In this episode, Ash and Dusty explore the pervasive challenge of forgetfulness for people with ADHD and how it impacts daily life and progress toward goals. They discuss the common experience of forgetting intentions or tasks, which leads to feelings of being overwhelmed or constantly “putting out fires.” Both coaches emphasize the importance of starting with small, manageable systems tailored to individual needs, highlighting that complex systems often fail or get abandoned without curiosity and adjustment. Ash shares his personal approach using a simple three-part system: a calendar for timed events, a Google Doc for catchall to-dos, and a weekly family planner on the refrigerator, illustrating how these tools can work together to improve awareness and consistency.
Dusty expands on this by sharing coaching strategies for clients struggling with forgetfulness, including the value of duplicative systems and the necessity of patience and incremental progress. They use metaphors like building a foundation before erecting a building to help clients understand why coaching requires time and consistent effort. The episode also touches on the importance of accountability, practice, and curiosity in coaching and suggests that listening to resources like this podcast can prepare clients to make the most out of their coaching experience. Ultimately, Ash and Dusty remind listeners that managing forgetfulness in ADHD is an ongoing process that benefits from starting small, learning from experience, and building reliable systems that fit individual lives.
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Episode Transcript:
[00:00:01] Ash: Hi, I am Ash. [00:00:03] Dusty: I’m Dusty. [00:00:03] Ash: And this is Translating ADHD. Listeners, we told you last week we were gonna do a second part on the topic of communication, but Dusty and I actually both forgot to do our homework and make some notes about what threads we wanted to continue to pull on, which hilariously enough means that today we’re going to do an episode on forgetfulness.Forgetfulness is such a big challenge for those of us with ADHD and it’s one that feeds into all of our other challenges, because if we’re not even aware in a useful way of what we’re supposed to do or what intentions that we’ve set for now, or the future, then we can’t make progress. We can’t get anywhere. Everything just sort of happens when it comes into our awareness; so, for those of you that feel like your life is happening to you more so than you are happening to it. For those of you that feel like you’re mostly putting out fires because you can’t seem to get on top of things, oftentimes the first step there is getting to a place where you’re at least aware of what the things are that should have your attention now or in the near future, and that’s a really complex and difficult topic for those of us with ADHD.
[00:01:21] Dusty: And I think for me as a coach, it is one of the more challenging things for sure that I see with clients, like you said, Ash. And we really have to use a lot of willful suspension of disbelief and a lot of hopefulness and a lot of curiosity to, to overcome it because it can be really demoralizing to put a lot of effort into a system or a lot of intention into something and then not see yourself make progress on it because it, you just forgot it. It just disappeared from reality. [00:01:53] Ash: Exactly Dusty. And this is one of those areas where we can tend to go very all or nothing with ADHD. So we’re having this struggle of being forgetful, and so we build out an entire complex system to try and aid with that. It doesn’t work. We throw the whole thing out.We throw the whole thing out in a very incurious way, so we don’t even get to learn what worked here and what didn’t work. We just let it go. We throw our hands up. We say, maybe this is just how I am. Nothing works. What’s the point?
Right alongside that challenge is something that I see in my clients who do need duplicative systems as a form of support, and that is a lot of frustration about the time that that takes. In particular if we’re talking about at work, where they feel pressure to spend their time well so we can discount planning is non-productive time.
I’ve had several client sessions where exactly that thing happened, where the client is bemoaning that they didn’t do what they intended to do, and what we’re finding out is it’s because there was some pre-work that needed to be done. There was some planning or some groundwork and that is what was actually happening at that time. But the client is sort of discounting it as well. I didn’t do the thing, I didn’t get the thing done, and therefore this was not productive time. No real work happened.
[00:03:22] Dusty: First of all, I like the word duplicative. I’ve never heard someone say that out loud before and it’s very fun to say duplicative. And I’m a big, big fan of duplicative systems. I need them a lot myself. And I would say that I forget, I’m very forgetful, and my forgetting has not improved over the years, but my systems and backup systems and backups of those backups have improved.And so things still do fall through the cracks sometimes, which is largely a result of the fact that I like to be very busy and I have a lot going on. So I have three times as much going on as most people, but at the same time, I’m able to stay on top of that most of the time because I have so many systems.
I’ll never forget the first year that I went to the Chad Conference in Philadelphia. I was there with Jessica McCabe, Danny Donovan and Rider Carroll was there with us as well, the guy who invented the bullet journaling method. And he was with Jessica, so I didn’t know him but I got to hang out with him a bit.
He is a very cool guy. He had very tight clothing. I’ve never seen a guy dressed in so much black and have no cat hair or anything. That guy’s blacks were really black. He must travel with a lint roller. But anyway, he was doing one of the lunchtime talks and I was like, oh, I’m gonna go check out what he is talking about.
People had a lot of bullet journal related questions for him. And as he was giving the talk, he said, you know, one thing that people ask me about all the time is when they get to the end of their bullet journal and they need to export all this stuff over, like move it from one bullet journal to the other. They’ll often ask him, what’s the most expeditious way to do this? And he said something that I’ve never forgotten ’cause I thought it was really smart. He said, we’re people with ADHD, repetition is not your enemy, repetition is your friend. He said, sometimes it’s not a bad idea to have to copy things over and over again.
And that’s true, right? So what you’re talking about, Ash, I’ve also had clients push back against the amount of time that they have to invest into the systems and backup systems. But the thing is, you pay for it either way. Either you pay for it by forgetting and or remembering at a really inopportune time, like your kid’s birthday party, and then you’re like, oh my god, that report’s due tomorrow. So now you’re missing your kid’s birthday party or you’re on a date or you finally have an evening to relax, or you’re sick and whatever the case may be – but now all of a sudden, poof, something came back out of the ether at you, and you’re like, oh no, and it interrupts, or you miss a deadline.
These are all costs. So if you have to spend way more time than you would like to build systems and backup systems for the systems, that’s just a different kind of cost. It’s not like it’s not costing you.
[00:06:04] Ash: That’s really well said, Dusty. Either way, there is a cost and I am a person who, by the way, everything else being equal, my goal is to keep my life simple enough that I don’t need overly complicated systems.I keep my business super simple. I try to keep my life as simple as possible. I try to kind of tackle one major project or thing at a time, but I’m not always in control over what my life looks like. Major, major projects come out of thin air that I couldn’t have anticipated or planned for, like the tree falling on my shed. So, what I’ve noticed for myself is, while that does work for me, most of the time I can have a really light set of systems.
And when I say light, the systems are still there and they’re still duplicative. I can tell you exactly what it is. My calendar holds all of my appointments, events and intentions that exist in a time and place. So client events, plans with friends, concerts, appointments I’m going to, etc., alongside intentions like going to my kickboxing gym because to me, that’s going somewhere else. That’s an intention that exists at a time and place, and it’s something that has to happen at a particular time.
I do not put tasks on my calendar because for me, I noticed when I tried to start doing that several years ago, I started missing client appointments. I started not paying attention to my calendar. It actually made the tool that was working well for what it was doing for me, stop working because I would hear the notification and assume, if I generally didn’t have a client, appointment or something important at this time of day, I would just assume it was something that I put on there for myself and I wouldn’t even look at it. Or if I looked at it, I wouldn’t register it.
And that’s what I meant when I said earlier about not being aware in a useful way. I looked at the thing, but I didn’t really process it. And so now I’m worse off than I was before. So my calendar is one part of the system.
The next part is a daily or weekly to-do list where I have a catchall place where the to-dos just go. It’s a Google doc. It’s not fancy, but that’s where I put the stuff that I can’t attend to right here, right now, but that I need to keep in the front of my mind and from there, those things get translated into a daily or weekly task.
Where can I start to plug this stuff in? Where can I mow my grass this week around the rain? Where can I send follow up emails to prospective clients? Where can I do this, that, or the other in the gaps in my week? And I don’t put ’em on the calendar, but I schedule ’em on a list by day of the week.
And then there is a weekly planner that lives on my refrigerator that is the high level, family view. So that’s the stuff that impacts my kid – when I’m gonna be home, when I’m not gonna be home, what night we’re gonna run errands together, what appointments does she have – what does she need to know?
And when I first started doing that, I started it as a system for her more so than for me, but it’s actually turned out to be quite a bit of support for me because there’s also a place on there to think about what we’re gonna have for dinner tomorrow. And there’s enough space that if there’s one thing that’s outside of the calendar that I absolutely wanna make sure that I attend to today or on this day – like Wednesday is the only day I can mow my grass this week, the day of, the intersection of time and good weather, I write it on there too so that it stands out for me in another way, even though it’s already on my weekly list.
So that becomes sort of the nutshell. This is the very high level sketch of the week, outside of the routine stuff of go to school and I work with clients all day, and those three things together are working reasonably well right now, but I’m also realizing that I’m at a moment in time in my life where I need to actually introduce a little more complexity.
Dusty and I were actually talking about that right before we started recording, and not because we were talking about it in relation to this topic. We were just talking about what my life looks like right now. And so I don’t wanna do it and I’m crabby about it, but I am realizing that there are more balls in the air than I can make sense of right now by using only the systems that I have in place. And so some of the work ahead for me is starting to figure out how to introduce more support in that realm, but in a way that’s gonna work for me. And Dusty isn’t that the rub really with our clients is there is no one solution for everyone. A bullet journal does not work for everyone.
Danny Donovan’s anti-planner, several of my clients love that planner, and I’m so glad it exists, but I already know it would not work for me based on what I’ve learned before.
And so the twofold challenge with DHD is, yes, we are forgetful. Alongside that, it can sometimes be really challenging to see what we actually need a system to do. What are we trying to get to that we don’t have right now? We tend to kind of work the problem from okay, here’s a system or structure that exists, let me replicate that and it should work. Right? And that’s just my experience with my clients. That is so rarely what happens, that a first crack at a system is the system. A first crack at a system is an opportunity to learn what does and does not work.
Just like when I tried time blocking on my calendar and recognized that, yes, while this does work for some people, this not only doesn’t work for me, it turns something that was already working into a failed system, and so I need to roll this one back and find a different way to capture those types of things.
[00:11:57] Dusty: I have a question about this, but what’s funny about Danny’s system is that it really is an anti-planner. So it’s actually not a system at all. It’s a toolbox of like ADHD hacks for when you’re feeling stuck. So it’s just broken into topics like overwhelm, frustration, avoidance, and like whatever you’re feeling.Like whenever you’re having a problem about anything, you’d go like, what am I feeling? Am I feeling overwhelmed? Am I feeling frustrated? And then you flip to that section and it’s just a bunch of ideas for how to get yourself out of that. You can just choose them at random. So I really find it to be more of a toolbox.
But the funniest thing is that the biggest feedback I hear about when people say it doesn’t work is they’ll buy it and then they don’t open it. Right? Like they procrastinate opening it, which is so funny. There needs to be a “hey, are you procrastinating opening this” place or something like that ’cause I find whenever people are like, it doesn’t work for me, it means they haven’t actually cracked it open yet to realize, oh, this is not a planner at all. So that’s funny, but if you guys have not checked that out, it is really kind of just a big repository of potential hacks divided up by how you feel.
The question I wanted to ask you, Ash, is when you have a new client or a client who’s struggling with forgetfulness, how do you coach them through that and help them? You know, I find it a very challenging situation that clients often find themselves in when they have an idea for something that could help them, but upon leaving the coaching call, they forget to take the first few steps. For example, say it involves setting an alarm or to give you another example, I have this client who has a co-occurring condition that also causes brain fog. And so he has a lot of really high forgetfulness, so he has this tool that I had never heard of before. It’s called Pavlok. Have you heard of it?
[00:13:46] Ash: I have not. [00:13:47] Dusty: It’s like a wristwatch that shocks you with small electric shocks. So it’s supposed to get your attention so you can use it to wake yourself up and get outta bed, or you can set it at a time so that it’s kind of giving you a physiological haptic feedback so that you’re more likely to notice.Sometimes an alarm on your phone or a post-it note, you’ll just swipe it away. So the idea is this is something a little stronger, more akin to somebody coming and tapping you on the shoulder and being like, hey man, hey man, you gotta stop this now.
So for this client, it is a great, great tool, right? He finds it really helpful. The problem is he always forgets to charge it or he loses the charger ’cause he moves it around. And so there’s this real frustration because here’s this tool that would work if only it would help him with his forgetfulness, but he is too forgetful to use it. So when you have clients like this, what are some things that you find help kickstart that cycle?
[00:14:41] Ash: It’s a good question, Dusty. I think first of all, to be a good coach, it’s on us to notice when a client is repeatedly forgetting parts or all of their intentions that come out of coaching. And in my coaching, I call that practice. So when they come back and they’re like, oh, I was just reviewing and seeing what the practice was, I kind of forgot about it.I’m noticing that and I’m probably suggesting that that should maybe just be our coaching topic, right? How can we bring the coaching more out into the world? Another, and it really depends on where the client is and I suppose I put my clients in three categories.
There’s the ones that are hyper aware of their intentions. These are clients for whom accountability is really, really a strong motivation. So just the fact that it’s happened in coaching is enough for them. And then there are the clients that are hypo aware, that’s who we’re talking about today.
The second the coaching session ends, they’re onto something else and they may or may not, despite best intentions, ever come back to or even recall in a useful way that there’s practice there. And then there are the vast majority of clients that fall somewhere into the middle of those two things.
So for a client that is struggling with forgetfulness, it kind of depends on where they are. Otherwise, this is a client that has no functional systems right now and that’s the place that they’re coming. Maybe we do need to spend an actual coaching session or two, starting with a basic entry point to better memory.
What’s that first system, right? I just described earlier, my very basic three component system. A very basic system that came from years of trying lots of different things and coming around to the fact that that’s what works for me. So just looking for an entry point. What’s something that we can try to start to build that muscle a little bit, to get some practice and to get curious about.
Next, now that we’ve actually tried a thing, now we can learn something more about what does or doesn’t work for you. Now, for my clients who might already have some systems in place that work or work some of the time, sometimes this can just be as simple as leaving enough time at the back end of a coaching session to discuss the how. Right? So here’s the practice – how and when and how will you remind yourself that this intention exists, and for those clients it might be that they take some time to schedule it.
I have a client that takes time to time block while we are still on the call together, so she makes time in her calendar for whatever the practice is. I have another client who has a really simple to-do list that is really important to keep uncluttered because it’s got a specific purpose.
But we found that particularly for practices that are in the realm of self-care, this isn’t a do or die. This isn’t, I have to do it, it’s, I want to do it. Phrasing it as an unattached question at the top of that list.
So, for example, is today a movement day? This client wanted to get more movement in their day, that was the goal of the coaching session that day. And where we came to was that really the challenge was they would get into their day and tell themselves the story that they didn’t have time, number one, and number two, trying to schedule it or making it an obligation also didn’t feel right or good. So we tried this middle ground way of just a prompt, a reminder, but it’s a prompt and a reminder that leaves my client at choice about whether they do have the time and energy for movement today, whether or not that’s going to be a helpful practice for them that day. And that has worked really, really well for that particular client.
So more than anything, it’s about some entry point. And the other thing I will definitely say, especially with newer clients, clients who haven’t gotten the rhythm of coaching yet, is keeping it small, pumping the brakes a little bit. Sort of noticing and naming for the client that, now we’re at a point where you’re just kind of piling on and we haven’t really coached about whether what you’re saying is gonna work for you or not. So why don’t we just start, I know this does, I know it doesn’t and write your tasks down in a dedicated notebook, but if you are a person with ADHD who struggles with routine, who struggles with memory, that’s not an easy thing to do.
There are a number of mechanisms even in a system that simple that could go wrong, right? If you can’t carry a notebook with you all the time or don’t want to, that could cause that mechanism to go wrong. If your pen runs out of ink and you can’t find another one that could cause that mechanism to go wrong, if you forget that it was your intention at all, that could cause that mechanism to go wrong. If you lose the notebook, right, there’s so many things that could cause that mechanism to not work for that particular client.
So let’s start at the very base level. I always say let’s start at the base level with a tool you already have, and I don’t care whether it’s a notebook or a paper-based system, or it’s digital and you’re using Google tasks or something that’s already built into your phone or some app that you’ve already tried before.
Let’s start really simple and let’s start with a tool that you already have because once we know something more about what does and does not work for you, we can modify the tool and in the meantime we’re building that practice muscle of when I think of a task, if I’m not going to attend to it right now, it has a place to go and it has a place to go that is reliable enough that I will eventually get back to it, and so I can mentally let go of it and trust that it is living in a place.
[00:20:35] Dusty: I think you hit the nail on the head there, because I think when people come to an ADHD coach, they’re very enthusiastic and they bring a very ADHD way of doing things – very all or nothing. They’re like ADHD coaching is gonna be the silver bullet I’ve always needed. And so they come with all the things that they’ve wanted to get done all this time and they don’t want to go slow. They don’t want to make incremental progress. Often, I will use a metaphor that I heard here on Translating ADHD with you and Cam, and I may have adapted it a little bit, but it was about facades versus buildings.There was this episode where you guys were talking about this idea of people with ADHD building facades. Let’s think about a facade, like for a movie set, you just throw some planks of wood up and it looks like a building from the front, right? It looks really good, like a building but there’s nothing behind and it’s not stable, it won’t stay forever.
And so comparatively, I’ll often discuss with people that when you are building a building, what’s the first thing you do? You build a foundation, right? And what’s the foundation? Have you ever walked by a construction site? It’s just a big hole in the ground. It’s not exciting, it’s not like woo woo, you know? It’s just a big hole. And if you’ve ever walked by a construction site, I live in Vancouver, so there’s a lot all the time for months and months and months, it doesn’t seem like anything’s happening. They lay the concrete, they put the iron thingies that go up (I can’t think of the words), but the thing is, when you spend a bunch of time laying that foundation and letting the concrete set and really build that foundation, well again, coming back to this construction metaphor, you’ll walk by that building one day, this happens to me all the time, and all of a sudden you’re like, oh my god, where did this building come from?
Once they get the foundation laid, the building goes up so fast and it lasts. It stays, right? So when we have to slow these clients down and we have to work with them on incremental progress and on making the coaching action smaller, I find it’s helpful to use that metaphor and help them understand that we’re not lowering the bar, we’re not lowering your expectation, we’re not putting the brakes on. We’re laying a foundation and that takes time. But once that foundation is laid, baby, that building’s gonna go up so fast.
[00:22:48] Ash: Yeah, Dusty that was a metaphor from a client of mine and one that I have continued using as well because it was so good. And one thing I will add to the concept of facades is, and why this client was describing facades in this coaching session was everything you said plus if nobody else walks around the back from the outside looking in, we can get really good as ADHD people of throwing a system together to get through this moment in time and to organize ourselves enough.But in that way, that’s out of urgency and very stressful. So we can get the thing done, we can get across the finish line, and we can sometimes get across the finish line having done great work, but if you walk around the side and you see that it’s just a facade, you see all the mess, the stress, the urgency, the toll that it takes on us and that thing that we’ve erected to get through this moment in time, this overwhelming series of tasks, whatever doesn’t carry forward, right? So the next time it comes around, we’re building a brand new facade.
I love that metaphor and I’m gonna double down and say, I think it’s really funny that you and I are using the same language in coaching sessions, and we’ve never talked about this before, because when I talk to a new client about what to expect in coaching, this is during the consultation phone call, I tell them that getting to a life that fits is like building a house, and the bulk of our time together is digging out and laying a really solid foundation.
You know, it is really rare that I see a client all the way through some huge, huge thing that gets them closer to a life that fits. More often than not, I’m spending six months to a year with them laying that foundation and that foundation is what enables them to then go on and continue pursuing that life that fits from there. And at times it can feel very slow. But, there comes this beautiful moment where the pieces start to come together. So the one little notebook to-do list becomes a more reliable list, suited more to that client, both in terms of how it happens, when it happens, and the format that it happens in. And then we build on it a little here and a little there.
Because that now exists, they’re being a little more consistent and then we add a little over here and a little over there, and all of a sudden things start to really click. All of a sudden, all of the things that were so hard when they first came to coaching aren’t so hard. And not necessarily because we’ve talked about or coached about every single one of them, but because our clients are learning how to think about how to think about ADHD, right? How to think about solving problems with ADHD.
So listeners, when it comes to forgetfulness, I think one of the most important things is to pick a very small thing and start there, right? If you want to set some intentions around what are the four tasks that you do first thing in the morning, start with a system that’s just for that. Don’t try and add anything to it. Don’t try to bring other tasks into it. Just find a reliable way to remind yourself to do those four things. And by the way, if the reminder part doesn’t work, you still aren’t able to do it well, that’s now a different challenge.
If you are aware in a useful way that you wanna meditate for 10 minutes this morning and you are still not able to get to meditation, we’re now into other ADHD challenges, right? Avoidance, procrastination and we’re now out of the realm of forgetfulness.
So keep your focus on remembering and finding a system that’s going to aid you in remembering. And then if you still run into stumbling blocks, that’s the opportunity to get curious about what else might be in the way. And then once that system is functioning well enough that it doesn’t feel so difficult to engage with, to maintain, and it feels like it’s contributing positively to your ability to remember, then look for the next thing.
Now that the to-do list thing feels in order, I’m still routinely missing events because stuff doesn’t make it on my calendar. So now maybe start to look at the calendar and set a small goal for yourself around the different experiences that you wanna have. And that’s a question, especially when it comes to forgetfulness that I like to ask my clients a lot, is what is the different experience that you’d like to have here? Because if you pick a really well-defined outcome, like my client who wanted to get movement three days a week, then it gets a lot easier to troubleshoot what’s not working along the way. Is it the system itself or is it that the system is reminding me, but there’s something else in the way of this particular action?
[00:28:00] Dusty: Yeah. I think this is kind of the thing that can be quite intimidating to people about ADHD coaching. I asked on Blue Sky the other day, if you don’t think that ADHD coaching is for you or you’re not into it, what is it that turns you off about it?And a number of people said, “well, I wouldn’t know. I don’t think it would help me because nothing has helped me.” Or, “I wouldn’t know how to make good use of it”. So if you are listening to this and you feel like you’re that person, just know a good ADHD coach will know that their first job is to help you figure out how to make use of coaching and to help you figure out how to know what you want out of coaching.
That is the first thing because as coaches, if you have a good coach, they’re gonna anticipate that you’re gonna struggle to make good use of the coaching and they’re gonna help bring your attention to that.
[00:28:53] Ash: Really well said, Dusty. And the final thing I will add to that is I have definitely noticed an interesting thing that happened in my coaching practice once this podcast had been around long enough to have a body of episodes. So within the first year, those clients who regularly listen to this podcast, and this is still true today, come to coaching with that readiness.Because if you listen to half or even a quarter of the almost 300 or over 300 episodes, I don’t know what number we’re at, but it was approaching 300 mark the last time I checked, if you’ve listened to even a quarter of that you’ve listened to two coaches talk about what ADHD coaching is and isn’t because every time we’re tackling a topic, we are tackling it through the lens of coaching, and that was always the goal of this podcast.
So, for those of you that might be brand new listeners or haven’t spent a lot of time here, one way you can come ready to make good use of ADHD coaching is spend some time with this podcast, but that’s not the only way. I still get clients all the time who have listened to a handful of episodes and knew that they wanted to work with me as a coach, but have never listened to the podcast again, because support looks different for everyone.
But for those of you that are already listening, this is one way, this is one big way that you can make good use of a coach or continue to use this podcast as your coach, right?
And not in that way where you try to tackle the topic we’re on every week, but in that way where if a particular topic resonates with you, stay on that for a while. Stay on that for a while and see if you can’t implement your own version of getting curious, finding out some new information about this old dilemma, putting it into practice, and then coming back and getting the learning, whether or not the practice went well.
[00:30:46] Dusty: Yeah, bad news is probably gonna take you more than a week to master any concept related to ADHD. I’m sorry. [00:30:52] Ash: Yep. Unfortunately, that is the truth. If your ADHD wants an answer now, this is a process that happens over time and again, back to the foundation metaphor, that’s why that’s such a strong metaphor. The foundation is the most important part of the structure. It also absolutely takes the longest to do, and it looks like there is almost no progress happening in that process until all of a sudden there is progress.Well, Dusty, we are out of time for today. And listeners, by the way, cut us a little slack on sound quality today. Dusty and I, even though we are an entire country apart, have both managed to have the same cold with the same impacts on our voice boxes. So we were struggling through a little bit today, but we did wanna get an episode out to you. So, until next week, I am Ash and this is Translating ADHD. Thanks for listening.
