Quit Relying On Your Brain

How to externalize like a champion and make your bed

Here’s an ADHD conundrum for ya:

Creating habits requires remembering that we are creating a habit. And how do you remember a thing when you’ve spent a lifetime not doing the thing?

And if your answer is, “know your why” or “if it’s important you’ll remember” then perhaps you aren’t familiar with how amazing an ADHD brain is at forgetting.

One of the world’s most simplest of tasks, making the bed, has been next to impossible for me for the past week. I’m writing about it today because this process came with some great insights I wanted to share.

At ADHD Big Brother, the members and I post daily accountability, these are the things we want to get done during the day, the commitments we are making to ourselves, and the community, and the productivity challenges/games we are playing.

I wanted to get in the habit of making my bed every morning, because I like how it feels to have a reset bed, I like the look of it, it offers me a sense of cleanliness, and it’s fun to get into a bed when it’s made. It’s a whole bunch of little “Isn’t that nice?”’s .

I created a challenge in the community for others to play along side me if they wanted to do it as well. The goal: 30 days in a row of making my bed within one hour of waking up.

Seems like I teed it up pretty nicely. But morning after morning, I would wake up, get my coffee, make breakfast for Alistair, sit down at my computer and check emails and then I’d get ready to copy paste my yesterday post from Daily Accountability so I could update the various sections and that’s when I would see “Make the Bed Challenge” Day 1 of 30…and realize that I didn’t do it. I forgot.

And then I forgot again.

And then I forgot again.

As it turns out, my brain has spent close to 50 years NOT making the bed every morning. That auto-pilot is strong!

The obvious question to ask here is what is getting in the way of me making my bed? The answer: I forget

Next question: What can I do to externalize this so I don’t have to rely on remembering? Because remembering clearly isn’t working.

In one of the posts, I put it out to the community to see what other’s might suggest. And here is the power of being a part of a engaged ADHD community, I got answers that did not include “Man, you just gotta make it important enough!”

One member has a morning checklist, another uses a physical basket called the morning basket that they go through each morning. Putting the note in there would work for him. Another suggestion was to set a second alarm that goes off 30 minutes after my morning alarm, and this one would have the label “MAKE BED!” on it.

AHA! That third one seemed like it would work for me. I tried it. It WORKED!

Awesome! I’m on the way to becoming a morning bed maker.

And then one morning I didn’t have to wake up until later, and the whole system crashed. I forgot.

Greeeaaaat. Back to the community I go, confessing that I didn’t do this easy fucking thing…oh, the humility and shame! But what’s cool about ADHDBB is that we can confess a “fail” without humility or shame. Yes, I’m frustrated, but I said I wanted to get to 30 days in a row, so I’m going to continue to troubleshoot.

Troubleshooting with ADHD does not include beating ourselves up because we are idiots, weak, stupid. It does, however, include a healthy dose of realizing that our brain has it’s own agenda most of the time.

In a conversation with a couple members during one of our ‘audio on’ decluttering body double sessions, I was lamenting about my bed making struggle. While we organized our various areas on a zoom call, a brilliant idea came up, and I’ve implemented it. Here is now what I do to make my bed in the morning and…it works!

How I make my bed in the morning

On my nightstand now exists a stack of orange post-it notes. I’ve written MAKE BED on about 20 of them so I’ll never be looking at a blank post-it. At night, when I go to bed (I already have the habit built where I put the phone on the dresser before bed. That way I have to get out of bed to turn it off. There’s your hack for getting out of bed in the morning!) …where was I…oh, when I put the phone on the dresser I place a MAKE BED post-it note on the face of the phone.

Done and done.

When I get out of bed to turn the alarm off, I have to move the post-it out of the way. And abracadabra, MAKE BED is put into my eyeballs, and I can act on it right away because that is how a person with ADHD remembers to make a bed.

I am not worried about whether or not I have to do this for the rest of my life. It will be interesting to see, after 30 days, if it becomes a new auto-pilot.

Let’s check in in 30 days! Or come join me at ADHDBB and let’s form great habits together!