The ADHD brain dump that actually gets filed

A thought you have in the car is gone by the time you get home. You know the feeling. It was important. It was right there. Now it's nowhere. An ADHD brain dump is supposed to catch it.

The usual answer is a brain dump: get it all out of your head and onto paper. That part works. The problem is what happens next. An ADHD brain dump that nobody files is just a pile of notes you never look at again.

Catch it anywhere, file it once a day

The fix was one rule: catch it anywhere, file it once a day.

Catching and filing are two different jobs. When I tried to do both at once, on a small phone screen, in a hurry, the catching stopped. So now catching is the only job during the day.

• I keep one note called Inbox, pinned to the top of my notes app.
• When a thought arrives, I add a line. No tidying. "insurance renewal??" is a perfectly good entry.
• I use the microphone. Talking is faster than typing, and it works while I'm walking.

Let the assistant do the filing

At the end of the day, I hand the Inbox to my assistant. It sorts each line into the right place in my notes, puts anything with a date where the morning will see it, and clears the Inbox for tomorrow.

It works the other way too. Some days I just talk for two minutes about everything on my mind. What comes back is a list, with the urgent things at the top.

Why this works for me

My brain is good at noticing things. It's bad at holding them. This splits the work so each part does what it's good at. I notice. The notebook holds. The assistant sorts.

And nothing depends on me remembering to look at the pile, because the pile gets emptied every day.

What to do next

Make one note on your phone right now. Call it Inbox and pin it to the top. The next time a thought shows up, put it there, messy is fine. Tonight, read it back and file each line somewhere you'll see it again.

This is my own experience, not a doctor's advice. The kit walks you through the Inbox and the daily filing, step by step.