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or anyone else who doesn’t know what on earth they’re doing.

(I have spent YEARS trying to get my brain around how to clean my house consistently, which has been frustrating because I’m a very tidy person who likes my house kept nicely. I have now managed to do it once a week for three weeks in a row. I don’t think I’ve done that before in my entire LIFE. This is the process I finally figured out which works for me, but it’s okay if it doesn’t for you! Everyone is different.)

The set-up

You will need:

1 microfibre cloth

1 flat-sponge mop handle and 2 sponge mops (or 2 full mops if you prefer) (the mop is vital for this system working for me)

3 standard cloths

Washing up liquid

All-purpose cleaner (I like Bio-D because you get a nice shine on mirrors and glass without needing a separate glass cleaner)

Bathroom cleaner spray (I like Sainsbury’s Antibacterial Bathroom Cleaner Spray - it’s cheap and really effective)

Toilet bleach

Optional but recommended: gloves for cleaning in

Colour-code your cloths, either by sewing different colours in each, attaching different ribbons, or even sewing on a patch. I will use green, orange and red for this post. It also might be a good idea to colour-code your mop-sponges, with green and orange.

The green cloth is kept in the kitchen, and can go anywhere except the bathroom.

Orange and red cloths are kept in the bathroom, and do not go anywhere else.

The process

This is the in-depth, step-by-step version. There will be a tldr version at the end.

It’s less complicated than it might look, and takes me about 15 minutes.

1: Mirrors and surfaces.

Get your microfibre cloth. One surface at a time, spray all-purpose cleaner on your mirrors, glass and other assorted surfaces and wipe them clean. You can do as many or as few as you have the energy for.

Get your green cloth. Use all-purpose cleaner to clean your kitchen surfaces, hob and kitchen sink.

2: Mop.

Get your kitchen (green) mop-sponge and get it damp. Add a small squirt of washing-up liquid to the sponge or the floor. Start from the corner and mop yourself towards the door.

If you have other mop-able floors, do those next.

Then mop your bathroom floor.

Wring your mop out in the bathroom sink then swap mops or mop-sponges. Spray bathroom cleaner on your tiles and tub. Use the mop-sponge to scrub them (absolute game-changer compared to leaning over with a cloth, I’m telling you), then wring it out in the bathroom sink.

3: Bathroom.

Grab your orange cloth and use the bathroom cleaner spray on your bath taps, shower head and bathroom sink + taps.

Rinse with the shower (or if you have a fixed shower-head like me, chuck some water at it with a cup).

Grab your red cloth and use bathroom cleaner spray; starting with the handle/flush, work your way through from the cleaner to the dirtiest parts of the toilet.

Squeeze some bleach around the toilet bowl.

Put all your cloths in the washing machine, wash your hands, and you’re done!

tldr graphic I made in two minutes on LibreOffice Impact:

But no one seems to make the connection that it's a time blindness thing. One of the symptoms of ADHD is not having a good and accurate sense of time. And not doing stuff prior to an event with a hard deadline is an obvious coping mechanism for that.

Can I go to the store? It's 10am and the appointment is at 3pm. How long does going to the store take? An hour? Three hours? Five hours? I DON'T KNOW!

I get anxious trying to do things before appointments because I'm aware that I don't know how long those things take, and that if I think I do, I may be very wrong. Too often I've been like "hey I can walk to the corner store and grab a drink, that'll take like 15 minutes!" and then an hour later I get back and whoops my rice has burnt.

Plus there's also the fact that ADHD people know that motivation and focus is a two-edged sword.

Like, let's say you decide to play a video game. You've got time, you can pause/save whenever, so this should be a perfect fit to make good use of your waiting-time. So you start playing and WHOOPS you get really focused for some reason today (because people with ADHD do not get to pick when their brain decides to focus) and the next time you look at the clock it's 2:49 and you haven't showered or dressed and the appointment is 30 minutes away. Fuck. (you could have set an alarm, but now you're asking people with the forgetting-things-and-time-ignoring condition to remember it set alarms)

And with motivation, it can be almost worse. Instead of playing a game, you so something useful or creative. You clean your room or fix your plumbing or write a story or draw a picture. And suddenly it's great. Your brain is firing on all cylinders. You've got all the motivation you can ask for, and you are FLYING. the ideas are brilliant, your hands are nimble, you're getting stuff done you've been putting off for weeks or months. And then the alarm goes off. Time to go to your appointment. Fuck.

You drive there, your brain still full of ideas and plans. But by the time you get back, the motivation is gone. You may still have the ideas but you don't have the drive to write them down. You can't force yourself to do it. Your sink is still in pieces. Your room is half-cleaned, and you have to shove all the sorted clothes into one big bin just so you have somewhere to sleep. You've left things half finished again, in a cycle that has been repeating your whole fucking life. It seems sometimes that nothing ever gets finished.

So next time you don't even start. There's not time. You've been burnt too many times. Why add another half-completed project to your pile of shame?

My point is that people seem to be going "lol I can't do anything all day if I have an appointment at 3pm" like this is a quirky "oh I'm so scatterbrained!" weirdness they alone have, and not a major complication of a disabling mental illness.

One of the biggest breakthroughs for me in living more comfortably with my adhd happened years before I was actually diagnosed, when I finally grasped the meta concept that my brain doesn’t understand time. That I could not trust myself to make estimates of how long something would take, especially “low value” tasks like commuting to work (I mean, it wouldn’t be FAIR for it to take more than, oh, five minutes, right?) or “high value” takes that absorb me (I reeeeallly want to work on that craft project, I can finish it up in five minutes and then do the other stuff, right?

So I started timing everything.

Seriously. I timed my journey to work from front door to desk, and I wrote that number down. It took a few goes, because I forgot to check the timer when I arrived the first couple of times, but once I had a number, I added ten minutes. Then I subtracted that total from the time I needed to arrive at work.

Then I wrote that new time down and said, “this is the time I need to leave the house to go to work”, and set an alarm every day for that time.

The alarm helped, but more than anything it was the act of doing the cold hard numbers calculation. Of looking at that time (8.20 AM if you’re wondering) written down and learning it like a New Fact, visualising it in my head: 8.20 is when I leave the house for work. Even if my brain is whispering that SURELY that’s too early.

Then I did the same thing for a bunch of other stuff. Other journeys. The washing up. Having breakfast. And over time I got two things out of it:

1. I amassed a little collection of Time Facts that I don’t have to think about any more because I’ve learned them by heart. I know what time to leave the house to get to the appointment because it’s maths I’ve already done, I just have to grab the appropriate number from my mental list.

2. I got better at estimating time in general, because I could compare known times to new ones (do I think this task takes as long as the washing up? Longer? Shorter?)

3. The combination of 1 and 2. slowly gave me back a sense of trust in myself. I didn’t have to be in waiting mode all the time because I knew that I had a concrete time when I had to leave for X, and I would often set an alarm for it, and that until then I could let go and get on with things.

It doesn’t work perfectly or fix everything. I am still very familiar with “can’t do anything because I have a thing at 3”. There are still times I get too absorbed or forget an alarm or drastically underestimate how long something takes. But overall, just having the basic self knowledge of “I can’t instinctively estimate time so I have to do it by recording hard data and memorising that” was a game-changer. I hope it helps someone else.

@nutmegan17 on tiktoks eating tray hack

By keeping a tray full of no prepare necessary food, in the fridge it can be used to aid neurodivergent or fatigued people.

By putting food like, cheese and crackers, or whatever is a safe food for you personally on the tray, it can be taken easily to the couch or bed to be eaten from whenever you are hungry.

This prevents executive dysfunction or fatigue and any reason preventing you from eating. You need to care of yourself because everyone needs food to stay alive including you.

You deserve to eat even when on a bad brain day and are unable to prepare a meal for yourself.

@nutmegan17 on tiktoks eating tray hack

By keeping a tray full of no prepare necessary food, in the fridge it can be used to aid neurodivergent or fatigued people.

By putting food like, cheese and crackers, or whatever is a safe food for you personally on the tray, it can be taken easily to the couch or bed to be eaten from whenever you are hungry.

This prevents executive dysfunction or fatigue and any reason preventing you from eating. You need to care of yourself because everyone needs food to stay alive including you.

You deserve to eat even when on a bad brain day and are unable to prepare a meal for yourself.

If you do go the tray route, make life easy on yourself with a vessel to contain/compact trash (plastic bag of some sort, even, a bag from the food on the tray) and/or paper towel or other vessel for compost if you separate trash fractions in your area.

and, on that note, plastic stays in your temporary collection vessel compacted waaay easier when folded rather than crumpled. Even a quick twist knot will save you the stress (and maybe tears) of the plastic popping out

I’m hungry and I want to eat. But when I get to the kitchen I realize I have to cook something. It’s not that hard but it’s something in the middle of where I am now and me eating. So I end up not eating.

I’m cleaning my room. There are dirty clothes all over the floor. But my laundry basket is full and so I can’t put my dirty clothes where they are supposed to go. Now my momentum for cleaning is shut down and I go back to something I know how to do, like change playlists.

there's no like. medical term for it or whatever but having a quick temper and being super emotional is generally understood as an adhd symptom. it's just one of the symptoms no one really talks about