my routine. This has been a revolutionary change in my life and well-being.
Learning to use the brain more effectively
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Having deficits in executive functions & self-regulation are typical to ADHD, which means, among other things, that there are problems in planning, executing, controlling and evaluating of tasks and behaviour.
Another aspect is the metacognition, the knowledge about knowledge, the thinking about our thinking, the fact that we are aware of and understand our thought processes, intentions and learning.
Metacognitive skills are strategies we use to monitor and improve our thinking and learning. Using the feedback from previous experiences of how well a process was executed, we can modify our thought processes and decision-making resulting in more accurate estimations of how to perform a task.
A simple example:
I used to not plan to do laundry. Then I learned to add it to the plan and ultimately become aware (by the statistics of the app) that the task takes longer than I thought.
Convert your Day Plan into a routine
You managed to build a Day Plan that represents a routine or typical day in your life? There is a powerful command available in your Day Plan options; Convert into Task Set.
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Here's an idea: Don't do it! Yet.
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Before jumping into action, consider building a Day Plan but not converting it to a task set yet. Go on with your day adding, replacing or removing tasks and modifying durations, finishing the tasks, step by step.
In the end of the day, go ahead and create that Task set.
Now scroll through it and replace tasks that are very specific for that day and not interesting for your routine, for example, with ‘Time between’. Try not to shorten those unexpected breaks in your routine.
This way you can make sure your routine is realistic. If you end up chatting with your neighbor before taking the bus, prolonging breaks with running errands in between, or simply getting tired earlier than you expected, that is not because you were not doing your best, it’s because life happens! And you should plan to live. Those breaks and interruptions needed to help you focus when you are doing your tasks and keep you motivated!
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You can still modify the Task set to be "more efficient" later, after having used it few times.