Organisation and task planning apps I find useful as an ADHDer
People often wonder how I'm so organised. The truth is, it's necessity and coping mechanism. This post is a recommendation of a few tools to help you all to improve your time management, so long as you can find just a little self will.
Apps will be listed first, and I'm closing this post with a longer explanation to try and sell you on the benefits and ease of doing this. I tried my best to include a variety for different preferences:
Remember the Milk
Available as a website and as an app
Good for people who like looking at lists
You create 'lists' (category of task such as home, school etc.), which you can also add tags and locations to
All of your lists combine into daily and weekly checklists
Imports to google calendar in the free version
Unfortunately a lot of options are paywalled, including app notifications. If you have an android, you can work around this with your normal phone calendar.
Trello
Good for more visual based people
Mostly a website, but available as an app
Better for long term tasks and projects
Would recommend for people more used to organisation as it can take a while to set up. However if you dedicate some time, you can get some great custom options.
A lot of functionality in the free version.
Habatica
Probably my favourite
Has a web and app version - where the app is actually quite easy to look at!
It is basically just a gameified version of your daily schedule. You get rewarded for checking off your tasks with RPG points, and you can buy items with coins and stuff.
Gives you a whole sense of progression and is great for dopamine.
A feature I love is the ability to set task difficulty, which gives you higher reward for harder tasks.
More of a daily habits type of thing, and not so great for one-off events.
All the functionality is free, the subscription is mostly cosmetic stuff.
Do it Now RPG
Similar in concept to habatica
What I really like specific to this app is the ability to assign tasks to specific character values. That means your character progression is actually quite realistic
Has an actual calendar which is a plus, however it is locked behind paywall. However it's about £11 for a whole year, so it's one of the cheaper options
Time Planner: Schedule and Tasks
Allows you to view tasks in these cool bubbles
You can also view them in list view and calendar view
Lots of customisation and easy to make categories
Most of the functionality is present in the free version including push notifications
Cute colour scheme!
Has a really good tutorial, which is kind of unique to these apps (which can be overwhelming)
Sectograph
Basically lays out your tasks visually on a clockface
Works best in combination with your existing calendar app
Has a home screen widget!!! You can have this be the thing you see whenever you unlock your phone!!!
Some features such as colour customisation locked behind the paywall, but it's a life time purchase of like £4 so it might be worth it.
Sweepy
A cleaning app specifically but I find it useful enough to mention here.
One thing I like is that it comes with existing task lists (editable). All you have to do is add the rooms in your house.
Basically requires very little set up and reminds you to clean at good intervals.
Benefits of doing this!
So immediately, you might think that this is super daunting. And no yeah, it is and I'm not perfect with these apps at all. But the thing is, with executive dysfunction being so crippling a lot of the time, any tool that helps is so valuable.
I find that writing down what I have to do not only makes it easer to remember, but also gives me more internal pressure to actually do it.
ADHDers generally enjoy problem solving and tasks that involve min/maxing. Just try and think about it like that during the set up stage. The set up is by far the hardest part. Good life advice in general honestly: gameify everything.
If none of these appeal to you, you can still do a lot on your phone's calendar app. Actually, back when I was doing my school exams, I made study schedules on excel spreadsheet that worked pretty well. There are so many options out there!
