- Hi, I'm Dr Tracey Marks, a psychiatrist, and I make mental health education videos. Today's video is part three of a series on learning ADHD skills to help you with your day-to-day functioning. The first videos work on time management, and if you haven't seen them, I'll have a link in the corner and in the description.
Organization is one of several of the executive functions that are impaired in someone who has ADHD. I talk about executive function in this video. You don't have to have ADHD though, to have problems with executive functioning, especially organization.
Disorganization causes a lot of frustration and wasted time looking for things and it can also frustrate the people around you. So here are three steps to keep up with your stuff. Place, retrieve, and return.
The starting point for organization is making a place for everything. Even small things have a designated place, and this can be a drawer for pens, a container for your mail, or a hook for your keys. When you have organizational problems, the tendency is to wanna keep things within reach.
So you may have a lot of clutter laying about and you may even feel like you need to keep it like that because you wanna be able to have your things nearby. When you are assigning your places, you do wanna have the things that you use most often in the most convenient place or within easy view. But the placement of things really needs a little bit more intention behind them.
Once you decide where things should go, you have to commit to putting them back in their place right after you use them. So when you need something you go retrieve it from its place, then you immediately return it when you're done. Many people think that they put it back, but they don't because it's much easier to put it down just for a moment so you can continue your task.
But it doesn't happen that you put it back and now where you keep it becomes a moving target that you have to find each and every time. And in the moment, you're not giving much weight to how you'll find that item in the future. That consideration is just not on your radar.
Now you wanna give some thought to how you organize your space. Have you had the problem of looking for something, not finding it, then someone else says, "It's right there in front of you. "You just missed it"?
Or an irritated family member says, "It's right there, you just didn't look. " But you did look. But it's like you were just blind to it.
Why? Because when you have attention problems too many things in your field of vision become distractions that your brain just eliminates for you. It's like you don't even see it.
For example, look at this cluttered garage. If you were sent there to find some cards in a brown bag, the natural thing to do would be to start to the left and scan right. But there's so much stuff here, you don't have the patience to meticulously look at every item, much less look inside something.
So even if you do turn your neck all the way to look, your eyes just wash over it and you don't really see anything. So you go back inside the house and say you didn't find it. Then your partner comes out and looks specifically for the brown bag and her eyes go straight to it.
It's sitting right there. How could you miss it? You say, "I didn't know I had to go in something.
" She says, "But you can see it through the plastic. "You didn't really look. " Or, "You didn't look very hard.
" You think, "Then don't send me out here "to look for something when you know what it looks like. " With attention problems, things either have to be in a place that you know about or they have to stand out to get your attention. So a part of putting things in their place is to organize your space in a way that makes things easy to find and eliminates clutter and distractions.
You don't wanna put everything in the drawers. You wanna sort and file the things that you use and discard the things that you haven't used in a while. And this while could be six months or a year, you have to decide what's reasonable for you.
It's easy to think that you should hold onto something that you may be able to use later, but think about it this way. Is the stress that holding onto too many things causes worth the benefit of maybe using that thing in two years? Getting rid of items that you don't use frequently makes room for updated items.
Also, what good is it to hold onto something that you won't be able to find because it's lost somewhere in your house? Organizing your living space can seem daunting, so the best way to handle it is to break it up into chunks. You can work on it for an hour at a time.
But if you break it up this way, put a time limit on it. Take a look at a task and make a mental grid of the space. Say that you'll spend one hour working on the left part of the room or a closet.
A nice motivator is to take a before and after picture so you can have some sense of accomplishment. Last thing on this. When you're sorting through things, if you find something interesting, like a photo book, resist the urge to look through it before you put it away.
This only makes your task last longer and you get side tracked, and this is how you can end up leaving things unfinished when you get bogged down looking through things. So put the interesting items in their designated place and then when you're finished with the task, or finished with your hour that you committed to it, reward yourself by relaxing and enjoying the book. But make sure when you're finished looking at it you don't sit it down somewhere, you put it back in its place.
You may tell yourself, "I'm just gonna leave it here "this one time so Susie can look at it "and I don't have to go find it again. " It will take time to break out of this kind of thinking. Susie may not wanna look at it right now, it may be another few days, and in that amount of time the book that you sat down on the table gets moved.
So you have to get into the pattern of seeing everything as needing to be retrieved and returned. Now if this seems very basic to you then you don't have this problem. But I guarantee that if you're always looking for things, like your wallet, your keys, and your phone, you aren't doing these basic things.
These three steps of place, retrieve, and return can make a huge difference in your ability to keep up with your stuff. If you keep up with your stuff, you'll reduce stress and frustration and free up your time. Take a look at the other videos that I did on ADHD skills.
See you next time.
