My Personal ADHD Mastery Guide for Stress-Free Productivity

My personal guide for managing my ADHD

If you are reading this I am going to assume you in some form have ADHD and are searching for methods to help manage and improve this condition for a better life.

Before we get into the problem at hand and solutions, it is important to note that you are an incredible creation, born in the exact generation you can thrive in. You are not your emotions or your past, you are a powerful manifestation of God with power beyond measure. It is your job to acquire knowledge of how the world and yourself operate. You are the hand of God, do not let ego let you think power comes without hard work.

When I was a kid my mother would help me do my homework after school. I remember the anxiety that would overcome me as I sat there. I would start lashing out and crying just because of the anxiety that overcame me in not knowing what to do. I think as kids we have no idea how to deal with emotions and have a large part of life that gives us that feeling of not knowing what to do. Thus as children, I think your ability to manage the symptoms of ADHD is quite hard, but for adults, we should be able to form a good framework for dealing with ADHD in most moments. This guide should hopefully act as a framework that can we keep revisiting periodically and should revisit in order to manage symptoms and find work you are well suited for.

Before we dive deep into the details of the guide I think it’s important to review from a high level some common problems that people experience. This list is by no means exhaustive and I am sure many would describe them differently. For our purposes tho we will try to keep it simplistic and keep everyone on the same page.

Common problems for ADHD:

1. Fast Boredom Trigger
2. Lack of routine training sticking
3. Low Self Control
4. Low Self Esteem or Negative Thoughts
5. Lack of Time Management Skills
6. Anxiety
7. Problem Sleeping

Benefits of ADHD:

1. Good with complication
2. Lover of Novelty
3. High Energy
4. High Emotional Investment
5. Ability to adapt
6. Intelligence

Books and Resources:

1. Finally Focused: Natural Treatment Plan for ADHD
2. Get things done book — The art of stress-free productivity
3. Deep Work
4. Power of Habit
5. Atomic Habits

Basic Summary of Thoughts:

ADHD is for me essentially a lack of routine and I think if we can keep it that simple we can define a process to account for that. This way we can simplify our analysis and approach for how to manage these issues. After we learn to at least follow some sort of routine we can then improve it to suit our needs over time.

Beyond process, you will learn to develop a swiss army knife of techniques to deal with some of the underlying symptoms such as anxiety and low self-esteem. Along with these techniques, we will attempt to give a good method for helping your brain implement them based on a basic understanding of forming habits.

Important Notes and Definitions:

1. Confidence: Confidence comes from the accurate prediction of success through experience and repetition. You can fake confidence till you get it, however, you will eventually need to find real confidence.
2. Anxiety: For our purposes, we will define anxiety as with any uneasy feeling making you feel uncomfortable at the moment.

Basic Process:

1. Weekly Review — Review, Prioritize, Schedule, Update Process, Reward
2. Daily Routine — Routines, Exercise, Diet, Journalling
3. Monthly

Techniques to deal with anxiety:

It can be especially important to remember that the feeling of anxiety you are feeling is just a moment and it too will pass unless there is an underlying chemistry imbalance. We will split these into two categories, Prempted Methods, and Post or in moment techniques.

Pre-empted Techniques:

1. Remove and Decrease Stress- If things are stressing you out then it takes up cognitive process time and the more you can decrease this the more your brain can focus on your obligations and enjoying the moment.
2. Pre-planning and Time Management — Typically you should be able to start understanding situations/processes that aggravate your symptoms. IE Setup environment and timing to limit distractions. No notifications, No Visual Entertainment, Proper Diet, Exercise.
3. Medications — If you take medication it’s important to note here they can help greatly.
4. Diet
5. Exercise
6. Control Distractions
7. Simplify — It’s typical to take on too much with ADHD — keeping your commitments to manageable levels will greatly help not to over commit and thus easy to know what to do and reach those deadlines.
8. Organize — Typical a part of everyone's anxiety is your brain admitting to managing too much info and recognizing it is losing track. By writing things down and getting all the thoughts out of your brain you will be able to relax as you know things are accounted for and handled.
9. Accountability and Delegation: Typically for some of these routines I have someone work with me, especially for less frequent routines.
10. Disconnect — You should clearly define work and offline times. This should make it easier to get into a flow when you do need to connect.
11. Therapy and Talking to someone

In Moment Techniques:

It may feel repetitive but it is important to remember that your current feeling too will pass and all we are trying to do is account for it and bring you back to routine. What we really want to do here is train our brain to get through this time and get back to what we scheduled.

1. Eat or Drink
2. Mindfulness Meditation
3. Music
4. Audiobooks
5. Change Work Location
6. Call a loved one
7. Behavior Modification Therapy — write down what you need to do, what down all the issues in accomplishing this, write down what will happen if you don’t do it, write down what will happen if you do
8. Alternative Sensory Stimulation — Shower, Hottub, Pool/Swimming, Old TV Show on in the background

These are the techniques that work for me and I hope they can help you. Hopefully, they can help some of you in these trying times and we can all work together to make a better future for all of us.