I should start with an apology for the title, dear reader. You will not get to find out about a groundbreaking new app that syncs to your devices, color codes your whatever, and makes you superhuman. However, I hope I can give you something even better. I'm now nearing forty as I write this and I have drastically changed my perspective on tools, accommodations, and ADHD. Maybe I will change them drastically again, but here's what I've figured out so far for myself: I don't think of tools as accommodations or corrective utilities but necessary sacrifices. Working memory issues make doing my job challenging, so I rely on tools to act as a cognitive prosthetic. I do not use that word metaphorically. Just as a prosthetic arm is a synthetic thing that stands in for a real one, a cognitive prosthetic is a synthetic thing stands in for a part of my brain that is malfunctioning or missing. A prosthetic arm is not a real arm and we shouldn't expect it will be anytime soon but it might be better than not having one. This is why I despise the term "second brain" for Notion, Obsidian or similar applications. Don't get me wrong, I'm not here to decide for everyone what products are good vs bad. Use them if you want, just don't expect they will act as an additional brain for you without needing to primarily use the one you already have. Actual brains allow you to avoid rounding down your attentiveness to zero so you can synthesize information and return to the conversation later. Cognitive prosthetics require exactly that and I have seen countless colleagues put great effort into building these out only to take on immense debt on maintenance and retrieval. It becomes the task you end up spending most of your time on instead of the ones it was meant to help you acheive. I see others passing them by actually getting things done while they are bogged down by engineering and supporting the thing. I see them struggle to outweigh the effort with concrete proof of what they've actually gotten out of them after all these years. I would sound like every other frustrating neurotypical if I ended it there. They will remind you how you don't compare to them and all the wacky time you spend in your tools is what is different between you and them. In reality, they have the luxury of not needing tools. You don't. So you will find that every piece of advice they give you is either: 1. Telling you to put in effort into something they are able to do effortlessly. 2. Convincing you the immutable condition (e.g. working memory or executive functioning disorder) you have and will have for the rest of your life is actually a missing skill you should just go learn. See #1. Effort is like money. How easy it is for them to tell you how to spend money you're already exhausting faster than they do on things they get for free. So there is probably a lot to say about keeping your tool usage in check rather than avoiding it completely thus catastrophically pretending you're like everyone else. I'll let someone else lay that out. In the meantime, what experience has proven to give me greater dividends is managing my cognitive fitness. This realization came to me when I looked back on an old performance review describing a variety of complaints about my performance from my peers. With fresher eyes I realized this wasn't a list of opportunities for improvement at all. It's a sterile description of someone who is just in a panic all the time! Well, that is interesting because being in a panic is not a direct symptom of ADHD, even if it is a common result of it. I realized that while I was just shoveling more shame and effort into fixing my brokenness, I was doing absolutely nothing to maintain my peace, and *that* was what everyone was complaining about. In fact, I have to wonder if some of the feedback that looks like ADHD symptoms (e.g. disorganization, lack of preparedness) was really 1:1 with ADHD knowing these are also symptoms of anxiety, panic, dread, whatever. No matter how good your tool is, you will keep stumbling and ADHD will get the best of you. You should ask yourself what your plan is for those moments and how are you giving yourself the acceptance that this will be a manageable but ultimately inescapable condition for the rest of your life. I recommend to anyone who is desperately looking for salvation in the newest tool around not to drop that effort, but stop and consider what you are doing to address the panic. Do you experience task paralysis? Do you constantly feel the need for breaks but push through it out of shame you are already not being productive with the time you've already spent? I see you. Your tool may do wonderful things, but it's not going to color code you out of emotional lockdowns. ![[Partials#^eaec46]]