Automating Your ADHD Life

One of the paradoxes of ADHD is how much work we can get done when we're interested in something... but then how little we get done when something is boring. Unfortunately in life there are a lot of things that are going to bore us. And this becomes especially true with those boring tasks we have to do over and over again. So this is where automation comes in - automation is simply something that accomplishes tasks for us without our intervention.

Whether we know it or not, all of us already use a lot of automation in our lives already. We often don't think of simple things like setting an alarm as an automated process, but it's a way we can externalize a reminder that will go off with no other input from us.

Today we're going to take a look at how automation can be helpful with ADHD, some of the ways that we can take advantage of automations and then go into some specific things we can look at automating. There was actually a lot to cover here so I'll be going into even more automations next week as well.

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Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/automation

This Episode's Top Tips

1. Automation is a way for us to frontload our work so that we can save time in the future - it can be helpful for ADHD because it can reduce decision fatigue, reduces chances of us forgetting a step, and just saves us time.
2. When we're thinking about automating a process the first things we need to think about are how to systemize the task and then if we can reduce the number of steps it takes. Sometime during this process, we find that maybe we don't need to use automation but we still find a better way of doing the task.
3. We can use automation to help with accountability by setting up automations that will let our teammates know when we have (or haven't) done what we said we were going to do. This can be helpful because it takes the reporting process out of our hands.
4. There are a ton of things we can do around our house to automate our everyday tasks that will make our lives easier - from automatically locking the doors at night, to getting notifications that we left the garage door open, to getting a smart speaker to read out our daily schedule - our biggest limitation is usually just what we think is possible, so go explore some options.