How to Make your Smart Phone ADHD Friendly (Part 2)

Jan 27

Jan 27 How to Make your Smart Phone ADHD Friendly (Part 2)

Let's get started by talking about reminders.

A few weeks ago I got a ping on my phone reminding me to take our trash bins out to the curb for pick up the next morning. As I was wheeling the bin out, I thought about how funny it was that I rarely miss a trash day, but that's only because I have reminders in 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 coming 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 my systems are made possible because of my phone.

A few weeks ago, in my episode about Habits and Routines, I was talking about the advantages of creating automated systems so that we could reduce the friction in doing our routines - and that's what I'm doing with these reminders. They are creating cues for me to do things 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 that reminds me to drink water, so three reminder apps).

I primarily use an app called Alarmed for reminders, and it is hands down the best reminder app I've ever used. Unfortunately, it is only available for iPhone, but it looks like an app called Remind has similar features and is available for Android.

I use Alarmed for my daily and weekly repeating tasks. What makes Alarmed so powerful is all of its customizations, but my favorite feature by far is Nag Me, which does precisely that; it nags me to turn off the reminder. For example, I take an extended-release med in the morning and a booster in the afternoon. Without a reminder, I tend to forget to take the booster (there's a joke in there, but that's the truth of it). This means I need a reminder. Before I had Alarmed, sometimes I'd see the reminders I made and take my pill, sometimes I'd see it and forget to take it, and sometimes I wouldn't see the reminder until it was too late in the afternoon to take it. Now with Alarmed, it pings me once, and then it keeps on pinging me every 5 minutes for an hour until I've marked it done.

This feature has been a live saver 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 don't have my meds with me. With just one ping, I'd likely have forgotten that I was supposed to take my meds by the time I got into my office, but with my alarm nagging me, I get that 2nd or 3rd... or 7th reminder I need. And I know that you are thinking, that sounds super annoying, oh, yeah, it really is - but that's the point. I can also snooze the alarms so that they won't ping me again for a set amount of time.

Alarmed also really pairs well with my Apple Watch - I get a ping and glance at my watch, and I can see that I need to take my meds. I can then either mark the reminder done from their or snooze the alarm, it's great.

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 (cause man are they whiny when I pick them up and have forgotten the snacks) and also weekly ones like making sure I take my trash out. Anything that I reliably know that is going to be repeating and that I 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 robust reminder but 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 because it doesn't have a cue. If I actually wanted that reminder to be effective, I'd 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.

In Part 1 of this series, we talked about alarm fatigue. This is something 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 just don't want too many reminders on our phone - yes, we want to remember everything, but if you have a new reminder going off every 10 minutes, you're going to start to ignore them all. 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 fog horn for anything, it's nice to have options.

And finally, make sure that 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 too hot while sleeping. Once we move into the summer months, that really isn't a problem anymore. That means I don't need to have that alarm on my phone, and with Alarmed, I can just pause the reminder indefinitely - but 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 reminders 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, I use Google Calendars. If you've got a calendar app, you are already using, I'd suggest sticking with unless you've really got a good reason you need to switch to something new (and just wanting to try something new isn't really a great reason - but also I totally get it).

I'll probably do an entire episode on calendars at some point, but for now, let me just say that if you aren't using a calendar, you really should be.

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 our kids without too much worry of creating a conflict.

As I was saying, calendars are great for reminders. Most digital calendars allow you to set them to send you notifications of upcoming events. Some things I don't need reminders about while others I like to have a bit of a heads up. In Google Calendar, you have the option of getting either an email or a 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 my next thing. But you have 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 the uncomfortable seating. And for things like travel, I can have my calendar email me all the information I'm going to need while I'm on my trip - all you need to do is include it in your calendar's note section.

The note section is excellent for really taking advantage of your calendar. If I've got to 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 an appointment, had them ask who I was seeing, and then just had to stare at them because I had no idea - you know, Dr. What's His Face...

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 also 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 it with me; however, I don't actually use Evernote on my phone very much.

Recently, I've switched to using an app called Drafts - which is available for both iOS and Android. What makes Drafts incredible it opens to 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 creating a new note. With Drafts, I just pop it open, and I can start writing. It's not great if I'm trying to work on something longer - although I did write nearly the entire Reviewing Your Year (LINK) 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 easy to forget that you ever wrote them down in the first place. Sometimes I'd hear something in a podcast that I wanted to check out later, so I'd 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 down. Or you can one-up yourself and create an 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 that in my weekly reviews on Fridays now. I try not to write down time-sensitive information in Drafts, so checking it once a week is fine - anything that is time-sensitive needs to get an actual reminder or 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 into a message to my wife. All I have to do is hit a button, and I can quickly let my wife know about when I'll 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 automations that you can put on your computer.

The basic idea here is that you can cut out some of the steps in some of your processes. My favorite part is that I can create widgets to access these shortcuts quickly. On iOS to access your widgets simple simply swipe left from your home screen to access the Today View, and then if you scroll 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 my GPS below that.

But back to shortcuts, there are a lot of great things that you can create quick shortcuts for that I'd recommend checking out. Here are a couple of examples of shortcuts that you could create:

One to tell you when you need to leave for work, so you're not late
Email yourself your schedule
Let people know how late you are going to be running
Send a time-delayed texts
Get directions to the next thing on your calendar
Or set timers for things need to time - like say for the laundry or your coffee to brew

Really the point of any of these widgets to take a few 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 that task without getting distracted along the way. It's great that when I'm heading home I can just push one button and it creates a text to let my wife know about when I'm going to be home or that I can set my phone to Do Not Disturb for when I'm at a meeting, and it'll just turn Do Not Disturb back off at the end of the meeting.

This Episode’s Top Tips

Make use of reminder apps on your phone - make sure to use lots of different sounds and to create recurring reminders for things that you need to be reminded of frequently.
Use your calendar as a reminder app as well - for important events make sure to have reminders well in advance so that you can plan for them ahead of time.
Get a good note taking app for your phone and create a reminder to also look at the notes that you take throughout the day or week.
Take advantage of shortcuts on your phone so that you can do complicated tasks without getting distracted.