ADHD and To-Do Lists: How to Make a List You'll Actually Look at and Use Every Day

What's happening

ADHD and to-do lists have a complicated relationship. You make a brilliant list on Sunday night, then add to a different one on your phone, then scribble a few things on an envelope. By Wednesday there are four lists, none of them complete, and checking them all feels like a job in itself. Or there's one list, but it's sixty items long and so off-putting that you stop opening it.

How to get moving

Keep two lists, not one. The first is a master list where everything goes, in one place only, like a single note on your phone. It can be as long and messy as it likes, because you only read it properly once a day. The second is today's list: no more than three things, copied by hand onto a sticky note or index card each morning.

Write each item as an action with a verb, like "ring garage about MOT" instead of "car". Stick the card where you'll see it without trying, like the edge of your laptop screen or next to the kettle. When all three are done, you can pull another from the master list, but the day already counts.

Important tip

Make adding to the master list as fast as possible. Pin the note to the top of your notes app, or put it on your home screen, so adding a job takes a couple of taps. If writing something down takes longer than a few seconds, you'll tell yourself you'll remember it, or jot it somewhere else, and that's how the extra lists start creeping back in.