PDF Summary:Order from Chaos, by Jaclyn Paul

If you have ADHD, you may feel like your life is one big mess. In Order from Chaos, Jaclyn Paul, a best-selling author and blogger with ADHD, argues that people with ADHD face particular organizational challenges that can make their lives feel chaotic and frustrating. But by implementing Paul’s organizational strategies and systems—which involve containing messes, sorting through inboxes, and managing projects—ADHDers can gain control over their lives and find greater peace.

In this guide, we’ll first explain what ADHD is and how it affects cognitive functioning. Then, we’ll move on to the first step of getting organized, which is to get to know yourself and how your ADHD affects you personally, followed by the second step, which is to contain your current state of disorganization, and finally the third step, which is to implement your organizational system. We’ll add information about how ADHD works and the other traits that accompany it, as well as advice from other experts on how to stay organized.

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The Reading/Writing Learning Style and Learning Disabilities

Some experts identify other learning styles besides those Paul listed. Specifically, many sources include “reading/writing” as a separate learning style. These learners do best when they’re able to read information or write it down. Some view this learning style as simply a sub-type of the visual style, but some people who learn well through reading and writing don’t learn well from other visual stimuli like graphs and images.

These distinctions become particularly relevant in discussions of ADHD because as many as 60% of ADHDers also have a learning disability, and some of these disabilities directly impair one or more of the learning styles Paul describes, as well as the reading/writing style. A common learning disability that manifests alongside ADHD is dyslexia, which impairs reading ability. An ADHDer with dyslexia might be a visual learner who does not learn well from reading and writing, suggesting that these should be considered separate learning styles.

Other common learning disabilities that can co-occur with ADHD include dyspraxia, which affects motor control and may make it harder to learn tactilely. Auditory processing disorder could impair the ability to learn from hearing information, and a visual processing disorder could interfere with visual learning. If you’re an ADHDer who also has a learning disability, you should take that into account when designing your organizational system.

Other ways for visual learners to tap into their learning style could be to create charts that help them keep track of their files or other visual aids like chore wheels. For auditory learners, talking out loud to others or themselves about your organization could help, while tactile learners may benefit from a variety of textures in materials (such as card stock, construction paper, or fabric) that correspond to different parts of their system. Reading/writing learners may do particularly well with lists.

Understand Your Scheduling Needs

Finally, identify your ideal daily schedule based on your energy and focus levels, writes Paul. Do you function best if you go to bed early and get up early, or are you more productive if you stay up later and sleep in? What types of work are easiest for you to complete at various times in the day? You may want to reserve your physical organization tasks for the time of day when you have the most energy, and do the ones that require little thought for the time of day when you may have less mental energy.

(Shortform note: One way to determine when you’re most productive and when you need rest is to figure out your circadian rhythm. Different people have different circadian rhythms, meaning the hours of the day during which they sleep best and work best are different. In particular, people with ADHD often have circadian rhythms that cause them to sleep and wake up later, making them more productive in the afternoons or evenings than in the mornings.)

Once you’ve identified your purpose, limitations, learning style, and ideal schedule, you can begin the work of containing your current mess.

Step 2: Contain Your Current Mess

According to Paul, if you’re already behind on your organization, you won’t be able to jump right into a new system. You need to get a handle on your current state of disorganization first. ADHDers can become disorganized more easily because they tend to quickly be overwhelmed by new input, and we’re all constantly receiving various types of input: Much of it is informational like ideas and obligations, and much of it is physical like mail and belongings. For ADHDers, the overwhelm from all this input often leads to piles.

(Shortform note: ADHDers may not even realize how messy their environment has gotten because they often experience clutter blindness, which is when they become so accustomed to the mess around them that it no longer looks messy. Sometimes it can help to ask a friend or loved one to help you identify cluttered areas in your environment so you know where to start containing your mess.)

Piles accumulate when we have no system for dealing with incoming stuff. We get a piece of mail or find a dirty sock on the floor and put it in a pile for us to deal with later, which grows and grows until it feels too big to manage. These piles feel necessary—particularly for those who suffer from “out of sight, out of mind” tendencies—so that we don’t lose track of important items, but ultimately these things tend to get lost in the piles anyway.

Organizing piles starts with containing them, which means designating a specific location to keep those items until you’re ready to deal with them.

(Shortform note: Some ADHDers use piles as an important part of their organizing system, often referring to them as “DOOM” piles (“Didn’t Organize, Only Moved). They may come in other forms than piles, including bags, boxes, drawers, or other containers. DOOM piles can be useful when you’re organizing on limited time or energy and need to get rid of clutter or mess. However, as with other piles, they need to be managed regularly—perhaps in one of the ways we’re about to describe—so they don’t get out of control.)

Containing Physical Items

To contain physical items that you struggle to keep organized, Paul recommends using baskets. While it may seem similar to a pile, a basket provides physical boundaries for a pile, which will help keep it more manageable. Each basket should only contain one type of item. That way, as soon as you find an item that needs to be stored, you know exactly where to put it, and you know exactly where to look for it the next time you need it.

(Shortform note: You can continue to tap into your learning styles and needs as you create your containment system. If you’re a visual learner, color-coding your baskets—say, using a red basket for household items, a blue basket for important documents, and so on—may help you keep track of them. Tactile learners may benefit from having to perform an additional physical step to put something in a basket (perhaps unlatching and opening the basket’s lid), and auditory learners could talk through their organizational choices with someone to solidify them in their minds.)

Also, remember your learning style (and those of any ADHDers with whom you may share your space): If you know you have “out of sight, out of mind” tendencies, putting items in a place where you can’t see them won’t be sustainable. If you don’t use the items frequently, you’ll forget about them. If you do use them frequently, you’ll never be able to keep up with a system that hides them from your sight because you’ll inevitably start leaving them outside of their container due to your need to keep visual track of them. To beat your “out of sight, out of mind” tendencies, use open containers that will help you use those items as visual reminders without them being strewn all over the place.

Organizing by What You Use Most Often

If you’re using baskets to contain a particular type of item, you might find your frequently used items keep getting mixed in with items you don’t need that much. For example, if you have a basket filled with office supplies, but you rarely use any of them except the stapler, you might get frustrated always having to dig past the tape dispensers, scissors, boxes of paper clips, and other items to get to the stapler.

In Algorithms to Live By, Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths suggest sorting your belongings based on what you use the most often. If you sort through your basket and find items that you almost never use or haven’t used in a long time, consider putting those items in a less accessible but more organized space, or even getting rid of them entirely.

Containing Email and Calendar Reminders

You may also have different “piles,” such as thousands of unread emails, mountains of written reminders, or digital calendars filled with things you may or may not do. These are also things that need to be contained, insists Paul.

To better contain your emails and calendar reminders, be ruthless about what you keep and what you don’t. If you have what feels like an overwhelming amount of unread emails, consider deleting all emails received before a certain date to clear out the current clutter. Then downsize: Unsubscribe from any newsletters, promotional emails, or other things you don’t use. Similarly, with your calendar, only include items that have to be done and are time sensitive. Filling your calendar with things you may or may not do is a recipe for an abandoned calendar.

Other Tips for Managing Email and Calendar

Other organization experts offer tips for general email and calendar maintenance that ADHDers could consider combining with Paul’s recommendations: For email, they suggest only checking your email during certain times of the day, dealing with an email as soon as you read it instead of leaving it marked as “read,” and using email templates to help you save time on drafting emails that you send regularly. When you deal with emails right away, you prevent an overwhelming amount of unread emails from accumulating, and thus may not even have to downsize.

For your calendar, they recommend color-coding your different activities based on the type of activity. For example, you could code all your work commitments in red, your free time in blue, and your errands in green—then you can see at a glance if your time commitments are way out of balance. They also recommend being judicious about which calendar invites you choose to accept and making sure your calendar is synced across all your devices.

Thought Containers

ADHDers also have trouble remembering things without concrete reminders. Rather than assuming you’ll remember something, Paul recommends creating thought containers by finding a way to record your thoughts immediately, before they can slip out of your mind, and storing those thoughts in a way that will make them easy to access later. This might mean keeping a dry-erase board in every room of your house or always having a pad of sticky notes on hand that you then store in a physical container.

This can also be helpful when other people need to ask you to do something. If your child needs a permission slip signed, or your coworker needs you to take the lead on a new project, they can put a note into your thought container to ensure you attend to it.

Additional Ways to Organize Your Thoughts

Sometimes you may not make it to your thought container before you lose your thought. Research shows that talking to yourself can help your concentration and processing. It also helps you remember and establish mental associations between your thoughts and a specific visual target, so saying your thought out loud can help you keep it in your memory until you can either write it down or perform the action it requires.

To avoid forgetting what you were about to do before you walked into a room, try using the P-L-R technique: Pause for 10 seconds, then use that time to Link your intended action to a verbal description and a visual image of the task. Finally, Rehearse the image and description in your mind so it will stick long enough for you to get it done.

Step 3: Implement an Organizational System

Once you’ve got your current situation contained, you can implement a system for managing your incoming items, tasks, and projects. The most important part of establishing a system for organization is to find one that works for you. It should be both simple and sustainable, meaning it should require as little work from you as possible and should be something you can reasonably do every week in perpetuity.

Paul doesn’t explicitly describe many organizational systems, but she highly recommends reading David Allen’s Getting Things Done and using his tips to design your own system.

(Shortform note: The guide to Allen’s Getting Things Done is available in our Shortform library. The five steps he describes for a strong organizational system are: 1) Capture your items and ideas, 2) Clarify what you need to do about each item, 3) Organize the decisions you’ve made about your next actions, 4) Reflect on what you should do next, and 5) Engage (complete the task). Paul’s system is heavily based on Allen’s Getting Things Done system, but she adds tips specifically for people with ADHD.)

Funneling Containers Into Inboxes

All of the containers you created in Step 2 represent a source of incoming tasks that require you to act on them. Paul suggests funneling these different incoming sources into as few inboxes as possible to make it easier to process them. For example, instead of having separate inboxes for your voicemails, your physical mail, and your emails, you might print out your emails and voicemails and consolidate them into one “communication” inbox. Paul recommends using as many containers as you need, but then putting those items into as few inboxes as you can get by with. This way, when it comes time to sort through those inboxes, you only have a few to manage, which, as we’ll discuss next, is the next step in organizing.

(Shortform note: This step corresponds to Allen’s first step, “Capture.” Allen makes many of the same recommendations as Paul, but he differs in his suggestion that you shouldn’t add your emails to your physical communications inbox. He suggests that since we receive so many emails, and since email servers have their own organizational tools, you should leave them in their digital form and deal with them separately. You should decide if it’s worth it to have two separate inboxes for communications or if you would benefit more from having them all in one physical place even at the risk of clogging it with all your email correspondence.)

Managing Tasks

Each item that goes into one of your inboxes is a potential task, and you need to sort through these regularly to keep them from overwhelming you. To empty an inbox, it’s important to take out one item at a time and to not put anything back in after you’ve taken it out. Then assess that item and decide if it’s something you can take care of in less than five minutes (or less than two if you know that a five-minute task will distract you too much from your management process). If it’s a short task, complete it immediately. If it’s a larger task, it needs to be logged in your project management system, which we’ll discuss next.

(Shortform note: This step corresponds to Allen’s second step, clarifying. Paul explains what to do with actionable items (tasks and projects), but Allen adds that some of the items you sort through may not be actionable. He recommends placing these in a separate pile designated for reference materials—such as reminders and instruction manuals—so they don’t get mixed up in your tasks and projects. He also explains why you shouldn’t put items back in your inbox once you’ve taken them out: Every decision you make contributes to decision fatigue—the gradual loss of energy that comes from making decisions—and leaving an item in the “undecided” category drains your energy more than making the decision quickly and being done with it.)

Managing Projects

Paul explains that a task is an individual, discrete activity that has to be done to accomplish something. A project is anything that requires two or more tasks to complete. As you come across potential projects while emptying your inboxes, it’s highly tempting to drop what you’re doing and immediately start working on these larger activities. However, this will derail your organizational system and result in an overflowing inbox because you’ll be too distracted to tend to it. Instead of starting them immediately, you need to establish a way to record such projects so you can come back to them later.

(Shortform note: Paul recommends not diving right into big projects because it can be distracting, but according to other experts, it can also help because you may realize the project isn’t worth completing at all: In Rework, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson explain that it’s better to drop a project that’s not going anywhere than to keep pursuing it and wasting your time and energy, though this can be difficult if you’ve already spent a lot of time on it. If you’ve been working on a project that seems to be going nowhere, consider running it by a friend or colleague to see if they think it’s worth continuing.)

Paul uses an app to keep track of her projects, and there are many such apps available. You can also use a paper system if that works better for you. Whatever system you choose should allow you to record projects and then break them down into smaller tasks, and it should allow you to note whether you can complete these tasks now or if they’re dependent on something else (like if they can only be done after another task is completed, or you’re waiting on someone else to do something so you can complete the task).

Making the Best Use of Your Projects List

This step corresponds to Allen’s third step, organizing. However, he recommends using your projects list purely as an index rather than a place to keep track of descriptions of the projects, tasks, or materials you need to complete them. Instead, such materials should go in a separate file that corresponds to your project list.

Also, remember to consider what you learned about yourself in step 1 to decide what organizational system to use. If you know you learn better by reading and writing by hand, consider a paper list instead of a digital app. Writing things down by hand can improve your retention of information, but if you have trouble keeping up with a notebook, or you want to be able to share your list with others easily, a digital app may work better for you. If you’re an auditory learner, you may want to use an app that can log voice memos so you can listen back to them.

Keeping a To-do List

To keep track of the very next tasks you need to complete for your various projects, you can keep a to-do list. A to-do list is not for projects; it’s only for specific, single tasks that don’t require any preceding steps to be completed first. Something like “renew vehicle registration” may seem like a simple task, but it’s actually a project that requires several tasks, such as making an appointment to have your car inspected, then submitting the renewal application, and later applying those little stickers to your vehicle’s license plate.

So activities like “renew vehicle registration” shouldn’t go on your to-do list, but instead in your project management system, and the next task required to make progress on that project (like “make appointment to get car inspected”) should go on the to-do list.

(Shortform note: Paul and Allen don’t specify how many to-do lists you should keep, and this will depend on your unique needs and preferences: You may want separate to-do lists for various projects, or one master to-do list with all of your important next tasks listed. While one list may be easier to keep up with, some experts suggest that one list isn’t sufficient for managing the busy lives we lead today and recommend keeping two or three—and possibly even a “not-to-do list” to remind yourself of things you’ve decided you don’t want to spend your time doing.)

Keeping Track of Future Projects

Paul also recommends keeping a list of things you’d like to do if you ever get the time but don’t want to act on currently. ADHDers have a lot of ideas, and they often have difficulty prioritizing them. It’s easy to get so excited about a project you can’t currently accomplish that you end up neglecting the things you need to do now. Recording these future projects and ideas gives you the relief of not having to keep up with them mentally, and also the freedom to say, “I’m not going to work on this right now, but maybe I will someday.”

(Shortform note: Taking things off your immediate projects list can be particularly difficult for ADHDers because they often experience the fear of missing out (or FOMO). By comparing yourself to others and the goals you see them achieving, you might find yourself adding so many projects to the list of things you want to complete that you’re unable to make progress on any of them. Being aware of when you’re experiencing FOMO (when you want to do something because someone else did it instead of because you want to do it) and focusing on enjoying what you’re doing now can make it easier to postpone some of those projects that you don’t have time for at the moment.)