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ADHD diagnoses have gone up in the last few years with many GenZ and Millenials looking for ways to improve their mental health. As someone who has struggled and worked through ADHD my entire life, I thought it might be helpful to share with you my tips and tricks for staying focused. So in today’s article, I will be going over the 4 techniques I use to manage my ADHD & Ssay productive without medication.
Use To-do lists and Writing to Manage ADHD Symptoms
One of the biggest reasons I started my blog was to give myself an excuse to write while attending college for marketing. I know that my ADHD brain does not enjoy traditional in-class learning and I knew I would need something to help me incorporate my education into my daily life that I enjoyed. Passion is a very important part of an ADHD diagnosis because ADHD is not an inability to pay any attention ever, it’s the disorganized and scattered attention span that makes it hard to focus on tasks or topics that are not entertaining.
I learned early on from my family the value of writing and creating to-do lists. People with ADHD frequently are in a state of disarray. Having an item you can come back to at any given point can really help you focus better and become more productive in the short term.
Use Meditation as a tool for ADHD Symptom management
Meditation has served a lot of purposes in my life and one of them has been to refill what I like to call the “Well of Focus.”
See early on in my college career, I learned that my focus was a resource that needed to be refilled and replenished to draw from it anytime.
If you are anything like me, you will have days where you are very focused, and motivated and feel like you’re ready to take on the world. But then sometimes the next day it feels like everything is impossible and your motivation to do the things you did the day before can feel impossible.
This might mean that you’re looking at your attention as a resource that is stagnant. But instead, your attention should be something you consider to be something you have to work on and develop a skill for nurturing.
There are many ways that people with ADHD have found how to nurture and replenish their well of focus, and for me, that has been meditation.
Now when I say meditation don’t feel like you have to sit in front of a blank wall for 5 hours and think about nothing… When I meditate, it can be for as little as 30 seconds. Just taking a moment to breathe and check in with yourself can be an easy way to refocus your attention in the task at hand. If you want a good way to learn about meditation without joining a meditation group, consider checking out my VR meditation guide and app recommendations for the oculus quest 2.
Utilize Phone and Technology Management
Find an avenue for fleeting and frequent thoughts to pass you by. TikTok, blogging, writing, social media, etc. Just make sure it’s a healthy relationship.
Unfortunately, I don’t use any ADHD software that a lot of bloggers might talk about. My experience with software programs that are dedicated to helping you manage your email or your tasks is they are made for people who are neurotypical by people who are neurotypical to help manage productivity better.
For a person with ADHD like myself, these apps and software services usually do very little to help me manage my own mind. And that’s the key… ADHD is a problem with managing your own mind not your time.
So if you jump into a software program and hope that it is going to save your ADHD brain, if you’re anything like me you’re going to find yourself largely unsuccessful because it’s the techniques that help you manage your brain… Not software.
Enabling passionate work, not frustrating work.
If 2020 taught us anything, it taught us that a bad work relationship can be just as toxic as a toxic romantic relationship. We spend the majority of our lives with the people we work with and doing the tasks we work on. So if your job makes living with ADHD difficult, it may work to reconsider.
That’s precisely what I did back in 2020 when I decided to leave my job and pursue my passion for marketing. Now that didn’t make my ADHD go away, but having a job I was excited about made it easier to focus on the tasks at hand.
In my work, I also have a few rules I live by that help me stay productive in a very creative and busy work environment.
3 Rules for ADHD Work Productivity
- “if it takes less than 2 minutes, do it right then”
- Don’t start a new task until your current task is complete
- Allow yourself to set boundaries for work.
When I am at work, if something will take me 2 minutes to complete, I do it right then. Because I have noticed that letting 2-minute tasks pile up is the fastest way to stress myself out. Once I start a task, I don’t let myself move on to other more exciting tasks until that task is complete. One big part of this is making sure my email does not get checked while trying to complete a task and that my phone is set to focus mode during that task. Finally, when I am working on a task, I don’t let other people start conversations with me because I know its an opportunity for me to get distracted from achieving what I am working on.
What do you think about these non-medicated tips for ADHD management? Have you tried or implemented these tips with any degree of success? Let me know in the comments!
If you liked this post, you may also like my recent article about how adderral may suppress natural creativity.
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Disclaimer: None of the information presented on this site constitutes legal, business, tax, or medical advice. In each scenario, it’s recommended to first chat with a medical, legal, business, or tax professional before making any decisions.
