Here is an email I just wrote to a parent who asked me about their child’s need to use a planner. Have I ever seen one that was particularly good for kids with ADHD?:
Hey!
(To cut to the chase of this very long email, you can just read the last paragraph before "hope this helps!" at the end)
For an ADHDer to remember to do a task, the rule is:
there must be an
unavoidable
external
reminder
that will appear at the moment the task needs to be completed...
Otherwise, a passive decision has been made not to do it.
No physical planner I have ever seen meets these criteria: they are both avoidable and have no way of appearing at the moment the reminder is needed.
However, in an environment where devices are not allowed, perhaps the best one can do is build in daily planner checks that happen without fail--anchored to something that always happens, i.e. at the 10:20 morning break bell I always get my snack, go to this bench, and check/update my planner. At the 1:40 afternoon break, my English teacher lets me stay after class and check/update my planner before I go out and shoot baskets for five minutes... Things like that.
The anchoring to dependable daily activities is absolutely key, but, frankly, even with the sincere intention, motivation needs to be extremely high for this to become a habit for a student with ADHD, which generally means it needs to be associated with a deeply desired reward...
(it seems that even huge amounts of suffering do not motivate us the way positive rewards do, perhaps because one way our polar attention profile helps us cope in general is that whether we are hyperfocused on something of great interest or desperately scanning for something to hyperfocus upon (aka "distracted" or "unfocused" or "hyperactive"), unpleasant thoughts and emotions are naturally out-of-mind, unless they are in our face).
It's also difficult to sustain daily attention to a new habit one is trying to form when it feels superfluous 90% of the time! Remember, all our lives we have been coping with a scarcity landscape of constitutional resources for getting ANYTHING done, so mustering the resources to check a planner with nothing in it day after day goes against very deep and hard-won instincts!
For kids, I try to liken things like this to the work of a security guard:
you WANT there to be nothing of note 90% of the time, because
*it makes checking quick and easy and
*STILL increases confidence and calm, and
*you also catch the rare things you would have missed AND
*you actually probably also end up taking for granted things that you THINK you would have remembered anyway, but really would not have, or would not have until the last minute.
And while I'm being frank, I think in 20ish years of doing this I have seen two students make good, consistent use of a planner, and I suspect neither of them had ADHD. I have never, ever used a planner for any length of time, even when highly motivated to do so.
I showed J____ what I do do this summer.
I use Google Calendar, Google Tasks, and phone alarms.
1. Anything time-bound that is outside of my regular schedule requires an alarm. If it requires preparation, it requires a phone alarm that will go off at the time I need to start preparing and another alarm one minute before I need to do the thing. Literally. If I set an alarm three minutes before I need to do something, I will often forget, within that three minute window, to do the thing. It is staggering, but that happened multiple times with recess duties when I worked at a school--I had set an alarm for three minutes before each of my duties to give me time to "wrap up" whatever I was doing, and I would later remember the duty with shock and shame only after it was already over.
It is key with ADHD to look at this kind of thing squarely, accept the facts of our cognitive landscape, and adjust to them without judgment or self-abuse. This is not our fault, but it is our responsibility, and cursing ourselves and demanding that we somehow generate the ability to do what we cannot is NOT taking responsibility for it. My recess duty alarms needed to be at the moment when I had to drop everything and go. Admitting that made me capable of showing up consistently, on time.
2. Anything that I need to do on my own time but am not doing immediately needs to be listed (descriptively!) as a task on Google Tasks. This works because I check it regularly. I have to be careful because when I have lots of pressing work, I can neglect it for a while. This is why anything with a deadline or that is important to me to get done in a timely manner goes directly onto my calendar. The Tasks app can actually sync with Google Calendar, if you put dates/times on tasks, but I only use that when my task list becomes unmanageable and I systematically schedule everything... so I can breathe again. (See "Tidy Up" here)
3. That "tidy up" idea also applies to my calendar. Things in my environment that do not change over time.. disappear. I can put a post-it reminder in the middle of my bathroom mirror or my steering wheel, and within days I will no longer see it. I replace such post-its with a different color post-it, or a different kind of reminder altogether, as soon as I notice they have become invisible. This is even more vital to do on the calendar because they become little zones of invisibility, and any anomalous thing nearby may be missed as well. I use the color-coding of events to fight this, but the battle never ends.
Obviously, calendar and task-checking are anchored to my work time. I start with email and try very hard NOT to address all emails as I go, but to list them as tasks if they will take more than a few minutes. This is also hard.
But my work time is anchored to nothing!
To get a little holistic here before getting back to J____:
It is only in the latter half of my 50s that I have learned that ALL of the above have to be anchored in a life that prioritizes self-care, relationships, then work, in that order, and the only way I do that consistently is by making a daily action plan upon awakening. I list what I am doing for
sleep
nutrition
exercise
emotional/mental health
quiet
creativity
staying connected to the people I love
keeping up with work tasks
and
I make a schedule with these priorities in mind. That's where work time gets anchored.
Again, this is ADHD (and a lot of other things) recovery at age 56.
So, what about J____?
I mentioned above looking "squarely" at what one can and cannot (yet) do.
J____'s face, as I went over my tasks/calendar/alarms system with him, seemed to indicate that he could not see himself doing these things. We talked about how it feels disrespectful to me for me to ignore that look and just squawk useless things at him. By definition, in my practice, if a student believes they are hearing something useless to them, they are right. Their mind is wandering. I am reinforcing their sense of difference. At the very least, I am putting the cart before the horse. They need something they can imagine possibly doing.
So J____ and I put our heads together and tried to come up with first steps that he could imagine doing. And here is what we came up with:
The problem he believes he needs to solve is occasionally missing assignments, missing instructions, or failing to follow-up on work he has missed due to absence. Using a planner regularly and building in checks/updates several times a day would probably solve this, but it feels like overkill. Happily, J____ thinks the information on the school's web interface is quite complete, so checking that regularly is a more reasonable starting place.
I mentioned that without a planner most of us need SOME place to write down additional information about assignments and things we want to remember that don't apply to everyone, so they won't be on the school/class site. J____ agreed that he should have a small notebook for this purpose, but I got the sense he was not really imagining he would use it. I think it would be good to get in the habit of having such a thing, so that when he is ready to start using it (or trying it out to find what he will really end up using--I also use "notes" in iOS for this), but I don't think it needs to be emphasized.
We agreed to anchor an assignment-check to-do list to his getting-home routine.
I suggested
* we make a sign that is posted prominently somewhere unavoidable (fridge? gaming device? pillow? bedroom door? see post-it discussion above) for him;
* he admit that he needs support to remember this kind of thing while building the habit, and that he officially approve of kind, brief parental reminders about this this year. I said I would suggest to parents to remind once or twice, without judgment or assumptions about what he is or is not doing at that moment. He suggested a complex battery of reminders, ramping up if he is not checking his work after the first several... but I told him I thought that would be inappropriate to ask in most families, that it sounded like a way to be able to blame parents if things went wrong, which would not be helpful. If things go wrong, he should first consider what he can do to improve his consistency (multiple signs? avoid particular activities until after work check? etc.) before asking them to ramp up their attentiveness to his... inattentiveness :)
The sign looks like this:
Daily Homework Check
Within 1 hour of getting home,
every day,
whether or not you think you have homework!
Check email, notebook, and Google Classroom, including To Do and Missing tabs
Check all three again after you finish each assignment, until there are no more assignments to do
OR use Google Tasks to list assignments and check them off
OR do the same thing on paper or a post-it
For any assignment that is not due the next day, spend at least 15 minutes on it (unless the work due the next day takes more than 90 minutes)
It could probably do with some colorful adornment and/or editing for brevity, now or over time.
All of this has been to say: I don't think a planner will help, but that is also my bias. I do think the goal of anchoring the things on this sign to J____'s getting-home-from-school ritual truly IS the first step toward "work management" in the bigger picture, which is what a planner is all about.
Hope this is helpful!!
BTW, I will humbly add that I am finishing this email at 11:20am... and my intention is to, ahem, write today's action plan, which I have not done yet..."upon awakening"....
:)
Mike
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