Confession: I’ve been totally disorganized for my entire life.
And I can’t just “get organized.” No matter what I do, it feels like my brain is inherently chaotic.
My desk at school was crammed full of paper. My bedroom carpet was covered with so much stuff the lime green shag never faded.
I once found a partially consumed take-out coffee with mold floating on the top in my bag. Who puts a cup of coffee in their bag? I asked myself at the time.
But I knew.
The same person who puts ice cream away in the fridge. Who asks a question and doesn’t hear the answer because she has become inexplicably fascinated by the way the person’s mouth moves.
My Journey is Typical of Girls with Undiagnosed ADHD
As a kid, my mind was a mess but I knew how to hide it.
My job was to be perfect. And with a lot of self-imposed stress, I created that illusion.
I was a straight A student, super social, and involved in a ton of extracurriculars. When it was time to nominate candidates for elementary school valedictorian, my classmates agreed, there was no point having a vote — the only logical choice was me.
On the surface, I seemed great. But underneath it all, I was barely coping.
For example, instead of studying for tests like a normal person, I memorized every word of the textbook, so a perfect mark was virtually guaranteed.
Imagine this rigid approach, but applied to every aspect of existence.
Girls and Women with ADHD Traits Often Struggle with Perfectionism
Because life felt so chaotic, I devote an inordinate amount of time to obsessing over details.
I would regularly spend the whole night awake worrying. Worrying about forgetting to do things, about handing in substandard assignments due to procrastination, about disappointing my parents, teachers and friends. I was hardly sleeping.
I assumed everyone struggled like this. That there was a secret path to calmness out there waiting to be discovered. And that everyone had found it but me.
One day at school, I experienced something that can only be described as a psychological breakdown. From that moment on, I knew everything had to change.
Creating an “Unstructured Structure” Helps Minimize Rigid Thinking
As impossible as it felt, I knew what I had to do.
I needed to get organized without being obsessive. I needed to accept my imperfect nature. I needed to be okay with being a disappointment — at least some of the time. And, most importantly, I needed to sleep.
I ran home, sprawled out on my bedroom floor with my coat and knapsack still on, ripped a sheet of looseleaf out of my binder and started writing.
I had tried making to do lists in the past, but they always ballooned into oppressive reminders of all the things I’d never accomplish. Even as a kid, I was ridiculously ambitious when it came to the big picture — and useless when it came to the practical details of life.
But what if I could somehow expel my internal chaos and arrange it on paper?
Maybe that would work. So I tried.
Time Blocking Was the Best Tool for my ADHD Overwhelm
Though I was unaware of its existence at the time, the coping strategy I began experimenting with that day was called time blocking.
I committed to the process that day on my bedroom floor — and did not stop.
I was religious in my devotion.
Every morning, between bites of Cheerios, I’d rip a sheet of looseleaf in half, make a grid and schedule everything I needed to do in 30-minute increments (including blocks for doing things I’d forgotten, and for daytime worrying, which allowed me to get a much better sleep).
It wasn’t pretty: My lines were hand drawn, my grid lacked symmetry, with tiny writing in places in order to fit into the box, in other places, spilling into adjoining cells. It was a hurricane of words blowing over fences, an unforgivable jumble of thoughts.
But somehow, it worked.
Time Blocking is Elegant and Simple
Planning out my day only took a few minutes.
And for those few frenetic moments, I was all in on organization, fully focused on the task of getting my shit together.
Unlike other attempts to organize myself, my imperfect way of time blocking didn’t feel tedious, overwhelming or rigid. It felt natural, like I was piecing together a haphazard collage of all my flaws.
The process was messy and raw. I could hardly read my own writing I wrote so fast. There was no hiding it — one glance at my “schedule” and you would know I was a disaster. But I was okay with it. I was done with trying to be something I wasn’t.
Interestingly, I hardly ever looked at my plan after.
But somehow, going through the process of blocking out my time allowed me to fuse it into my head. Even though my brain still percolated with chaos, I understood the big picture of what I had to do — and most of the time I actually did it.
But without the stress of perfectionism that was destroying my life.
The Problem with Planning on Paper
I used this “time blocking on paper” system for my entire adolescence and most of my adulthood.
But as life became richer and more complex, the amount of “planning paper” I was generating started to get out of control. My notebooks were piling up. There were no keyword search options. I could feel myself losing focus. I was on the precipice of being overwhelmed. It didn’t help that we were living through the most distracting time period humans have ever encountered.
So I decided to try using a digital productivity tool. I knew there were a ton of apps and browser-based systems out there. I’d heard great things from people I trusted.
Finding the best productivity tool became my mission. I obsessed over the details, did a freakish amount of research (which wasn’t easy now that every search result with “best” in the title feels like a scam). I read reviews, watched demo videos, and tried everything that seemed good.
But I was so disappointed.
My Quest to Find the Best Digital Productivity Tool
Some apps were ridiculously complicated (and were clearly designed for people who loved the process of organizing details vs actually getting things done).
Others had potential but were difficult to customize — and I needed customization options so I could remove 99% of the extraneous stuff product people and marketers had crammed in there. What I needed was a distraction-free / ADHD-friendly version of my super simple analog system.
The fact that my ideal tool didn’t exist was a WTF moment.
Even more concerning, all the tools I tested — even the ones that were supposed to be “ADHD-friendly” — were designed in a way that would (for someone like me, at least) lead to rigid thinking and perfectionism. Which was the exact thing I was trying to avoid.
So I trashed all the apps and created my own system.
It’s called Quiet and it’s powered by Notion. If you’re interested, you can get it here.
I still write on paper occasionally when I’m tired of looking at screens, but I use Quiet most of the time. Confining my mental chaos to one location I can access anytime, from any device, has been truly life changing! I hope it might work for you too. (Btw, there are no monthly charges — you buy it once and it’s yours for life.)
If you end up trying Quiet, I’d love to hear about your experience, so feel free to contact me anytime. It’s just me here, so I respond to all email personally — and I’m always happy to hear from you.
Until next time, Love Anna