My ADHD Productivity Stack

Having ADHD can be a gift when you're creating solutions (or fighting fires) and a nightmare when you're in the grind and trying to stay organized and productive. This is especially important if you're freelancing -- it doesn't matter how novel your solutions are, how tight your code is, or that you came through during crunch time. Missing tasks because you're disorganized isn't just a loss of revenue, it's going to lose you customers, no matter how competent a developer you are.

What makes ADHD particularly difficult to manage is that the brain is constantly seeking a dopamine "hit" and that dealing with a steady flow of work doesn't really provide that. I'm at a point in my career now where I've adapted my workflows and my behaviors to help work around my ADD. The trick has been to develop a certain set of habits that I can do every day without thinking, and set up a series of automations to help support those habits.

Habits

"WTF," you're thinking, "how the hell do habits come into play when you've got ADHD?"

The answer here is getting the novel dopamine hit associated with getting shit done, and adding some social accountability in.

I'm revealing my age a bit here, but back in the 90's, in college, email and IRC were both a great way to get that dopamine rush. The novel experience of getting emails and communicating with like-minded nerds kept me online far more than I should have been. I had built a habit without even realizing it. In the same way, modern mobile devices take this to an extreme. My phone chirps, I check it. A combo platter of bright colors, friendly noises, and well-written notifications keeps me picking up the device even when I don't want to.

So the trick here was to tie my phone to my productivity plan and to ensure that even in cases my phone was dead, that I would be able to access my to-do list and continue to be fully aware of what's on my agenda for the day.

Services and Apps

The core of my productivity set is Todoist. It has mobile, web, and desktop apps, and synchronizes across them all. This where everything goes to die for me to address. This costs five bucks a month and is some of the best money I've spent to-date.

As I need to work with freelance clients as part of my life, I employ Trello (using the Kanban board view). I've found that clients are more understanding of it than a standard checklist -- when they can see where things are, it makes it easier for them to understand where things are in the process, prioritize existing work, and generally makes life easier for both of us.

I use the Google suite for my email and calendars, natch, and use the Mail client in macOS to handle my interface to Gmail.

And then I tie it all together using IFTTT. I pay for this service, as well, and it's worth it. I'd like to run with Zapier, but I can't justify the $30 a month.

Workflow

There's multiple ways a client (or potential client) will reach out to me.

If I'm contacted via a web form, that email is sent to me with a string in the subject line. That email (in macOS) is highlighted in red, and is forwarded to an email address at IFTTT. This does this following things: creates "read the email" as a task in Todoist scheduled for today with a Priority 1 flag, and it sends a notification to my iOS devices.

This same chain of events happens with minor variations in the task name and notification data for emails from certain people or domain names (representing clients), or when a client adds a new task to the Backlog in Trello.

On the Trello side of things, a task has three columns it moves through before it is in production.

The first, Backlog, is where all the ideas go to die be estimated by me. I also use this space to ask clarifying questions, so that I can give a good estimate. I put estimated hours in the title, notes in the notes field, and then move it to the next column, which is "Waiting Client Approval".

Only the client can move a card from "Waiting Client Approval" to the next column, which is "Client Approved". Once it's there, I have the ability to move it into "Working" and from there out, it's the typical QA/User Acceptance/Closed cycle like you see in your average Kanban board.

Integration

Largely, this is done with IFTTT to connect everything -- I realized early on that if I got bogged down building my own solution from scratch that 1.) like most ADD projects, it would never get finished, and that 2.) the level of irony involved in not being able to finish building a productivity system would probably kill me.

(That said, based on some of the limitations associated with the way IFTTT and the Todoist API work, I've been writing a bit of code to make parts of this less annoying. See more, below under "Success Factors"...)

Success Factors

This has amped up regular communications flow with my freelance clients and it's made a huge difference in how our relationship works. I've encouraged clients to add items to the backlog as if it were their Amazon wishlist -- put whatever you can think of in there and we can discuss. I never miss an email or a Kanban board addition anymore, which is fantastic.

Social accountability is also a powerful factor -- one of the things that I had originally done is using IFTTT to send a Tweet every time I checked off an item in Todoist. But when you're nailing 20+ items a day, that turns into a flood of tweets that no one wants to see. Thus, I'm working on a python script that'll run via cron job and spit out a short thread every night at 11pm local time.

Failure Points and Solutions

The hardest part to account for is going to be the levelling-off of the dopamine rush in response to the notifications that I've set up. I need to find a way to make that change and evolve over time so that it remains a novel situation.

Staying in the flow. Before I started this, I was simply using Todoist as a barebones "keep up with tasks" manager for my life as a whole. Having recurrent tasks that repeat daily has been a life-saver. I haven't sent my kids to school without their ADD meds in a long time. I get my household chores done on the regular. I'm using this as a way to build good habits.

The Future

As I have mentioned earlier, building my own solution is a possibility here. Currently, I'm looking into a more full-fledged solution that'll look at my existing habits across a large swath of my life -- diet, exercise, meditation, sleep patterns, work patterns, etc. -- and analyze that to help me figure out how to be more productive.

Resources

• Todoist
• IFTTT
• Trello
• Faster Than Normal - Finding The Best Lead Domino
• Atomic Habits