Ep 73: My Favorite Tool For ADHD

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Today on Learn to Thrive with ADHD, I'm sharing my favorite tool for managing the overwhelming amount of information our ADHD brains try to store! If you've ever felt exhausted from keeping everything in your head, or found yourself constantly forgetting important tasks, this episode is going to be a game-changer. I break down exactly how I use Trello to create an external brain that works WITH my ADHD, not against it.

What You'll Learn:

• How to stop relying on your memory for everything
• A flexible system for family coordination and shopping
• Why digital organization works better for ADHD brains
• How to track time-blindness more effectively
• Practical strategies for project management
• Ways to organize recipes without perfectionism
• The power of using a digital "brain dump"

Game-Changing Takeaways:
1. Digital Flexibility: Move tasks and information around without starting over
2. Visual Organization: Using boards and lists makes information easier to process
3. Family Coordination: Share lists and tasks effortlessly
4. Searchable Systems: Never lose important information again

Free Resource:

• 12-Week Year Template (Coming Soon)

Connect with Mande:

• Learn more about private coaching with Mande: https://learntothrivewithadhd.com/services/
• Free Resources: https://learntothrivewithadhd.com/freeresources/
• Website: https://www.learntothrivewithadhd.com/
• LinkTree: https://linktr.ee/learntothrivewithadhd
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/learntothrivewithadhd/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/learntothrivewithadhd/

Remember, thriving with ADHD is possible – sometimes we just need the right tools and strategies. If you found this episode helpful, please leave a review and share with someone who might need to hear this!

Next Steps:
Ready to stop keeping everything in your ADHD brain? Start with one simple board and build from there. Your mind will thank you!

#ADHDorganization #ADHDtools #AdultADHD #ProductivityHacks

Click here for full show notes.

CLICK HERE for more resources. We're on this journey together!

Transcript

All right. Welcome back, guys. Today, I'm going to be telling you about a tool that I use for almost every aspect of my life. And it helps so much as far as not having to remember things moving forward and projects. And if you're on YouTube, I'm going to be showing you. But if you're on the podcast, I will be explaining.

And if you don't use this particular tool, there are lots of tools like it. Or you might just get ideas that will help you with putting something together that will work for you. So what I'm going to be talking about today is Trello, and I've talked about Trello before and I'm going to go ahead and share my screen here in just a second.

Fairness. Okay, so here are my Trello boards and you. One says 2025 New Identity Project and my last podcast Vodcast. I'd like to say a video podcast was on creating a whole year plan with chat. And that was fun and interesting. And I'm moving forward with that plan. And then Mandy's one week year, Mandy's brain.

This is about my rabbit tree shopping. We have had this Trello board for probably, I don't know, 13 years maybe. Has it been that long? It's been a long time. We had this board and maybe not quite that long. But what it is, is all of us have the Trello app on our phone and we have the particular shopping widget board and by all of us, I mean when my oldest son was living at home, he would have it, my husband had it and I had it.

So anytime we need something from the store, let's go ahead and click on it. It has the shopping list. And my husband likes to put things he needs to get from the hardware store on here and grocery options and so, like, let's say I wanted some applesauce. I just pull out over baby carrots and some bacon. And then while we're at the store, you just pull it back over as you get the items.

And I'm pulling from the shopping list to the grocery options. Now, when I first set this up, I wanted to get crazy and go, okay, let's put everything that we could possibly get at the grocery store on this list. And then I told myself, Stop it. We're not going to do that. We're just going to put things on the list as we need them.

And so you can see over time, we've built up quite a list. I'm only like halfway through. For those of you that can see something I want to show you is you can also put pictures of items in as an attachment here. So, for example, I needed a particular stain remover and my son was going to the store and I knew he wouldn't know which one to get.

And so I just put a picture of the item there in this board. I also put four weeks of menus with the items that I would need to get if I were to do that menu. This was to completely, like offload load, trying to decide what was for dinner. And then once I decided what was for dinner, what items did I need in order to make that thing.

I put all of that there. So that is my shopping one, for example, here is one that is kind of my workflow for my coaching business. And so we have Mandy's tasks, ideas and information. These are collapsed boards because this kind of information doesn't really matter all the time. I've got my logo there. There's a bunch of templates that have been created here, links, but I put like my high priority things, my second priority, my third priority in red, yellow and green.

And I do the same for my assistant who these are. This is my top priority. This is my number two. Priority number three, priority. And I list them there. Sometimes items will get pulled over to my side after something has been done with them. And then we have a done board where everything gets pulled when it's finished. I also have an upcoming task and project board that it's just that's where I offload anything, where it's like, I think that's a good idea, but I'm not ready to take action on it yet.

So as you can see here, these are the episodes where the the podcast and the YouTube channel. And if I just click on one of the more recent ones for example, it has the description for Instagram. We have all the art that's been created. There's these checklists on the things that need to be done, all the links in the conversation and everything is all in one place.

And so that is great for scheduling things on, you know, on social media schedulers and stuff like that. But the nice thing is you're you're moving from one, you're moving things from one place to another. I can pull over, for example, when I want something, we'll schedule old episodes in order to go up on social media as well.

And so if I want this specific episode, I'll just pull it over and ask for it to be scheduled a certain time. And I'm probably not going to put that back in the right place, but that's okay. just barely in the wrong place. And let's talk about another board. So what's another interesting one? Recipe board. I like to cook.

You may not like to cook. It may make cooking easier for you. I don't know. But I have new recipes, breakfast appetizers, soups, salads, veggies, beans, sides, pastas, chicken, beef, fish, pork sausages and dressings, desserts, cookies, cakes, pies, brownies, so on. Okay. And this is not at all complete, but what I did is I took all my online recipes that I printed out, and I found them online and I found the images of them and put them in here.

And so for those of you that can't see it, there's like a lot of really pretty images of the food. And then there's a link to the recipe. If I couldn't do that, if it was maybe a very old recipe or something that I got. Here's a very good example. This is just my recipe. I made it. And so I call it Mandy's potato pork, and I wrote it on a on a little note card.

And so I just took a picture in the note card and put that as an image in in here. And so I have all my recipes in one place. Again, I did not get perfectionist about it and decide that this all had to be done at once. I just put them in here as I use the recipe. So for example, we have been doing a lot of holiday.

I have a specific holiday one because we've been doing a lot of holiday stuff. And so it's gotten gotten pretty full. So that's how I use my recipe board. And then this is interesting. This is for my gym business and there's like projects that my husband and I need to do. There are things that we need to pay attention to.

Chloe that runs the office is going to pull over something that I need to pay attention to. This is somebody else was going to be doing some. My son actually was going to be doing some projects and I can take pictures of exactly what needs to be taken care of. Chloe knows what's most important and what's not. And so you can see how, like, you can really use this as a prioritization tool.

Another one that's interesting, it's kind of it's funny. It's called Mandy's Brain, and it's empty right now. But I started this was actually one that I started before I had these, like separate boards and not all the separate boards, but some of the separate boards have made this one no longer necessary. This used to be where I would offload all the stuff in my brain, and I'm always working with clients when they feel overwhelmed, when they feel like there's so much going on in their head and they're so busy.

I'm like, Where are you offloading your information? And it's important where you offload your information because one, I really want it to be searchable. You can offload it into a notebook. That's great. But once you start doing that for too long, you really need to digitize that in some sort of way. Whatever works for you, if that's Trello for you, great.

If that's not. But you need to digitize it in such a way that that you can search. Because what's going to happen with that notebook is it's going to get to be too much to look through to try to figure out if that information in there is still important or not. In fact, this morning I went through this board and just deleted a bunch of stuff and realized, gosh, I don't even need this board anymore.

I only left in here like ideas for family, families stuff and date night stuff because I didn't know where else to put it yet. But what this started with is how long do things take? That's really important for those of us with ADHD, there are tasks that you have to do every day or that you do most days, and you have no idea because of time blindness, how long it actually takes.

00:10:09:06 - 00:10:34:05

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And so I would time something, figure out how long it took and then rapidly forget how long that thing took. And so the next time I went to do it, I didn't remember. And so I would put here out of card and I would put I'm always using dishes and laundry as an example. Right. But let's pet dishes and say 15 minutes, I'm just making up numbers.

But let's say I timed it and I took a 15 minutes. And so next time I go to do the task and you know, you're going to fill this up with whatever your every day or most day activities are. For example, if you go to work out, I in my mind thought working out takes like 45 minutes, Right?

Well, driving there, finally getting started, working out, maybe getting interrupted, doing something afterwards, then driving home, actually takes more like an hour and a half. And so I was completely wrong about the amount of time that I was giving it. And so again, you would just say, okay, working out actually it's going to take, you know, one hour and 30 minutes and you would just type that in and you have that there for when you're trying to plan your day.

And I'm going to do a series later on about exactly how I plan my day. Now I have a video on how do you use your calendar time management? I have a time management video. It's kind of old, though, and I think it was kind of rigid for for the ADHD brain. I've very much adapted it since, and so I want to kind of redo that with all of my

tips and tricks.

Okay, so how long does it take? I had here put on calendar delegate. So who else could do that job Decisions, things I just needed to make decisions about. It was like there were things in here. Like what doctor should my kids go to? Things I just didn't know how to do? I left this one here because I need to send this to one of my kids because it's something that they want to do things.

I'm just curious about courses or subscriptions that I have what I want. Again, this family couple time was put here, so whatever is taking up space in your brain, you're going to dump out here. And also this is a great place to collect. A lot of clients will ask me, what do I do with my paper, what I do with the Post-its that I wrote or write or the notebooks or the whatever.

This is a great place to dump those things. And this just happens to be the way I do it. Yours is going to be completely unique to you. Another one I have is gardening. We haven't actually got we've got the garden almost started, but we haven't actually got it started. We intended to start in October. That's when we made our plan.

But then we got busy with the holidays and I need to put like what we can grow in January and stuff like that here. And I have like a little to do and then I'm going to have each month of the year and I'll only have to put what grows that month once. And I've kind of separated it out by like, I have the seeds for these things.

I need these things at that time anyway.

12 year

is a template that you can actually get from me. This is my this is mine. And I haven't filled it out yet because I'm going to be starting a new to every year. But it has your vision, how to build a vision statement and then your 12 weeks and then your 13th week.

And at the end it has some suggestions on things you could do a 12 week. You're on relationships, homes, hobbies, talents, business, career, health, financial, spiritual, educational, and but like I said, you can actually get that. You can get that template from me. I'm not sure the link right now at the moment. We'll have to put the link in the description or the video and the podcast for the 12 week your template that you can get.

I have an Etsy store I'm going to do just does it like a fun hobby and my vodcast ideas and research goes and this board. So I just wanted to kind of show people what's possible here. I do pay for Trello now, but for many, many years I do not pay for it. I actually went to a conference where the person running the conference talked about how she uses Trello with her family and it was really interesting is there were things like, you know, giving the kids because you can put checklists within the board.

A good example of that. Let's go here for the checklist. I just I was making an example here and put different tasks, but you can put checklists. So let's say you have children that need to do certain things in the day. And she gave an example of her kids and it was like put on deodorant, brush teeth, you know, the things that she just didn't want to have to tell them to do.

And they could get on their phones and they could check the things off as they did them. But that's even great for us, right? So you can really use this for anything, but I really love it for not storing things in my brain. So yeah, I just wanted to share that with you guys this week. Hopefully this helps you get some inspiration or some ideas.

There are different types of things similar to Trello that that work. This is this type of thing where you can pull the the cards from one place to another has a special name that I cannot remember right now. But there are other things similar to this. But you could also do this kind of thing in like notion or wherever you would like to do it.

So I just hope that gave you some some good ideas. It is what I feel is one of my ADHD hacks as far as not having to remember things because I have Trello. But as I was saying, I used it free for many years. I do pay for it now, but you can have up to a certain amount of boards without paying.

And yeah, it's, it's a great tool. So I hope this is helpful to you guys and I will see you next week. Thanks.