← Hacking Your ADHD
Hacking Your ADHD
How to Make your Smart Phone ADHD Friendly (Part 2 rebroadcast)
00:14:54
This is the second part of the series on how to better manage your smartphone with your ADHD - you don't have to have listened to part 1 to listen to this episode, but if you like this episode I'd definitely recommend going back and listening to last...
Loading summary
Transcript5 lines
- [00:00]
A
Back to school is better with Family freedom from T Mobile, we'll pay off four phones up to $3200 and give you four free phones, all on America's largest 5G network. Visit your local T Mobile location or learn more@t mobile.com familyfreedom. Up to $800 per line via virtual prepaid card typically takes 15 days. Free phones via 24 monthly bill credits with finance agreement eg Apple iPhone 16128 gigabyte 820099 eligible trade in eg iPhone 11 Pro for well qualified credits end and balance due if you pay off earlier. Cancel Contact T Mobile Ever notice how.
- [00:31]
B
Ads always pop up at the worst moments when the killer's identity is about to be revealed during that perfect meditation flow on Amazon Music, we believe in keeping you in the moment. That's why we've got millions of ad free podcast episodes so you can stay completely immersed in every story, every reveal, every breath. Download the Amazon Music app and start listening to your favorite podcasts Ad free included with Product Time.
- [01:07]
A
Welcome to Hacking your adhd. I'm your host William Curb and I have adhd. On this podcast, I dig into the tools, tactics and best practices to help you work with your ADHD brain. This is the second part in the series on how to better manage your smartphone with your adhd. You don't have to listen to part one to listen to this episode, but if you like this episode, I definitely recommend going back and listening to last week's episode as well. In that episode, we covered how we can limit the distractions that our smartphones can present, and also how to make it easier on our ADHD brains when we're setting up our phone. This week, we're going in a bit of a different direction. While smartphones can be easily distracting and endlessly entertaining, they also provide us with some great tools to help us manage our adhd. In this episode, I'm going to be discussing a number of the apps I use to help me navigate my day. Since I use an iPhone, that means most of the apps apps I specifically discuss are going to be iPhone apps. However, I do try and provide alternatives for Android. Today we're going to be exploring all the ways I use my phone to create reminders, take notes, and some tricks that make my phone even easier to use. If you'd like to follow along on the Show Notes page, you can find that@hackingyouradhd.com ADHDPhone too. Keep listening to find out more ways you can get the most out of your adhd we're going to get started by talking about reminders. A few weeks ago, I got a ping on my phone reminding me to take out our trash bins so that they could be picked up at the curb the next morning. As I was wheeling out the bin, I thought about how funny it was that I rarely miss a trash day, but that's only because I have so many reminders on my phone and calendar. If I didn't have those reminders, I'm sure that nearly every Thursday morning I'd hear the garbage truck rolling down the street and have to rush out the door in my bathrobe to get the bin out to the curb before they passed. While my neurotypical neighbors might miss a day now and then, they don't need to have all these systems in place to make sure that they don't miss it every week. I need these systems, and these systems are made possible because of my phone. In my episode about habits and routines, I was talking about the advantages of creating automated systems so that you could reduce the friction in doing your routines. And that's what I'm doing with these reminders. They are creating cues for me to do things that I'd never remember to do on my own. Sometimes we aren't going to have natural cues to start our routines, and that's where reminders can really shine on my phone. I've got two primary reminder apps that I use for different kinds of things, and also I have a separate app for reminding me to drink water. So three reminder apps. My primary app for reminders is called Alarmed, and it is, hands down the best reminders app I have ever used. Unfortunately, it's only available for iOS. I use alarmed for my daily and weekly repeating tasks. What makes Alarmed so powerful is all of its customization, but my favorite feature by far is Nagme, which does precisely that. It nags me to turn off the reminder. For example, I take extended release meds in the morning and a booster in the afternoon. Without a reminder, I tend to forget to take the booster. And I know there's a joke in there somewhere, but that's the truth of it. Before I had Alarmed, sometimes I'd see the reminders I had made to take my pill. Sometimes I'd see it and forget to take it, and sometimes I wouldn't see the reminder at all until it was too late in the afternoon. Now with Alarmed, it pings me once and then it keeps on pinging me every five minutes for an hour until I've marked it done. This feature has been a lifesaver for me. I love that I only have to make one alarm and still get multiple notifications about it because sometimes I'm not able to take my medication when it first pings me. Like if I'm driving to my office and I don't have my meds with me with just one ping, I'd likely have forgotten I was supposed to take my meds by the time I got to my office. But with my alarm nagging me, I get that second or third or seventh reminder I need. And I know that you are thinking man that sounds super annoying. And yeah it really is. But that's the point. And also I can snooze that alarm so it's not going to keep pinging me forever. Alarmed also really pairs well with my Apple watch. I get a ping and I glance at my watch and I can see that I need to take my meds. I can then either mark the reminder done from there or snooze it. I use a bunch of these reminders on alarmed. I have daily ones for things like packing snacks for my kids before I leave for work because man are they whiny when I pick them up and have forgotten the snacks. And also weekly ones like making sure I take out my trash. Anything that I reliably know that is going to be repeating and that I'm going to need a cue for. It can take a bit to set up a good reminder on alarmed. So when I'm making quick reminders I typically use the built in reminder app on iOS called Reminders. I mainly use this baked in app because it integrates so well with Siri. Typically I'll use it for things that I just thought of and know I'll need a reminder for like hey Siri, remind me in one hour to change my laundry. I also love using it for location based reminders with things like hey Siri, remind me to text my trainer when I get into work. Sometimes when I need a more robust reminder but I don't have time to set one up, I'll create reminders like hey Siri, remind me to create a reminder about my meeting with Eric. But you know what, I messed up with that reminder there because it doesn't have a cue. If I actually wanted that reminder to be effective, I need to add something time or location based like remind me this evening or remind me when I get home. Without that location or time cue, it's really easy to let those reminders fall into a black hole that I'll never look at it's also important to remember that in part one of this series we talked about something called alarm fatigue. This is something that you are going to run up against if you put too many alarms on your phone. We can avoid alarm fatigue as long as we follow a few rules. First, we don't want too many reminders on our phones. Yes, we want to remember everything, but if you have a new reminder going off every 10 minutes, you're just going to start ignoring all of them. Make sure you are only adding your most important reminders. Perhaps you just need one reminder to check your schedule a couple times a day. Next, make sure you vary the sounds that your reminders are making. Alarmed has an excellent library of noises you can use, so every alarm can have a unique sound. While I'll probably never use the foghorn or anything, it's nice to have options. Finally, make sure you are removing alarms from your phone that are no longer serving you I have a reminder on my phone to check my thermostat in the early evening. If it got moved up a couple of degrees during the day, I'm going to end up way too hot while sleeping. But once we get into the summer months, that really isn't a problem anymore. That means I don't need to have the alarm on my phone, and with alarmed I can just pause the reminder indefinitely. The point here is to remove alarms that are adding to the noise but aren't creating value. It's easy to just leave them on because we don't want the hassle of removing them, but those distractions add up, so get rid of unneeded reminders. What I failed to mention earlier is that I also have the ultimate reminder app on my phone, which is my calendar. Because when you break it down, that's really what a calendar is all about, reminding you of your past commitments and intentions. There are a lot of calendar apps out there, and I use Google Calendars. If you've got a calendar app you are already using, I'd suggest sticking with it unless you've got a really good reason to switch to something new. And just wanting to try something new isn't really a great reason, but I also totally get it. I'm probably going to do an entire episode on calendars at some point, but for now let me just say that if you aren't already using a calendar, really look into starting Having my calendar available on my phone is a godsend. One of the most significant advantages of having a digital calendar for me is that my wife can easily share her calendar with me With a joint calendar, we can easily schedule things for ourselves and for our kids without too much worry of creating a conflict. And as I was saying, calendars are great for reminders. Most digital calendars allow you to set them up to send you notifications of upcoming events. Some things I'm not going to need reminders about, while others I love to have that heads up. In Google Calendar you have the option of either getting an email or notification. I typically use notifications and they are fantastic as long as you take the time to set it up. I've changed my default notification to let me know about events 30 minutes before they start. That gives me a good buffer so I can start closing down what I'm doing and get ready for the transition into the next thing. And there are a lot of options that you can set up here. For example, I'm getting my car serviced next week, so I've got my calendar set up to not only ping me an hour before, but also the evening before so that I can pack something to entertain me while I wait around in those uncomfortable seats. And for things like travel, I can have my calendar email me all the information I'm going to need on my trip. All you need to do is include it in your calendar's notes section. The Notes section is excellent for really taking advantage of your calendar. If I've got something like a doctor's appointment, I'll include the location of the appointment and the name of who I'm supposed to be seeing. I've definitely shown up for appointments, had them ask who I was seeing, and then just had to stare at them because, you know, doctor what's his face. Anyways, using the Notes feature on your calendar to include all the relevant details really levels up your calendar because you don't get stuck with an event that you created six months ago but can't remember the context of. I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about my note taking apps. I've got two primary apps that I use for notes. First, I've got Evernote. Since I use Evernote for all of my writing, it's kind of nice to always have with me. However, I don't actually use Evernote on my phone all that much. Recently I've switched to using an app called Drafts, which is available for both iOS and Android. What makes Drafts incredible is that it opens up a blank page every time I open it. This feature alone sold me on the app because I can't tell you how many times I've had an idea that I wanted to write down only to lose my train of thought in the process of opening up an app and then creating a new note. With drafts, I just pop it open and I can start writing. It's not as great if I'm trying to work on something longer, although I did write nearly the entire reviewing your year episode in drafts while I was on a plane. I love having the space to write down my ideas, but the biggest pitfall of any note taking system is that it's easy to forget that you wrote down anything in the first place. Sometimes I'd hear something in a podcast that I wanted to check out later, so I jot a quick note and then it'd disappear into a vortex of me never looking at my notes. The good news is that there's an easy fix for this from earlier in the episode. In fact, we've got a couple of options because all we need to do here is create a reminder to go through what you've written. Or you can one up yourself and create a repeating event on your calendar for when you want to check your notes. I don't have a specific event for reading over what I've written anymore because I just include it in my weekly review on Fridays. Now I try not to write time sensitive information in drafts, so checking it once a week is fine. Anything that is time sensitive needs an actual reminder or a calendar event. One of the most fun things I've learned about recently is the ability to create shortcuts on your phone that do several tasks in a row. For example, I have a shortcut on my phone that when I hit it, opens up my gps, finds the ETA for me to get home, and then plugs that info into a message to my wife. All I have to do is hit a button and I can quickly let my wife know when I'm about to be home. Right now I'm using the Baked in shortcuts app for iOS, but you can also use an app called IFTTT, which stands for if this, then that, and it works for both iOS and Android. IFTTT also has some great automation features that you can put on your computer. The basic idea here is that you can cut out some of the steps in your repeated processes. My favorite part is that you can create widgets to access these shortcuts quickly on iOS. To access your widgets, simply swipe left from your home screen to access the Today view and then if you scroll down to the bottom of that screen, you can customize what is on that page. The Today view is a great way to organize the information you want easy access to on your phone. My today view starts with the weather, then my shortcut widgets followed by my calendar and my activity score for the day. I've also got widgets for my screen time and GPS below that. But back to shortcuts. There are a lot of great quick shortcuts that you can create that I'd recommend checking out. Here are a couple examples of shortcuts that you could use. 1. To tell you when you need to leave work so that you're not late, email your schedule to yourself. Let people know how late you're going to be running, send a time delayed text, get directions to the next thing on your calendar or timers for things you regularly need to time like say the laundry or for your coffee to brew. Really, the point of any of these widgets is to take a few of the steps out of things that you repeatedly do. When I can just push a button and 90% of what I need to do is taken care of for me, it makes it that much easier to complete the task without getting distracted along the way. It's great that when I'm heading home I can just push a button and it creates a text to let my wife know about when I'm going to be home. Or hit another one and it'll set my phone to do not disturb for when I'm at the meeting and then turn off do not disturb when the meeting ends. Thanks for sticking with me all the way to the end. I'd like to remind everyone that this was a two part episode and if you haven't listened to the first episode yet, you can go check that out on your podcast player or find it at hackingyouradhd.com ADHDPhone I hope you got a lot out of today's episode and if if you did, I'd really appreciate it if you'd leave a rating and review on your podcast player. Before you go though, let's do a quick rundown of Today's top tips. 1. Make use of a reminder app on your phone. Make sure to use lots of different sounds and to create reoccurring reminders for things you need to be reminded of frequently. 2. Use your calendar as a reminder app as well for all important events. Make sure you have reminders well in advance so that you can plan for them ahead of time. 3. Get a good note taking app for your phone and create a reminder to also look at the notes that you take throughout the week. 4. Take advantage of shortcuts on your phone so that you can do complicated tasks without getting distracted. And that's it for this episode. Thanks for listening. I mentioned a ton of my favorite apps in this episode. If you'd like links to all those or to a transcript of the show, you can go check out hackingyouradhd.com ADHDPhone followed by the number two. If you've got feedback for me, I'd like to hear it. I read everything I get and I'm actually getting better at responding. So if you've written in, thank you. You can reach me on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter hackingyouradhd, or you can connect with me over@hackingyouradhd.com contact. It's been a pleasure. And until next time, stay curious.
- [15:56]
B
This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. You chose to hit play on this podcast today. Smart Choice make another smart choice with Auto Quote Explorer to compare rates from multiple car insurance companies all at once. Try it@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates not available in all states or situations. Prices vary based on how you buy.
- [16:16]
C
Hey, this is Dan Harris, host of the 10% Happier podcast. I'm here to tell you about a new series we're running this September on 10% happier. The goal is to help you do your life better. The series is called Reset. It's all about hitting the reset button in many of the most crucial areas of your life. Each week we'll tackle a topic like how to reset your nervous system, how to reset your relationships, how to reset your career. We're going to bring on top notch scientists and world class meditation teachers to give you deep insights and actionable advice. It's all delivered with our trademark blend of skepticism, humor, credibility and practicality. 10% have here is self help for smart people. Come join the party.