Taking notes with ADHD
Any system you have to maintain will be abandoned by week three. Capture in one place, in whatever state, and sort later or never. A messy note you actually wrote beats a beautiful system you stopped using on the ninth of the month.
Why the good systems fail
Tags, folders and color codes are a second job, and it is the job that gets dropped first when the week gets hard.
The system also becomes a procrastination target: reorganising it feels productive and produces nothing.
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One inbox, no decisions
One note, one app, always the same one. Anything that requires choosing where something goes is a decision you will avoid making at the moment of capture.
The whole value is in the writing-down. Retrieval matters far less than people think, because most captured things only need to exist for a day.
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Four lines is a meeting note
Decided, owed by me, owed to me, unclear.
That is enough to act on and short enough to write while still listening. Anything longer competes with the meeting.
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Say it instead of writing it
Dictation and voice memos capture far faster than typing, and speed is the whole point at the moment something is said.
Especially useful for names and for anything you are catching as you walk away.
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Review once, weekly, briefly
Fifteen minutes, once a week, to pull anything owed into your actual task list. Not to tidy, not to re-file.
If you skip it, the capture still worked. That is the test of a system that fits: it fails gracefully.
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Rehearse it before you walk in.
Haveo builds your intro, lets you practice out loud with an AI coach, and keeps your notes one tap away in the room. Free on iPhone and iPad.
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