190: Break This Organizing Rule if You Have ADHD – Look For Organizing Advice Online

Break the Rule: Stop Randomly Googling “Organizing Tips”

Every tenth episode, I take an organizing, decluttering, planning, or productivity rule that’s out there as standard monkey-brain advice and explain why I think our fish brains are better off breaking it. Today’s rule: turning to a quick online search whenever you want organizing advice.

How I stumbled onto this one

Every time a tenth episode rolls around, I usually Google around for the latest organizing chatter to see what’s worth responding to. This time, I searched “top organizing tips of 2024.” The very first result was a Southern Living article published right before New Year’s Eve, titled “Six Small Ways to Start 2024 on a More Organized Foot.” Notice the word small. That sounded digestible, so I clicked in expecting to pick one tip apart for the podcast.

The list that started it all

The article laid out all six tips right up front, which I appreciated: thoughtfully put away your holiday decorations, tackle a quick closet revamp, go through the freezer, clean out your inbox, corral your papers, and create an action plan for the year. If your ADHD brain works anything like mine, you’re not reading each of these in depth. You’re skimming, catching headlines, maybe glancing at a photo. And once I actually looked at that list, I felt immediately overwhelmed. What part of “revamp a closet” or “go through your freezer” is small? Clean out your inbox, when mine currently has an infuriating, ever-regenerating pile of subscriptions I’ve unsubscribed from a hundred times? Corral your papers, does shoving them in a box and calling it a stack count? And the sixth tip, create an action plan for the year, made me want to ask: shouldn’t that have been step one? Isn’t that actually the container all the other five belong inside of?

Why these roundup articles are dangerous for us

Each of those six items is really its own multi-step project, dressed up to look like a quick, easy hit. Our brains can already struggle to hold onto a two-step process, and here we’d been handed six completely different projects across six completely different areas of the house, each needing its own breakdown into smaller actions. It sounds brilliant if you’re a monkey brain who can naturally chunk and sequence that kind of list on your own. For the rest of us, it just adds six new sources of overwhelm to the pile.

The rule to break

Be genuinely cautious about typing broad, generic phrases like “top organizing tips” into Google, Pinterest, or Instagram and expecting something usable to come back. Roundup articles like that are built for browsing, not for actually doing.

What to do instead

Get specific before you search. If you already know your freezer is the problem, search “best ways to organize a freezer.” If paper clutter on your kitchen counter is the actual issue, search exactly that. A narrow, specific search is far more likely to land you on something you can act on immediately, instead of a buffet of six unrelated projects.

And, of course, my honest best advice: keep listening here, since I try to hand you one bite-sized, actionable idea at a time instead of a roundup. If you want the framework behind how I break things down, go back to episode 186 on planning and acting according to your why.

A bright spot from the membership group

We had our very first Work on Your Why With Me Wednesday recently, a Zoom call where everyone set a timer, announced what they’d spend the next twenty minutes on, muted their mics, and just worked alongside each other. Nobody was doing the same task, but everyone made progress, and there was something genuinely helpful about that quiet body-doubling energy. If you don’t have access to a group like that right now, you can recreate a piece of it: put a podcast in your ears, set a timer, and just work like someone’s alongside you.

Your practical, actionable step

The next time you feel the pull to Google “organizing tips,” stop and get specific about the one actual space or problem in front of you first. Search that instead, and let it lead you to one concrete action rather than a list of six.

Until next time, continue to choose joy.