🧠 Tools for brains that work differently

I have a graveyard of half-used journals. Moleskines with three pages filled. A Leuchtturm with one spectacular brain dump dated March 4th and then nothing until a grocery list in July. A bullet journal where I spent four hours designing a habit tracker I never once tracked a habit in. Sound familiar? Yeah. Welcome to ADHD journaling. Here’s the thing though — journaling actually works for ADHD brains. Not the “dear diary” kind. Not the aesthetic spreads you see on Instagram. I’m talking about the raw, unfiltered, get-the-chaos-out-of-your-skull kind. The kind where you write “I’m angry and I don’t know why and also I need cat food” and somehow feel 40% less insane afterward. ...

Let me paint you a picture. It’s 2 PM. You’ve been sitting at your desk for three hours. You’ve read the same Slack message four times. Your leg is bouncing so hard it’s registering on seismographs in neighboring countries. Your brain has checked out and is currently browsing a mental catalog of every embarrassing thing you said in 2019. Sound familiar? Yeah. Welcome to ADHD desk life. Here’s the thing nobody told us growing up: the fidgeting isn’t the problem. The sitting still is the problem. Your ADHD brain is literally begging for sensory input, and you’re trapping it in a chair like some kind of focus jail. ...

My six-year-old was singing “Let It Go” for the 400th time while I was trying to close a deal on a call. That’s when I decided to get serious about noise cancelling headphones. If you have ADHD, you already know: one random sound can derail an entire work session. The neighbor’s dog. A coworker’s keyboard. Your own kid asking for a snack every nine minutes. Finding the best noise cancelling headphones for ADHD isn’t about audiophile specs. It’s about protecting your focus like it’s a rare and endangered species. Because it is. ...

I’ve abandoned more to-do list apps than most people have ever downloaded. Forty-three, at last count. That’s not a flex. That’s ADHD. Here’s what I’ve learned after years of trying every shiny new productivity app, only to forget it exists three days later: most to-do list apps are built for neurotypical brains. They assume you can look at a list of 47 tasks and just… pick one. They assume you know how long things take. They assume you won’t spend 90 minutes organizing your task system instead of doing a single task on it. ...

I’ve bought eleven digital planners in the last three years. Most of them lasted about a week before joining the digital doom pile on my iPad’s home screen. That graveyard of abandoned apps? Peak ADHD. But a few actually stuck. And the difference between a planner that works for my ADHD brain and one that doesn’t comes down to very specific things. Low friction to open. Visual enough to hold my attention. Forgiving enough that skipping a day doesn’t make the whole system collapse. ...

I stared at “clean the house” on my to-do list for three hours last Tuesday. Then I found Goblin Tools [AFFILIATE LINK] and it broke that task into 12 steps before I could talk myself out of starting. That’s basically the whole pitch. A collection of tiny, free, AI-powered tools built specifically for neurodivergent brains. No account required. No subscription wall. Just open the site and use it. But does it actually help with ADHD? I spent two weeks testing every single tool. Here’s what happened. ...

I’ve tried both. Multiple times. With the enthusiasm of someone who just discovered a new system that’s definitely going to fix everything. Spoiler: neither one fixed everything. But one of them stuck, and the other kept becoming a beautiful graveyard of abandoned dashboards. Here’s the todoist vs notion adhd showdown you actually need. The Quick Verdict If you need to get things done today, pick Todoist. If you need to build a second brain and have the hyperfocus hours to set it up, pick Notion. ...

I’ve downloaded probably 200 productivity apps since my ADHD diagnosis three years ago. Most of them lasted about 48 hours on my phone before I forgot they existed. A few stuck. These are those few, plus some newer ones that genuinely surprised me. This isn’t a list where I pretend every app is amazing. Some of these are brilliant for certain ADHD brains and completely wrong for others. I’ll tell you which is which. ...

Most planners are designed for people who already have their life together. The ones who wake up at 5 AM, journal for 20 minutes, and actually use their color-coded system past January 14th. That’s not me. And if you’re here searching for the best planner for ADHD, it’s probably not you either. I spent the last several months testing 10 different planning systems. Physical notebooks, apps, and hybrid setups. All tested through the lens of an ADHD brain. Executive function challenges, time blindness, the dopamine-seeking chaos of hyperfocus followed by “wait, what was I doing?” ...