Maniacs' Book Club ~ Add-Friendly Ways To Organize Your Life ~ Judith Kolberg & Kathleen Nadeau
Hi everybody. Welcome to our Book Club and this month, we are reading the ADD-Friendly Ways to Organize Your Life, second edition by Judith Kolberg and Kathleen Nadeau.
I’m Cris Sgrott with Organizing Maniacs and we are a professional organizer, productivity consultant and coach in the Washington DC Metro Area. We specialize in working with clients with brain-based challenges. Our clients have ADD, ADHD, OCD, and hoarding tendencies. If you like some support, you can find us at www.OrganizingManiacs.com. You can download our book report here: https://www.organizingmaniacs.com/2017-book-club-reports/. We try to convert the information that we read for everyday neurotypical people into information that can be easily used by anyone.
I always find great tips in there that I have forgotten to – I forget things too, that I’ve forgotten to suggest to people. So to me, it’s like a little bit of a bag of tricks of things that you can use over and over again.
So if you have read all the books and you feel like, “All of the tips out there are just not good for me,” I suggest you try this book. There may be one or two things that you may learn that may really be helpful to you. Like my three favorite tips in this book are basically to take a green break and taking a green break just simply means if you’re working on something for a real long time, maybe stop. Go find a tree or – I received these beautiful roses for my birthday, from my husband.
You can just as well be looking at a poster or even a postcard or just a picture of something that’s green and lovely that will just kind of help you reset your mind. I love her stubby list tips, which means we all have super long lists of things to do.
Instead of struggling to figure out how are you going to manage this very lengthy list, just pick three things that you think like, “Oh, these are my top three items that I have to get accomplished today or the most important things that I have to do today,” or “These are the three things that I want to start with,” and then put those on a sticky note. So they’re an easy reminder of what you’re supposed to be working on.
As you cross those things off your sticky list, throw those away and then create a new one. Then you can keep accomplishing things from your to-do list. But it keeps the list very manageable and easy to do. I do that all the time. It’s really helpful for me.
The third thing that she talks about in the book is the level of focus. So it’s very easy to start working on something or start working on research and before you know it, hours have passed and you have gotten nowhere just because you have hyper-focus or you only have an hour or two to work on a project and it’s eight hours later and you’re still working on that same project.
So understanding how to manage your focus is a really big deal for a lot of our clients with ADHD. So she talks a little bit about how to manage that, which I find it’s like very, very useful and helpful.
Every section of the book is also subdivided into three parts. It talks about strategies. It talks about support. It talks about structure. So the strategies are basically the how-to.
All right. Let’s say you want to create a schedule. So how to create a good schedule would be in your strategies and then you have the support and you have structure and to us, those two things are basically the foundation of how you’re going to make your strategies work because if you don’t – you can have all the strategies in the world.
But if you don’t have structure and support around your strategy, it’s probably not going to succeed. Funny enough, I just met with a client a couple of weeks ago to help their family with some strategies around – there’s one family member that does not have ADHD and all of the other family members do have ADHD.
The one member that doesn’t have ADHD was feeling very frustrated with the fact that nobody in the family was contributing to her systems. So she wanted me to give her strategies, to help her family be onboard with her strategies.
Well, needless to say, I had to give her the bad news that your strategies, one, are not created to support all of the family members that have ADHD. They were really complicated.
Her expectations were well above and beyond what you should expect all of the people with ADHD in your family to maintain. So we talked about how to change those strategies in a way that helped her, one, lower her expectations; two, make the systems a lot simpler for her family.
So then she could have those strategies that she needed and then she could get them to support her and then creating structure around how do you help people remember that those are the strategies they’re following.
Anyway, I hope you are staying organized and if you have any feedback, let us know. Cris
We have lots of other book clubs that you can look through and see what else we’re talking about. https://www.organizingmaniacs.com/2017-book-club-reports/
