ADHD: A Place for Everything & Everything in its Place

Louise often tells me that I don’t have a filing system; instead, I have a “piling system.”

Image by Tung Lam from Pixabay

Louise often tells me that I don’t have a filing system; instead, I have a “piling system.” For me, if I can’t see something it doesn’t exist. So I tend to have piles of stuff all over my office, bedroom, and my side of the closet. She’s finally made peace with it, because it works for me, and here are a few stories about other Hunters who figured out how to deal with the disorganization that seems to be a hallmark of ADHD:

■ This Hunter survival strategy was first put forth by Ben Franklin, but it was a common theme I read in stories sent to me by ADHD adults.

Psychiatrist Stephen Bluestein told me how his mother had taught him, as a child, to always have a specific place in his clothes and on his dresser at home for his money, keys, wallet, and so forth.

“It was one of the most useful life-skills she taught me,” he commented, noting that he rarely loses such things as an adult, even though he knows he’s a Hunter.

Similarly, Dave deBronkart frequently travels around the country giving speeches and doing consulting work on one of his three expert topics: ADHD, computer programming, and medicine.

“Whenever I enter the hotel room,” he says, “I clear the top of the TV. That’s the place where everything from my pockets goes, and that’s the place from which, when I leave the room, I collect it all back. I’ve created the habit of always checking the top of the TV whenever I leave the room, and it’s been years since I forgot or lost my keys, wallet, money, or the other things that I used to leave behind so often before I started doing this.”

Other people wrote me about the importance of having a small hook in the kitchen or by the front door where they always hung their car keys, or a special place for their wallet or shopping list. The moral: “A place for everything, and everything in its place” is a great motto for ADHD folks to adopt.

■ Put important things nearby

Bill in Pennsylvania writes:

Proximity is important to Hunters, which is one reason our desks are often cluttered with paper. All that important stuff needs to be kept nearby, lest it be forgotten!

However this principle can be taken one step further to office and home filing systems.

Following the alphabetical systems of organization I’d learned in school, I’d always put the files in my desk file-drawer and the ones in the filing cabinet on the other side of the office into alphabetical, or subject-alphabetical order.

While this was technically organized, I found that I was often not immediately filing things because it would involve having to walk over to the filing cabinet, and there were other things still on my desk which needed to be done immediately.

My “to file” pile ended up huge, and sometimes it was months before I got around to it.

That, in and of itself, wasn’t so much the problem as was the fact that when I needed something quickly, if often wasn’t in the right file— because I hadn’t gotten around to filing it.

So I re-arranged my desk and filing cabinet. My desk drawer files now only contain the things that I frequently have to dig out or use. My filing cabinet files are more archival: things I might need months or years from now, or should keep for the IRS or whatever.

I still have a big “to file” pile on my desk, but now there’s nothing in that pile that would be among the things I will have to quickly reference in the near future. Those papers get put directly into the desk drawer file, because it’s as close and convenient as my “to file” pile.

After I figured this out at the office, I decided to try it at home, and rearranged my closet and dresser drawers along the same lines. The difference was amazing! Hopefully sometime this coming summer I’ll get to the garage...