Overview

ADHD stands for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. It’s a bit of misnomer, as the issues seem to stem more from misplaced focus than a lack of focus. According to the DSM-5, there are several symptoms of ADHD, which show up in the inattentive type, the hyperactive type, or the combined type. In order to diagnose someone with ADHD, the patient has to meet 5-6 of the symptoms in the inattentive category or the hyperactive category (depending on whether they’re a child or an adult). Symptoms must also have been present for more than six months. A brief overview from the CDC says: “People with ADHD show a persistent pattern of inattention and/or hyperactivity–impulsivity that interferes with functioning or development”.

Below, I’ve listed the symptoms of each category in bold, then given an example of how it impacts or has impacted me specifically, both now as an adult and what I remember from being a kid. This is so that I can share my experience with others who might relate to it, which is beneficial for both of us, because it means we’re not alone in our struggles. Plus, it helps me track my symptoms for when I can eventually get a psych evaluation.

Inattention

• Often fails to give close attention to details or makes careless mistakes in schoolwork, at work, or with other activities.
  • I often make careless mistakes like typos because I often rush through detail-oriented tasks, such as writing an email. Usually I catch them right away, but sometimes it takes me a little while, and that can be embarrassing. Or, for projects at work, I’ll assume I know what something does if I think I’ve seen it before instead of checking to make sure it is what I think it is, and that can come back to bite me too.
  • I’m also not great with estimating time, amounts, or distance. I’ve started collecting datapoints so that I have something to base my estimates on for recurring tasks, but if I don’t have data I’m going to be wildly off, usually underestimating. If I think a task will take an hour, it’s probably actually going to take three. If I think a large container has a gallon of liquid in it, it probably has two gallons. If I think a hundred people were at an event, it was probably 150. If I think something is 100 feet away, it’s probably 200 feet away.
  • I definitely struggled with the amounts thing as a kid, but it’s also true that probably a lot of kids struggle with that while they’re learning how the world works.
• Often has trouble holding attention on tasks or play activities.
  • This depends on the task. If it’s something I find interesting, I’ll hyperfocus on it for a couple hours. If it’s something I find uninteresting, I have to fight myself to keep at it. I’ll try doing something else, or I’ll sit and stare at it, or I’ll get distracted more easily by YouTube videos or something.
  • If I get going on a task, I can focus on it for a long time and then forget to do things like eat or go to the bathroom or sleep until a strong enough internal or external force pulls me out of it and I realize I’m starving or actually really needed to pee an hour ago but ignored it semi-consciously, or that I was supposed to be in bed 15 minutes ago, much less start getting ready for bed an hour ago. I often tell myself or others that I have just “one more thing I want to do real quick”, but that one thing leads to a few more that seem equally important, and then I’m still there.
  • I don’t know how I was with this as a kid; that would be something to ask my family about.
• Often does not seem to listen when spoken to directly.
  • I try on purpose to show that I’m listening by nodding or making sounds of agreement, but I’m not always looking at the person I’m in a conversation with. I do emote with my face and hands, but it’s often intentional rather than incidental, which might be more of the autism side of things. If someone’s not looking at me, I prefer to keep a neutral facial expression.
  • I’m pretty sure I was often in my own little world as a kid.
• Often does not follow through on instructions and fails to finish schoolwork, chores, or duties in the workplace (e.g., loses focus, side-tracked).
  • I’m usually pretty good about getting the strictly necessary stuff done, like when I was in college, I usually turned in projects and papers in on time. The week-to-week readings, though, usually fell by the wayside, especially if I had other things I wanted to do instead, or if I wanted to hang out with people I didn’t get to see very much during the week.
  • I think as a kid I was pretty good about finishing important things, although if my parents were helping me out a lot, that could be why.
• Often has trouble organizing tasks and activities.
  • I love making lists and organizing things into spreadsheets! But that’s usually for long-term or abstract projects. When it comes to day-to-day work, especially for my job, I can outline what areas I want to focus on. But once it hits evening, I’m tuckered out and am lucky to get much more done.
  • I have many tabs open at all times on my laptop, sometimes in colored and labeled tab groups and sometimes not. I don’t want to close them because I eventually want to return to the task or project they’re for, so they tend to collect digital dust for a while.
• Often avoids, dislikes, or is reluctant to do tasks that require mental effort over a long period of time (such as schoolwork or homework).
  • Similar to the one about holding attention on tasks, I’ll come up with a few different excuses of things that I could be doing instead of the one I don’t want to do. If I have a project at work that I’m not confident about, I’ll go for one that’s a lower priority with the justification that I haven’t worked on it in a while (which is probably true). When I was in college, I would avoid sitting down for homework that involved reading for long periods of time, which meant that later I had to read more in one sitting because I had let it pile up. It was a great system and nothing was wrong with it (ha). I don’t like long and difficult tasks because it takes a while to get meaningful results, and it can be draining if it’s particularly tedious or difficult.
  • The flip side of tedious tasks is if it’s related to something I find fun or interesting. Reordering all the parameters for my code functions at work so that the values passed in are interpreted correctly? Ugh. Mining out a 100 x 100 x 100 cube in Minecraft? Hooo boy sign me up, especially since I can visually break it down into chunks and smash through them one after the other.
  • More often than I’d like to admit, I start a project because I’m very interested in it and/or believe it would be beneficial, and then I leave it for a while before coming back to it (like this website and this page on this website, which has been sitting in limbo for at least 3 months).
  • Schoolwork was pretty light as a kid, since I was effectively homeschooled through high school, but my family might be able to provide more insight on this one.
• Often loses things necessary for tasks and activities (e.g. school materials, pencils, books, tools, wallets, keys, paperwork, eyeglasses, mobile telephones).
  • I misplace stuff all the time. My bedroom is usually a mess. I’ve perfected the art of having something in my hand, and then suddenly not having it in my hand and not remembering either that I put it down somewhere, or where that somewhere might be. I can’t count the number of times that I reach for my water bottle at work and then realize I put it on the other side of my chair, but when I put it on the other side next time, I still reach for the wrong side first.
  • I also often bring up my water bottle from my office downstairs or get a cup from the cupboard and then leave it on the counter instead of filling it up, several days a week.
  • When I was a kid, my room was always messy, and that’s never gone away. I’ve gotten better at organizing as I get older, but after a day or so of being tidy, I lapse back into cluttered.
• Is often easily distracted.
  • My phone is a nightmare to me. If I have it nearby, I struggle to get anything done because there’s such interesting stuff going on that I can access through it. I will get stuck in social media scrolling loops. I have to tear myself away from watching endless YouTube shorts. I’ll scroll through my favorite Discord servers to re-read old messages, no matter how many times I’ve seen them before. I have to try quite hard to stay off of it when I’m doing something important, like when I’m at work or spending time with family.
    • I’ve been getting better about this by turning staying off my phone into a competition – at work, I use a Willpower Scorecard to act both as a reminder and a challenge. I have more details on that later.
  • If someone says something that reminds me of something I find interesting, I’ll tune them out for a little bit while I open up a search engine to look up a meme or Wikipedia page that’s relevant to what I’ve started thinking about.
  • If I’m trying to do something in the living room while someone else is watching TV, my attention gets split between what I want to do and whatever’s playing, and it’s frustrating to have to keep pulling myself back to what I want to actually be doing. Since I still want to spend time with the people who are watching TV, I’ve starting sitting a short distance away at the dining room table instead of being on the couch, which helps.
  • I’ll keep looking out the window to watch for squirrels and birds while at work, which can be a bit of an issue when I need to focus on the task at hand (but it may provide a brain break also).
  • Even when I was a kid, starting with when I was a baby, I would look around at stuff going on around me all the time. When I was in high school, I liked to people watch just about whenever I could, so long as they didn’t realize I was watching them.
• Is often forgetful in daily activities.
  • If I set out to do something in a day, or if someone asks me to do something, there is a high likelihood I will simply forget to do it unless I write it down first, at which point the likelihood is medium-level. I can definitely still forget, but it’s more likely that I will remember to do it and carry it out.
  • Remembering something isn’t the same thing as doing it, though; often I remember a task but still forget it when I have the opportunity to actually do it, and because I did spend time thinking about it my brain apparently decides that’s good enough for the day.
  • When I was a kid, my brother often complained that I didn’t do something I had agreed to do or promised to do, which left me confused because I usually didn’t remember that I had done so. Back then I sometimes wondered if he was making it up, but now I figure I legitimately just did not retain the information for very long.

Hyperactivity

• Often fidgets with or taps hands or feet, or squirms in seat.
  • I am often rubbing my hands against something, or jiggling my leg (a classic), or shifting my sitting posture. I like to sit cross-legged, but after maybe fifteen minutes that feels stiff and I have to sit with my legs straight. Fifteen minutes later, and I’m back to cross-legged.
  • When I was a kid, I fidgeted with my hands and clothes a lot. I remember being maybe eight years old in choir and one day just constantly apologizing to the kid sitting next to me because I thought the fidgeting was annoying, which in turn just annoyed them more.
• Often leaves seat in situations when remaining seated is expected.
  • If I have to solve a problem and I’ve been sitting for a little while, I have to get up and pace around while I think out loud.
    • I also find it helpful to pull out a whiteboard and start capturing my thoughts in bullet points, perhaps with a diagram or two after I’ve been pacing for a little while. The whiteboard is a secondary supplement; the pacing is the real help here.
  • When I was in school, I could stay relatively still, probably because I had a people-pleasing fear of breaking the rules.
• Often runs about or climbs in situations where it is not appropriate (adolescents or adults may be limited to feeling restless).
  • This usually shows up as me shifting my sitting position.
  • At work, I struggle with balancing stimulation – if I’m understimulated, I’m painfully bored, but if I’m overstimulated, I’m painfully overwhelmed, and it’s not fun either way. I’ll listen to YouTube videos or music on Spotify until I feel like my head is full of bees, and then I’ll turn that off for a little while. If I need to focus on a difficult task, the feeling of bees shows up a lot faster.
  • When I was a kid I definitely enjoyed being able to run around outside in the backyard, or at the park, or at a playground; I’m not sure if I kept up that energy when I was supposed to be doing schoolwork or at church or wherever.
• Often unable to play or take part in leisure activities quietly.
  • I usually talk to myself when I’m working on something (either for my job or for a hobby) or sign to stim a little bit. I find that talking myself through a task helps me to stay on track and/or problem solve, which is great, but hopefully not too annoying for anyone within earshot.
  • When I was a kid, I hummed all the time, to the point where I didn’t hear myself doing it anymore because I simply tuned it out. I believe it came out mostly when I was focusing on a task or eating.
  • I remember one day when I was maybe around seven, and I decided to to narrate what I was thinking out loud while playing with Legos. This quickly annoyed my brother, who told me he didn’t need to hear every thought that was going through my head. I never wanted to try that again to that degree.
• Is often “on the go” acting as if “driven by a motor.”
  • When I was writing up this page, for example, I kept jumping from section to section. I would start a sentence, then copy and paste a quote into the next sentence without finishing the first one. Then I wrote this paragraph.
  • I’d have to ask my family about how well this one applied to me when I was a kid; I do remember my mom talking about how I was interested in many different things. I also remember our weekly trips to the library where I’d get books on painting, or crafts, or treehouse building, or comics, or self-sufficient farming, or video games, or novels. It’s safe to say that kids tend to have several interests, so I don’t know if I necessarily had a lot, relatively speaking.
• Often talks excessively.
  • If I get on a roll, I can talk at length about something, usually at a high speed, which leads to my family or my boss telling me to slow down and start over. I still don’t quite talk at the speed of my thoughts, and I still keep tripping over my words, which doesn’t help my efforts to be understood.
  • When I was in high school I helped my mom teach religious ed at our church for some elementary-aged kids, and I can remember at least once when I was leading a small group and my mom said I was talking to them too fast ’cause I was getting excited.
• Often blurts out an answer before a question has been completed.
  • This one doesn’t apply to me as much but only because it takes a couple seconds between when I hear what someone is saying and connecting it to the part of my brain that processes what those words mean, which means someone will be halfway through repeating what they were saying when I suddenly respond to what they said after the initial “What?”.
    • More on this in the auditory processing disorder section below.
• Often has trouble waiting their turn.
  • I think I’m pretty patient when it comes to waiting in games and such, especially if the people or person before me is doing something interesting on their turn. If there’s something I really want to do on my turn, on the other hand, it can be hard for me to sit still while I wait.
  • I do tend to make impulsive decisions – usually not financial ones, but rather dietary ones. I have a moderate starch intolerance, which means that most snacks and baked goods will make me sick in various ways if I have too much. For example, one cookie will make it more difficult to breathe, but I’ll be fine; more than one will result in gastrointestinal distress. The problem is that starchy things usually taste great, which means I’ll often run to eat a treat and then suffer the consequences, no matter how many times I’ve suffered the consequences before. Sometimes it’s a delayed reaction, so I’ll get through two or three servings of a treat before I start to feel it, and then it’s two or three times worse than I remember it being.
  • I remember when I was six or seven playing a card game with my aunt and complaining about how it was going slowly, but being surprised when she suggested that we do something else if I wasn’t having fun. I think I knew it was a temporary issue, or else I was surprised that doing something else was an option.
• Often interrupts or intrudes on others (e.g., butts into conversations or games).
  • If there’s someone I want to spend time with, like a close friend, I sometimes have trouble leaving them alone, which can be annoying, but is hopefully more often affectionate than not. If they’re doing something I know is important to them, like their favorite hobby, I make sure to find something else to do in another room or do my own thing in another part of the same room.
  • I was definitely socially awkward in middle and high school, much more so than now, where I would jump into other people’s conversations, usually to show off when I was confident that I knew a lot about something. Most of the time, though, I was too anxious to put myself out there, or I never quite felt like I fit in while playing with the other kids, like they understood something I didn’t or had something I was missing.

Other Considerations

• Several inattentive or hyperactive-impulsive symptoms were present before age 12 years.
  • This is something I would have to ask my family about for more details; I have some memories, but there’s a lot I have simply forgotten thanks to having the Forget About Things disorder.
• Several symptoms are present in two or more settings, (such as at home, school or work; with friends or relatives; in other activities).
  • Home, check; school, check; work, check; friends, check; family, check; alone, check.
• There is clear evidence that the symptoms interfere with, or reduce the quality of, social, school, or work functioning.
  • I would love to have more executive function and get more done at work and in my free time. I keep making lists and schedules of what I could do if I used my time well, and I always fall short of what I could technically be capable of doing. I don’t know how much meds will help, but I’m willing to give it a shot.
• The symptoms are not better explained by another mental disorder (such as a mood disorder, anxiety disorder, dissociative disorder, or a personality disorder). The symptoms do not happen only during the course of schizophrenia or another psychotic disorder.
  • There’s a theory that autism and ADHD are two sides of the same coin, and I have symptoms of both; I also have some social anxiety, which could be part of one, both, or neither. It’s also possible that the executive dysfunction/brain fog are caused at least in part by a physical ailment, such as iron deficiency. I need a psych eval before I can be sure, but I strongly suspect that the main reason for my issues is ADHD.

Source: https://www.cdc.gov/adhd/diagnosis/index.html

Other Symptoms

I’m not entirely sure where these couple-few items go or if they belong in any of the lists above, but they tend to be annoying.

• Audio processing disorder
  • If someone’s talking to me, I often need them to repeat themselves; sometimes I process what they said the first time just before or during the second time, and then I interrupt them to respond accordingly.
  • I always need subtitles on movies and TV shows to make sure I don’t miss something. If it’s a movie I know well, I’m fine because I know what’s going on, but subtitles have been helpful for me for as long as I can remember.
  • When I’m scrolling through social media, I almost always have my sound turned off because I don’t want to deal with the sudden changes in soundtrack from one post to the next. Usually the video posts have subtitles, but not always.
  • When I was growing up and even a little bit now, I avoided phone calls as much as possible because it was always difficult to make out what the other person was saying (as well as some social anxiety about how the other person perceived me).

Tools

I may make a separate page for the tools and mechanisms I’ve found most helpful, but here’s where they’ll live for now. I’ve found that physical items are more effective than digital ones – you may notice that the list of helpful apps is a smaller fraction of the list as a whole. If I’m on my phone, it’s easy for me to get sidetracked and distracted by the other things on it, especially games and social medias.

Books

The Anti-Planner: How to Get Sh*t Done When You Don’t Feel Like It

The Anti-Planner is a compilation of dozens if not hundreds of strategies and exercises for getting yourself out of a rut when you’re feeling stuck, overwhelmed, unmotivated, disorganized, or discouraged. Each of those unhelpful feelings has its own section and is further broken down into root causes, with bullet points to see which one applies best. “Stuck”, for example, has “difficulty getting started”, “indecisive”, “perfectionistic”, and “distracted”.

It also starts with and has encouragement sprinkled throughout to reshape the perspective of you being the problem because you’re having trouble getting one (or many) things done, and learning how to work with the thing instead. The idea is that you use the book as a tool when you need it.

There are many fun and helpful illustrations all throughout the book, which makes it both a great tool and a pleasure to read. It also has resources in the back for the various unhelpful feelings and root causes, at least one and up to ten for each subsection, from apps to websites to products to books. Some of the resources help multiple categories, like Finch (which I was already using before I got this book!).

Bullet Journal

The tagline for The Bullet Journal Method book is “Track the Past | Order the Present | Design the Future”

As of mid-February 2025, I’ve been using it once or twice a day for a couple weeks and found it helpful for organizing my monthly goals, keeping track of events and upcoming tasks, and tracking how my day-to-day activities are progressing toward those monthly goals. It’s got a short but effective method of symbols to track events, notes, and the current status of tasks (open, complete, pushed to the future, passed on to someone else, or irrelevant).

The book is very helpful at explaining how the bullet journal system works, and includes several exercises for helping you evaluate what matters to you and therefore what you should construct your goals around.

Items

Willpower Scorecard

This is a simple sheet of notebook paper and an index card that helps me to stay off my phone at work.

The notebook paper is the day by day Willpower vs Phone scoresheet where I track the number of times I want to use my phone vs the number of times I actually use it. If I give in and use my phone for a frivolous purpose, I earn a strike. My goal is to earn three or fewer “strikes” per workday. The exceptions to a strike are if someone asks me a time-sensitive question, there is an emergency, or I need to use my phone for something legitimately work-related, like two-factor authentication to connect to my work computer.

I also have an index card labelled Willpower Scorecard by Day, where I track the number of days where my willpower won over my phone, the number of days where my phone won over my willpower, and my longest streak of days where I didn’t use my phone for a frivolous purpose at all. My current streak is 19 0-phone days, and my longest streak is 25, so I might break my record soon. I’ve been using this for 98 work days now, since late September, and of those 98 days, my willpower has only lost twice.

Notebook

I use a simple spiral-bound notebook to track my work activities by writing down timestamps and what my current task is, dozens of times per work day. It’s great for when I need to provide accurate estimates of my time for projects and my timesheet at the end of the day. If I’m going back and forth between different projects because my main goal for the day is one thing, but my boss wants me to intermittently work on something else, I can fill up a page or two for a single day, but there are some days where I only need a couple entries.

ADHD Token System

This used to be a spreadsheet (a statement which surprises none of the people who know me best), but I’ve started turning it into physical graph paper tables and cardstock tokens.

The idea is that I can earn points by doing tasks in different areas – work, exercise, chores, game dev, etc. The number of points per tasks depends on how long it takes, multiplied by a number which corresponds to how much I don’t want to do it on a scale of 1-10. A task that takes an hour, but I really like doing, will get me 40 points, while a task that takes the same amount of time, but I feel a bit of nervousness about or I’d maybe like to do something else instead will get me 90 points. Based on the average number of points across all areas, I have a list of rewards which cost those points. Having a donut is a treat, as is spending time on social media or playing video games, so I must spend points in order to participate in those activities.

The tokens are penny-sized “coins” I cut out of index cardstock and have drawn things on – clover (1 point), cat (5), raven (10), wolf (20), cactus (50), tree (100), river (500), and mountain (1000). The things are in roughly size order, except that I like ravens a bit more than I like cats, so they’re swapped. The ravens are also not cardstock; I got a set of 50 little raven figurines, which is what inspired making the physical tokens, so I have a bowl of those and then a tic-tac-toe board to hold the other token circles. It would be neat to have figurines for all the tokens, but this works for now and also takes up a bit less space.

I’m still in the process of creating the physical tokens, so right now I’m just writing down my tasks vs rewards in a day and doing the math that way, but once the tokens are finished I can carry them around and add or subtract points in the moment instead of at the end of the day.

My points intake is higher than my points output, so I either need to increase the amount of points each reward is worth, or create an abstract set of rewards which may be appealing in a different way.

Index Cards

Index cards are an easy way for me to jot down ideas for projects or to capture remembering something before I forget about it again, whenever such a thing strikes me during the day.

The downside to this is that if I don’t organize them well, it can be hard to find the one I need at a given time amongst all the others I don’t need at the moment

Apps

Finch

Finch is a self-care app where you check items off your real-life to-do list to give your virtual pet bird (“birb”) energy to go on adventures to explore places like Paris or Vancouver and come back with a discovery once a day. Tasks can also give you Rainbow Stones to buy fun clothes and furniture for your birb. You can tie recurring tasks to hatch micropets, which grow from baby to adult after 15 adventures. You can also connect with friends who have the app and send each other clothes, furniture, and “good vibes” – greetings such as good morning, hello, encouragement, calm, reminders to stretch, drink water, etc. If you have Finch Plus, you can send special good vibes like flowers and a dance break.

If you don’t check off a task by the next waking day, all you lose is your streak on that task; if you skip or snooze a task during the day, you’re given the option to write a brief reflection about why, which can help you recognize patterns in your motives and behavior.

There’s 56 micropets and counting, from a gorilla to a dinosaur to a heart with wings to a ghost to a potted sunflower. Each of them has a set of pronouns and a short paragraph on their personality, and they show up in your “birdhouse” and walk side by side with you on adventures. Once I get my current micropet to adult status, I switch to a new one so that I can grow another one up. Right now, my micropet is Butterscotch the Calico, who I’ve been on 6th adventures with and has a “playful nature”.

Finch also has month-long seasonal events in which you can get themed outfits and furniture. Every day, if you complete enough tasks to send your birb on an adventure, you earn an event reward, or 2-3 rewards if you have Finch Plus. You’ll either get a piece of clothing from one of three outfits, or a piece of furniture. When you get an item, you can change the suggested color to a few different options; often, the same item will show up more than once over the 30 or so days, so you can get it in a couple different colors or sell it immediately for a couple hundred Rainbow Stones. You also get a new micropet on day 25 if you have the free version, or day 20 if you have Finch Plus.

This month, the event is called Playtime Palooza. so the room theme is a elementary school-esque playroom, and the outfits are the Cool Kid, the Sweetie, and the Playground; the micropet is Cheeky the Hamster. Previous monthly events I’ve been in were Dino Dash, Strange Science, Homespun Haven, Midnight Masquerade, Frozen Frontier, and Glimmering Gardens.

The base app is free, but I purchased the premium version to get access to the extra content and also to help support the developers, because I’ve been using it every day since I got it and I love it.

The art style is soft and fun, and there’s a lot of tools for mental-health and self care; it’s a very gentle experience.

Habitica

I haven’t used this one in a while, but you are an adventurer with one of four classes (wizard, fighter, etc), and as you complete tasks, you earn coins and xp. When you get enough xp to level up, you can choose which of the four stats to level up in – strength, dexterity, etc. You also get armor which has stats of its own, and you can equip a cosmetic layer over your actual stat-armor so that you don’t have the problem of effective but ugly armor if you don’t like how it looks. You can join community guilds or create an adventuring party with friends and fight boss monsters, to which you deal damage by completing tasks, and from which you can loot gold and armor from defeating them. There’s also pets which you can feed with their favorite foods to turn into mounts, or sell their eggs for extra gold.

You can sort your tasks into habits, dailies, and to-dos more intuitively than with Finch, which is cool. You can also set custom rewards to spend gold on, which is great for accountability. You decide how much gold a reward is worth, but you do not decide how much gold a task is worth; Habitica gives more gold for recurring tasks you have a long streak on, and more gold for to-do items you’ve been putting off for a long time.

If you fail a task, you take damage and can die if you take too much; your health bar increases as you level up, and if you do die, the main consequence is that you lose a random equipment item and probably some gold too.

The art style is pixelated, which gives it a kind of retro video game vibe.

The base app is full of features and is free; you can buy the premium gems currency with real money, but I’m pretty sure that’s just for cosmetic items, like special event armor.

LifeRPG

You are an adventurer, but you can put in whatever “class” you want – I like to put myself down as Hero or Blacksmith, something epic or craftsman-ish like that. As you create tasks, you determine how much it’s worth in reward gems, what custom skill it’s part of, and you provide the parameters of what the tasks means for you to determine how much it’s worth in terms of XP.

LifeRPG is different from both Finch and Habitica for two main reasons: skills and parameters. You can determine your own skills (English class, game dev, self-care, whatever you want), and over time, as you earn XP in tasks you’ve associated with those skills, you get diagrams that show which skills you’re strongest in and which ones you’re weakest in, at least insofar as you’ve been tracking them through the app. When you create a task, the XP is determined through a scale of 1-10 on each of the following three categories: Difficulty, Urgency, and Fear. That way, the task is worth more or less depending on your specific relationship to it. I found a pdf online which has been helpful to figure out where on the scale I should put a given task and the amount of reward gems I should assign to it, as well as other ways of using the app – https://www.docdroid.net/rCMd5XN/liferpg-pdf.

A third, smaller thing which makes LifeRPG different is that you can upload your own audio clips for the various sound effects – completing a task, leveling up, failing a task, purchasing a reward, etc, which is fun. The menu of icons you can assign to a task or skill or your adventuring profile is different from the usual list of emojis, too – for example, there’s icons for a Daedric helmet, the programming language Python, a windmill I’m pretty sure, as well as more common icons like a glass of water or a person with a speech bubble. It’s a fun stylistic choice. Every once in a while when I scroll through the icons menu I swear there’s new ones, but there’s so many that it’s possible I’ve missed it before or just forgotten about it.

It has no social aspects as far as I’m aware, at least not in the free version, which is a bit of a bummer, but not a huge downside for me. Someone on Reddit described it as a “self-driven” system, which is an accurate descriptor.

Like Habitica, if you fail a task, you incur a penalty of whatever amount of reward gems the task is worth instead of the usual benefit, which can be a helpful motivator.

Clock

A digital way for me to remember to do something later is to set an alarm on my phone for it, either one-time later in the same day or scheduled for a specific date, or as a recurring reminder for daily and weekly events. I generally find it a very helpful way to support my working memory, which is something I greatly need.

One downside to this method is that I can push the alarm until later, especially if it’s not urgent, which fuels procrastination. Another downside to this is that my clock app is a graveyard of one-time reminders I took care of or ignored but didn’t delete once they were gone, but that’s simple enough to solve by taking the time to go through them one by one.

This app is not only free, but already installed (hooray!)

Google Keep

If I need to jot something down and make sure I always have it with me, I make a note of it in Google Keep. It syncs across devices, which is real convenient.

I need to go through and organize my notes; for a little while I was color coding them, but I fell away from that a while ago. It was helpful while it lasted, and I think I should return to it. I also need to go through and delete the ones I don’t need anymore. I have no idea what the exact number of notes I have is, but I sure know it’s too many to organize well. I always have to pin a new note, because if I don’t, it gets lost fast. There’s a tagging system I need to re-utilize so that I can keep only the most important notes pinned and search for the rest.

Sticky Notes

It’s built in with Windows, and it syncs across accounts, which is helpful for when I’m using two different computers and need to reference information. I’ve got them color coded, and just the other day I deleted the ones I didn’t need any more and consolidated a few others so that I went from 210 notes to 88. I have notes on: current projects, troubleshooting software, meetings, general office tips and tricks, and general project tips and tricks. My coworker sometimes makes fun of how many notes I have, but it works well for me.