ADD-Friendly Ways to Organize Your Life

Strategies that Work from an Acclaimed Professional Organizer and a Renowned ADD Clinician

Judith Kolberg, Kathleen Nadeau

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317277712
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Inclusive Education

Acclaimed professional organizer Judith Kolberg and Dr. Kathleen Nadeau, renowned ADHD clinical psychologist, are back with an updated edition of their classic text for adults with ADD. Their collaboration offers the best understanding and solutions for adults who want to get and stay organized. Readers will enjoy all new content on organizing digital information, managing distractions, organizing finances, and coping with the "black hole" of the Internet. This exciting new resource offers three levels of strategies and support: self-help, non-professional assistance from family and friends, and professional support; allowing the reader to determine the appropriate level of support.

Part 1

Getting Started

1 ADD-Friendly Organizing: A Different Organizing Approach

2 ADD-Friendly Strategies That Work with Your ADD

3 Structure and Support: Creating the Framework for Success

Chapter 1

ADD-Friendly Organizing

A Different Organizing Approach

For many adults with ADD, life feels overwhelming and chaotic. Their homes are cluttered; laundry and dishes go undone; unread newspapers and magazines pile up. Their cars are filled with junk and debris—clothes to take to the cleaner’s, misplaced athletic shoes, and half-eaten, dried-out fast food. And many spend hundreds of dollars each month on storage units because they can’t decide to throw away long-unused items. Because decision-making is often difficult for adults with ADD, the default decision is to keep everything. Time rushes by and they don’t notice, leading them to miss some events and arrive late to many others; bills and important paperwork are buried under piles. Their finances are often in overdraft; charge cards are up to their limits; frequent late fees are assessed; tax returns are filed late, often several years late. And when they make an effort to get organized, their clutter seems to magically reappear shortly after it has been cleared away because they haven’t developed the habits required to keep their belongings put away. The skills to manage the demands of daily life, to make plans, and to execute those plans all come under the term “executive functioning skills.” In this book, we will teach you many strategies to build and support better executive functioning skills—the skills you need to manage your time, your tasks, and your belongings.

If you are an adult with ADD who struggles with organizing the many aspects of your life, this is the book that can put you on a path to finally create order. Other organizing books often aren’t helpful because their approaches aren’t well designed for people with ADD who need simple solutions and more structure and support while they implement those solutions. The advice in other organizing books may be too detailed, for example suggesting a complex paper filing system when most adults with ADD would be thrilled simply to see the surface of their dining room table again. Also, in most other organizing books, there is an assumption that readers will be able to follow the book’s suggestions and put their home or office in order, without any support from others.

You’ve probably tried to “get organized” many times before—buying organizing books, day planners, organizing apps, and electronic gadgets—but nothing in the past has worked. You start out with the best intentions, only to find that each new organizing system falls apart very quickly. This doesn’t mean that getting organized is a hopeless quest, but it does mean that you need special approaches designed for adults with ADD. That’s what this book offers, ADD-friendly ways to organize your life. In this book, you’ll find stories about adults with ADD, describing the organizing dilemmas they’ve encountered and the ADD-friendly approaches that worked for them—and that can work for you as well.

How is this book different?

● It’s written by two experts: an expert on ADD, Kathleen Nadeau, Ph.D., and an expert on organizing, Judith Kolberg.

● The tips and tools in this book are specifically designed for adults with ADD.

● Not only is our advice ADD-friendly, but the book’s format is ADD-friendly too, with clearly outlined topics, bold headings, readable print, an open page design, and a reader-friendly writing style.

Dr. Nadeau

Problems with planning and organization are among the biggest challenges for adults with ADD. Planning and organizing challenges can be especially difficult for women with ADD who are often in charge of organizing not only themselves but their families as well.

Years ago, I began to realize that most organizing tools and training didn’t work well for adults with ADD. For example, daylong seminars on time management or organization require people to listen effectively for six to eight hours at a time. Listening for that long is difficult for most, and next to impossible for adults with ADD. Also, typical organizing books and seminars assume that you will be able to put their organizing ideas into action on your own, without structure or support—the “just do it” school of organizing. If it were that simple, adults with ADD would have gotten organized long ago!

On top of unrealistic expectations, many organizing approaches suggested in other organizing books are ludicrously inappropriate for adults with ADD. Someone whose garage resembles a landfill, or whose dining room table is permanently covered with piles of papers, isn’t likely to benefit from detailed advice on record-keeping or filing systems.

Other organizing systems don’t take into account the ADD stumbling blocks of inconsistency and forgetfulness. For example, day planners (yes, even in this digital age, some people find that pencil and paper are more helpful) and digital calendars on laptops, iPads and smartphones can be helpful for adults with ADD. However, without developing strategies to counteract patterns of inconsistency and forgetfulness, these tools can’t be used effectively.

To use a planner or digital calendar successfully, you must first learn to use it consistently—to write necessary information about schedules and tasks in the planner on a daily basis, and consult your planner regularly throughout the day. And even those adults with ADD who enter information and consult their planner on a daily basis must also develop strategies to keep their planner with them at all times, and to avoid misplacing or losing it. The standard training seminars on the use of day planners don’t even begin to address these typical ADD challenges.

After repeated failed efforts to take charge of your life, you may be convinced that the task is impossible. Instead, the problem may lie in the approaches that you’ve tried. In this book, we’ll help you learn to better understand yourself and how you are affected by ADD, so that you can develop successful strategies to manage the organizing tasks of your life. The keys to ADD-friendly organizing success involve:

● Strategies (ADD-friendly strategies, of course!);

● Support; and

● Structure.

We’ll come back to these “three S’s” again and again throughout the book, as we describe ADD-friendly organizing approaches.

Judith Kolberg

The difference between the organizing needs of people without ADD and those of people with ADD could not have been more apparent to me than when I began to do organizing work with Olivia. What an education! Olivia is a mini-whirlwind, a swirl of dangling purses, bags of groceries, car keys, and odd papers. Always in motion (mainly because she is often late and hurrying), Olivia whirls to answer the phone, spins around to yell out to the children, frees a hand to pet the dog as she simultaneously opens the door. Her desk and dining room table are buried beneath unopened mail, newspapers, and loose papers. “I tend to disorganize spontaneously,” she explains. It’s true. I watch her turn a clear space on the kitchen counter into a clump of clutter in no time at all.

I am a good professional organizer. Olivia is a successful career woman. With patience and a can-do attitude, I figure we can organize Olivia’s life. But few of the approaches I used with other adults seem to work for Olivia. I try putting her papers in file folders with titles, stacking them neatly in her in-box. But Olivia can’t find anything. Two weeks later, her desk is overflowing again with heaps of papers. I teach her the time-honored “A place for everything and everything in its place” proverb as we put things away and try to clear out the clutter. But these approaches are thwarted by her forgetfulness. She leaves her cell phone behind, and the dog’s leash is nowhere to be found. We work on her time management skills and, with my support, Olivia agrees to plan her week in advance; however, her plans deteriorate into a rush of semi-emergencies and unplanned surprises.

Eventually Olivia explained to me that she had attention deficit disorder. At first I was convinced that even a neurologically based organic disorder like ADD would eventually yield to the logic of standard organizing approaches. What I learned through working with Olivia was that these standard approaches couldn’t work for her—and don’t work for many others with ADD.

Here’s what did work. Instead of filing papers in plain old manila file folders assembled into a filing cabinet, we bought a colorful milk crate and stuck casters (wheels) on it. Inside we used multicolored file folders with lettering on the tabs and, instead of using many file folders, her papers were f...