Why do people with weak executive functions often allow things to pile up?  The mess works better for us than having things hidden away out of site where they might as well cease to exist.  We have not been taught how to use our strengths, including exquisite responsiveness, to organize our projects and other stuff.

The GOOD NEWS is that there is a lot of order in an ADHD mess, and that order is what can be developed to make life better.  By using our strengths to organize, instead of trying to use our weaknesses, we can have more order in our lives without losing our creative energy and passion for the next project.

Images and words copyright 2016 Brenda Roberts Shaw, Mansfield Center, CT, USA

I am not a health-care professional, and am simply sharing ideas with no promises of this material being safe or helpful to others.

Why do responsive-dominant thinkers freak out when someone tries to organize our lives for us, or tidy up our desk?  It’s because a messy desk, work space, or room often has at least four kinds of order:

• visual
  
• geographic
  
• chronological
  
• kinesthetic
  

Our way of keeping track of things gets messed up when we lose the visual, geographic, chronological, and kinesthetic cues for knowing where things are.

We may put stuff out in anything but neat piles, with bits and pieces showing so we can find things visually – using images, font style, size, shape, texture, and colors to cue us.  We know where we put something geographically on the desk or in the room.  We know that stuff set down longer ago chronologically is deeper in the pile.  We know kinesthetically how far we reached, or where we walked in the house to set something down.  These four types of order represent strengths and skills that can be developed.

NEXT STEP:  If you want to, keep working on getting your life expressed on one page (see posts entitled “Yikes!  Time for a Better Life?” Step one Life on One Page and “Responsive Storage” Step Two Life on One Page).  Later, you can use that summary of your life along with visual, geographic, chronological, and kinesthetic ways of organizing to make life work better.  I’ll show you what is helping me soon.