Non-Toxic ADHD Productivity Hacks that ACTUALLY Work

I don't do my morning routine because it's the absolute pillar of my day and it is so helpful. No, I do it to keep up my streak. Look, I have a fruit. How cool is that? 196 days. Imagine feeling that way about just pooping and brushing your teeth. There's nothing fun about that. But getting a high score for it, sign me up. That's how the ADHD brain works. If you have one, I'm sure you don't need further proof. Because if you've ever been in a dopamine crisis, I'm sure you weren't helped by that productivity advice you learned from Ali Abdaal. It didn't work because your brain didn't care. That advice works for neurotypicals and that's okay. I'm here to tell you what works for us. A smart way to work with your ADHD brain. The first rule to working effectively with your brain is to make life as fun as possible. Because ADHD brains are constantly looking for more dopamine to satisfy their needs. And some of our most important tasks offer none whatsoever. Brushing your teeth? No. Cleaning up? It is not fun. And they need to be fun now. Because our brains only ever know one time frame. And that is now. Nothing ever happens later. So how do we make things rewarding right now? Here's a few things you could do. You could try to gamify your life. For example, you could put your favorite song on and try to clean up before it ends. You could start a timer and see if you can do the task and beat it. You could compete with someone in your house to see who does it faster. You could come up with some form of point system or use random rewards. And my favorite one, by far, is to do some kind of challenge. I've been doing yoga since November. And every month, I still make these cards where I check off every day that I have actually done yoga. Because it takes so long to see actual progress. It is not rewarding right now. It is not fun right now. But crossing off the day is. And that's the same way I use my morning routine. Every step of the way is rewarding when you click that you've done the thing. And then gathering stuff towards your streak is the big reward. Eventually, it makes a life difference. But who cares? Your brain only cares about the fun part. And you can make it even better by crossing off whatever you have done on a list or just crushing your post-it notes like King Kong and feeling so powerful. You can get really creative with this. I have linked a few resources for further ideas down below. But whatever you do, you're gonna get bored. That's just how it works for us. We need novelty. So instead of seeing it as a problem and as a fault of yours, you can try to work with it. Anticipate it. Not like, oh, I'm abandoning whatever I'm starting. No. You are an explorer and you are having fun. Now, the second most important rule is to always work with your brain and not against it. Imagine you're swimming in a river. You can swim against the stream and waste all of your energy while covering almost no ground. Or you can go with the flow and get much farther with much less effort. What would you rather do? Well, the river is your brain. And sometimes it doesn't want to do anything. No productivity BS will work. Not even gamification will work. What do we do then? We approach things differently. If your brain wants to do something, you let it. Heck, don't even try to stop it. If you can't stop watching videos, you go shower, you take your phone to the shower. If you can't go outside and stop scrolling your phone, go scroll in the park. Walk around like a zombie and at least you'll get some exercise. I used to work out while playing a YouTube video on mute and listening to an audiobook for fun instead. And I even watched Twitch streams at an old job whenever I had to do some mundane tasks. If it works, it works. The fact that you did anything at all might be enough to snap you into action so that you could continue doing some other things first. And if it's not, you keep flowing. But if you do have the brain power for something more, you might want to try dopamine switching. Plan your day in such a way that every hard and draining task is followed by a fun and recharging task. If you write your homework in the morning, you go grab coffee outside. Then you can do your chores, maybe while watching videos. And you go play for an hour. And so on and so forth. I call that dopamine switching. Maybe there's a real name for it out there. But who cares? As long as you were giving yourself something fun to look forward to every time you have to do something hard, you're gonna be fine. But you need to make sure that whatever you do, you don't stop flowing. Like when you take a long break from exercising and then all these negative emotions build up and you don't want to get back into it. Or when you don't answer some of your emails and eventually you dread talking to those people, so you never do. Stopping is a bad idea. If you do some small walks in between big exercise breaks, if you answer one small email every single day, at least you'll keep going. Do it while watching a movie if you have to. You can make it fun and simple, but don't stop. The third rule is to accommodate yourself. No coping mechanism is too out there. Because it's better than doing nothing the conventional way. If you have to lock up your laptop to deal with your gaming addiction, you do it. If you have to do push-ups every time you squeeze your face, you do you. You want to use all the tricks in the book. Any fidgeting toy, binaural beats, ASMR, playlist, whatever. You try anything. The one item that started this whole journey for me was this sensory tape. And when my psychiatrist gave it to me, I had no idea that the simple act of scratching on this very interesting surface can be so grounding and so calming and you can do it anywhere and it is really really helpful. So I was really excited when Wonder Inspired reached out to me to send me a spinner ring. It is similar to the sensory tape in the sense that you can just do something wherever you are as soon as you need it. It's essentially a gold-plated or silver-plated ring where you can move the middle section. They all have a very interesting surface for you to explore as you're spinning, which I think is really important. But I chose a more minimalist design because it just fits my aesthetic. Still, I think that these ridges are so interesting to explore with your finger and then you can just spin it whenever you want. If you are somebody who wears jewelry anyway, I think you will not even notice it and neither will anyone else. They will not think, oh, what are they doing with these rocks or sensory tape? They'll be like, oh, look at that, what a beautiful ring she has. The cool thing is that Wonder Inspired donate 20% of their profits to women's mental health organizations and they have a 15% off code for you too. You can try a spinner ring or a spinner necklace, jewelry, anything that you choose and I think you will love it. Before I had that, I had rocks with different surfaces that I would explore, for example, at the dentist, massage balls that are essentially for your hands, this ring that is for massaging your fingers or just fidget with it. I really like to use the sensory tape on my phone. I'll just scratch it at the first sign of stress. Don't stress me, I will scratch. The fourth rule is to use your environment as much as possible because we don't have that much control over anything else in our lives. The easiest thing here to try is something like music. If you get some sad music, happy, motivating, energized, you can put a playlist on with that and eventually you should feel the feels. You can play with lighting, whatever and if nothing works, you just change your space. Go sit in another room or go outside, meet your friend at the coffee shop, sit on a bench. It will change your state eventually. Your secret weapon here is probably showers. Nothing is ever the same after a shower and if you don't feel like it, you can take your phone and watch YouTube while you're doing it. You will definitely feel like doing something, even if it's sleeping. It's not the same. I tweak my environment pretty much every time I have to get in the mood for something or in the mental headspace, even for things that are fun. Just remember, make it rewarding, make it exciting and if all else fails, throw your phone across the room and you'll have to catch it and get up eventually because otherwise you'll be bored. Finally, constraints suck but they rock. I'm sorry, it's true and I love freedom as much as you do but some constraints are incredibly helpful, especially with time. Because what? We're time blind. It's only ever now. What time is it really? Nobody knows. That's how you get stuck in a wormhole and suddenly it's tomorrow and you had so many things to do that you didn't do and you also didn't have fun. Who knows what you did? I do my best work with a Pomodoro timer, especially if I force myself to take every break and my morning routines only work because the app is essentially a to-do list timer. I even have two timer apps on my website that beat the timeout out so that I don't get lost and forget what I'm doing and I have an ADHD Pomodoro timer. All free, link below. I use calendars and alarms and timers and time blocking and everything I can to keep myself from overworking and oversleeping and overchilling and just generally losing track of time. Is it annoying? Yes. Is it motivating? Strangely, yes. Otherwise, everything feels like it's never-ending and it's just this big blend of tasks that just keep coming and coming out of nowhere so you have to find your own time constraints that work for you in order to protect yourself. And if you want some extra help in the form of applications, things that I really think are useful, I mentioned them in this video. My five best ADHD management applications. I've been using them for the longest time. I think they're amazing and you might love them too.