Claire Keane
★
if i look back, i am lost
Fai_Ryy
occasionally subtle
sheepfilms
hello vonnie
JVL
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NASA
shark vs the universe
$LAYYYTER
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
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KIROKAZE
almost home
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d e v o n
noise dept.
Noah Kahan
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@adhdexecutives
The fastest way to accomplish The Project is to cease being afraid of The Project. The Project cannot maim you. The Project cannot kill you. The Project is more afraid of you than you are of it. It is okay if The Project turns out differently from how it was in your head, and it is okay if it has flaws. You are capable of engaging with The Project.
who’s gonna tell tumblr that executive dysfunction is more than Not Doing Things?
okay
these are the executive functions. impairment of these functions is executive dysfunction
Oh.
OH
Girl, help. None of my executives are functioning
That’s actually really helpful though, because “not doing things” is vague and unactionable, while once you break it down you can figure out which ones you struggle with (all of them?) and create a list of strategies for each function, like so:
Activation:
- write a list
- count down from 10
- bribe yourself
- make the task nice (make senses happy)
- think about doing it for your future self
- identify what needs you have that haven’t been met
- identify any barriers and create a plan to deal with those
- identify any scary or overwhelming bits and create a plan to deal with those
- mental check in
- did you get enough sleep, food (fat, protein, fiber, vegetables?), physical activity (pre-work), and a good level of social interaction?
- identify the reason why doing the task matters to you
- set a timer for a short amount of time and promise yourself you can stop after that
Focus:
- address sensory needs (are your clothes comfy? Would it help to play music?)
- make a brain dump
- make a quiet corner
- body double
- set a timer for work period and break period
- did you get enough sleep, food (fat, protein, fiber, vegetables?), physical activity (pre-work), and a good level of social interaction?
Effort:
- did you get enough sleep, food (fat, protein, fiber, vegetables?), physical activity (pre-work), and a good level of social interaction?
- keep your why in mind
- think how much future-you is going to appreciate that this task is done
- caffeine and other safe and legal for you stimulants
- celebrate progress
- bribe yourself
Emotion:
- positive self-talk and reframing
- did you get enough sleep, food (fat, protein, fiber, vegetables?), physical activity (pre-work), and a good level of social interaction?
- do things that are nice for your senses- warm beverages, crunchy snacks, spike ball for feet, elastic band for legs, comfy clothes, music that makes you happy, etc
- access your reaction and proportionality, as well as alternate explanations for people’s (including your own) behaviors
- and with caution and intentionality, put it in a box to deal with later
Memory:
- make a list
- set alarms
- put in calendar with alerts
- write it down and stick it on your phone
- take a picture and send it to yourself with written explanation
- ask people to remind you
- respond to people quickly so the ball is in their court
- say it to yourself over and over until you’ve done it or written it down
- assign a spot for important things (like keys) and practice putting them there. Like, LARP it.
- did you get enough sleep, food (fat, protein, fiber, vegetables?), physical activity (pre-work), and a good level of social interaction?
- make your own chore list
- write out routine and put it where you’ll need it
Action:
- set timers for breaks, assess how it’s going mentally, emotionally, and physically.
- celebrate progress and action internally and/or externally
- did you get enough sleep, food (fat, protein, fiber, vegetables?), physical activity (pre-work), and a good level of social interaction?
- check to-do list/road map
- practice monitoring, checking, and/or recognizing internal states, like ‘hunger’, 'itchy’, 'back is hurting’, 'overstimulated’ and 'bored/understimulated’ (and make plans for each)
- use (pleasant) alarms to guide you through your day, for example “get out of bed”, “make and eat breakfast”, “walk dogs”, “You need to leave in 5 minutes” etc.
Also if people have more specific strategies, coping mechanisms, techniques, etc, I’d love to see them!
(me ever since I was 12) okay I actually need to get it together now
ok. enough suffering now. i am seeking out delight
they hate me because the years of memory loss has purified my mind
What I also found was what you find on all social media. A false reality being passed off as truth. Outrage that would register as minuscule on a worldwide scale of calamity, but was being given the weight of something much more important. Resentment, self importance, complaining, negativity, more complaining, more negativity. Ultimately, Substack fell into the category that every other social media eventually falls into, something I call The Other World.
The Other World is not a world that I live in. It is a world were the social lives of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk ruin someone’s weekend and determine levels of happiness. It’s a world were no one is reading and everyone is using AI. In The Other World, people hate their neighbors, there is no hope for anyone under the age of 35, everyone hates their job, no one is happy, political beliefs are less beliefs and more of a moral code, people don’t work hard, and life as we know it is over. Children are doomed to their screens, parents are worthless, America is failing, and the only sane thing to do is to talk circles around it all. Inhabitants of The Other World post first and think later, and they are so, so angry. They feel contempt strongly and are victims always. Victims of what? Any and everything.
I really am only interested in reality. In reality, I dropped off cookies at my neighbors last night as a thank you for helping me carry my new bedside tables inside. In reality, I stopped at the park while on my walk to throw a touchdown to the group of little kids playing in a pick up game. I played cards at the bar with my friends and we got so many people asking to join we took over the whole back patio. I cried in a little venue with 100 other people during a concert two weeks ago and it felt really magical. Somebody dropped their coffee in a cafe yesterday, and me and five other people jumped up to help them.
Strangers are actually wonderful people if you talk to them. Small talk isn’t annoying, it’s planting the seeds of community, and I’ll let you in on a little secret— if you can stop thinking about yourself for 10 minutes and become curious about others, it is unbelievably fulfilling to talk to people. Life is full of so much love. There is happiness and joy and passion and there is also sadness, but real sadness is never one dimensional. It’s never pure evil and annihilation. There is always a way out or something to be gained within it. In The Other World, there is no way out of their despair. It’s turtles all the way down.
Leaving ‘The Other World’
“A boring life is more fun than an interesting phone”
three months of low screentime later.
with adhd you really either make decisions in ten seconds or not at all
Being struck on the skull, second after second, with the blunt instrument of time.
— Daniel Poppick, "The Copywriter: A Novel" (Scribner, February 3, 2026)
have never understood the brand of adhd advice that’s like “you don’t have to do it all at once you can do a little bit of a task over time!” like you want me to come up with task initiation energy more than once for the SAME task? no thank you #allornothing
This just cracked my brain open after a lifetime of wrestling with this aspect of ADHD without ever really understanding this exact problem.
Absolutely bewildering to watch ADHDs starving themselves from anything that could feed their brains and nourish their souls and regenerate their bodies, and their acting surprised when their brains ignore their direct orders to go AWOL and loot for scraps of nourishment instead of working.
When exactly have you believed them that the living soul that you are can work forever motivated only by fear anger and shame?
Don't you understand that your body literally needs to be happy to keep you alive? That chemicals released when you're excited and happy are necessary for your brain to keep working? Are you unaware that chemicals produced when you're hugged by someone you trust are important to keep your guts working and also for your immune system? Do you think that neurotransmitters are optional pro feature that person needs to pay for?
You need to be alive first in order to work and happiness, satisfaction, contentment are all markers of you successfully surviving.
To work while being unhappy you need to make it a matter of survival: "I might die if I won't make this spreadsheet", "I'll starve if I won't do these chores".
How long you think you can keep yourself in survival mode until parts of your body start dying?
Are you aware that burnout is literally your body throwing a mutiny to keep you alive? It's literally your body saying "you said it's what we have to do to survive and it was a lie, we're taking away the steering wheell and the buttons and levers, you're demoted from captain to observer-advisor and from now on the survival boost mode is unavailable unless the threat to our survival is imminent and direct?"
Are you aware that you're descendant of an incredibly long line of people who survived? It means their bodies were shaped to make them survive for all costs, including straight up lying to their brains to ensure the survival.
If you're tired and hungry, productivity will be turned down, and if you'll try to circumvent it, your awareness of your productivity will be turned down too.
If you're unhappy for a long time, you'll find yourself looking for anything that looks like satisfaction or fullfiment, regardless of what you were planning to do.
Yes it is about "never sit down" adhd tip. I don't think I'm ever going to stop grieving about this. This line of thinking is what made me disabled and this line of thinking is what disabled and killed countless people.
You cannot bruteforce your way into functioning while depriving yourself of rest and care and happiness.
Anti-doomscrolling tips
Somebody recently asked me, upon seeing my low screentime, how I managed to (mostly) avoid doomscrolling. And really, the answer was quite simple; hobbies.
I, personally, like to identify as a ‘Jack of all trades’. There are simply so many things that I love doing, experiencing, and want to know, that it’s impossible for me to focus on one single thing.
Therefore, I have an almost never-ending list of hobbies, tucked safely into my notes app and scribbled in several half-used journals.
I strongly recommend anyone struggling with phone-use to make a list like this aswel; just write down one or two things you enjoy doing, and add something new to the list whenever you find something new to do. And then, hopefully, next time you grab your phone and find yourself opening tiktok, Instagram, or whatever you use to scroll, you’ll get yourself to open the notes app and pick another thing to do instead. (A second tip is to add hobbies/activities of all difficulty levels, for when you’re exhausted or when you need a challenge. Different energy levels ask for different activities.)
As an example, here’s my list;
HOBBIES
writing (fiction, writing prompts (fiction/journal), essays, journaling, letters, philosophising, reviews (movies/books/food), etc.)
research (random interests, Q&A, fiction-related (Harry Potter, Maze Runner, etc.), etc.)
art (sketching, drawing, photography, art walks (possibly + research at home afterward), etc.)
Spanish (music, puzzles, etc.)
exploration (discovering new places)
candle making
reading
alone time (no screen, nothing specific: just sit in your room or living room, perhaps browsing through bookshelves or collections. Boredom is the savior of the mind. Being alone with a simple pen and paper is also an option.)
books
studying (especially at the library)
gym
workouts
yoga/pilates
cycling
walking
sudoku puzzles
coloring
Junk journaling
Bullet journaling
Creating cookbooks/plant research/herb research/etc. pages in my journal (with text and drawings)
Being offline (no-screen challenges, for example)
Being outside
Hogwarts Legacy
Minecraft
Baking
Cooking
Calling friends
Lyrics (writing them or analysing existing ones)
Translating
(Mini) diamond paintings
3D puzzles
Working on my personal archive
DIYs
Puzzles
Listening to music
Raw dogging boredom
Trying to learn something new (instrument, sport, tricks, etc.)
Playing chess
Photo album
Organizing/tidying up
Spending time with pets
Taking a nap
Making lunch
Following tutorials
Meeting up with friends
Taking the train somewhere
Going to a café
Going to town
Working/Earning extra money/Selling things
Maths (seriously, it’s so fun)
What I’ve learned trying to use my phone less as someone with adhd:
The out of sight, out of mind shit is real. After deleting the app I used most on my phone I barely touched it (I still use said app just on a different device that I can’t realistically bring places)
Having a device that stays at home bc it’s expensive, delicate, or just hard to travel with where you have all your fun stuff has allowed me to maintain an online social life without dealing with the downsides of always being on a device in public
No longer bringing my phone to bed and instead bringing a clunkier device that’s harder to use lying down helped me work my way to not having one by my side every night
Doing something with my hands while watching something on TV or just by itself is helpful, for me that’s embroidery or traditional art (aka doodling in sketchbook)
It’s normal to be on social media and to see it as a vital way to maintain bonds with people who no longer or never have lived in the same region as you. If you wanna cut social media entirely that’s cool but don’t see it as a moral failing that you rely on it to keep in touch with people you don’t regularly see in person
I know it’s corny but watching an extremely basic barebones adhd friendly bullet journaling tutorial and then applying it to a pocket sized notebook I already owned was genuinely an improvement to waiting 20 years for google keep to load so I could type up a to-do or a reminder before I forget it
You will not forget what’s happening in the world by not being on a social media platform for upwards of 7 hours a day, and you can still spread important information even if you use it less than you previously did
My screen time for my phone and iPad together is usually 3-4 hours a day, about half of what it used to be, and I’m cool with that. as someone who draws on the iPad and who lives far away from most of their friends I rely on the iPad in particular, but I have better boundaries with it than I did my phone bc it big and so fucking expensive. Hope this helps anyone who might be thinking “it really do be that dang phone”.
what Big Tech doesn't tell you is that if you keep a bullet journal you can harvest your own personal data and nobody can even buy it for nefarious purposes
I am once again vexed by what the bullet journal has become, when there are people who could really find value in the simplistic organization method it was originally designed to be by someone with ADHD
I really think people need to accept the fact that their aesthetically markered and extravagantly washi taped notebooks are actually art journals or even scrapbooks or junk journals, not bullet journals as a tool to help stay organized
This. I was so hooked on the general idea years ago, but then got distracted by all the **aesthetics**. I bought fancy colour pencils, washi tape, rulers, made Dutch doors, drew monthly covers, got stressed to fill out all the templates … and totally forgot the most essential rule: this system is meant to cater to my specific needs, I don't have to pass a bar or please anyone but me. Whatever helps me is right, and if that means scruffy notes with a simple check mark, so be it.
It is so freeing.
How to GET SHIT DONE
Because it comes up a lot for all of us trying to manage schedules that slam more than 24 hours of work into a day, I thought I would make one giant productivity post for everyone to help us all out (including myself).
10 steps to GET MORE SHIT DONE in a day
JUST START—I think most of us find that sometimes the hardest part to starting a task is overcoming the “ugh—fuck this shit, I don’t want to do this” feeling. So, trick yourself into it. Instead of saying you’re going to work for 8 hours, tell yourself you’ll do an hour… and watch that hour turn into 2 or 3 or 4 magically.
Action fights anxiety—If you’re terrified of a project hanging over your head, just start it!! Instead of waiting till tomorrow or next week when things might be right, just start right now! Do something to help yourself feel better about it. You’ll feel better getting through the rest of your day if you don’t have the fear. If you wake up at 2 am panicked you haven’t replied to an email, get up and do it now so you can go back to sleep in peace!
Make a list—Never underestimate the power of writing it down and crossing it off.
Take care of yourself—It’s hard to work when you’re tired or hungry or haven’t worked out, etc. So, prioritize—make yourself #1! You’re fucking worth it. So work out, eat breakfast, sleep 6 or 8 or 9 hours (whatever you need). Do whatever it takes to make yourself feel ready to take on the day.
Stay organized—I have a slightly OCD-type personality. If the desk is a mess, it’s hard for me to do my work. So put things back where they belong, take the time to keep things tidy so you can do your best work.
Don’t multitask—We all think we’re good at this—but the truth is we’re shit. We’re complete and utter shit at multitasking. Do one thing very well instead of four things poorly.
Shut off—Turning away from the work for just a minute can really decrease your productivity. Unless you are actively waiting on a text to hear the test results from your mother’s biopsy or an emergency call from your best friend that your house is burning down almost anything else can wait another hour until you finish your task. Even an email from your boss can probably wait another 10 minutes for you to finish what you’re working on.
Be competitive—Be a better you than you were yesterday. Do more. Show yesterday-you that they’re a lazy bitch and you can do better!
Refocus—here’s a list of how to do it in 3 minutes or less.
Give a fuck!!—If you actually care about what you’re doing, you’ll be more motivated to do it!
10 very specific ways to get more shit done
Work when you work best—This rule that people work better in the morning is bullshit. Some people work best from 5 am to 7 am, but some of us do our best work from 1 pm to 3 pm or 10 pm to midnight. Work when you do your best work and get things done—whenever that is!!
Localize—Put it all in one place. Stop moving between eight study resources or you’ll fail to focus on one thing well—instead condense all your study materials into one place and then focus on that ONE thing.
Multi-task on the stuff that doesn’t matter—It takes no brain power to clean a counter, so when you have to clean your apartment you can also return the phone calls you’ve put off. When you have to stand in line for coffee you can also answer emails, while your lunch is heating in the microwave you can put away the dishes in the dish washer. Get more done in the spaces between.
Be contrary—Who says you have to buy groceries on the busiest shopping day? Go at a weird time when other people won’t be there and you can get in and out faster. Don’t waste your time waiting in line just because that’s when everyone else does something. Do things when you can do it fastest!! Hit the post office at 3 pm when everyone else is at work, go to the gym late in the evening after the post-work rush is over. Do it when you can get it done fast!
Buy the right shit—Go ahead and buy the best tool for the task. If you don’t set yourself up right, you’ll just spend more time fighting for things to work than actually working!!
In arm’s reach or screw it—When you sit down to work, get all the things you need ready to go so you don’t have to keep getting up for more paper or some water. If it’s not within arm’s reach, move it or screw it!
Bribe yourself—Never underestimate the power of a piece of chocolate, or a night out at the end of the week, or an online shopping spree for that shirt you’ve wanted.
Turn it up (or turn it down)—If you hate the quiet play music, but if the sound is too distracting shut it the fuck off. Work in a space that works for you.
Deep end—welcome to it--Do the hard stuff first. You’ll lose energy as the day goes on, so leave the easy things for when you’re tired and don’t need as much will power.
One touch—You’ve probably heard this one before, but here’s my irreverent version of it. Pick it up—don’t put it the fuck down until you’re done. If you get an email from your professor saying you all have to complete a required form, do the fucking form now and email it back immediately. Why spend more time later having to look at that damn email again? If you realize you’re out of paper towels, check your level of tin foil and tissues while you’re at it so you can go to the store one time. Do it once, do it right, don’t fuck around.
Oh, and don’t forget to give yourself a break when you need it. Not every day can be a day where everything gets done. :)
