As part of my involvement with the New England Chapter of the National Assoc. of Professional Organizers. I’ll be a featured speaker at our Go Month organizational expo this Saturday.  Click here for details!

As of tonight, I am officially a member of the MGH Patients and Families Advisor Council. I’m super excited to be on this council and help make policy for one the best hospitals in the world. Apparently, there is much strategic planning and HIPA related stuff. So I may not be able to share too much, but I will do my best to keep everyone updated on what I can share.

I recently had a grandparent post on our CHADD website about… let’s say overwhelming stress while managing her ADHD grandchild. I’m sure many parents/ care givers end up in a similar place. I wanted to pass along two resources I’ve become aware of. If you are worried about losing control with your kids… Parental Stress line: 800-632-8188   or   www.parentshelpingparents.org And, if you are worried about you… Samaritans: 877-870-4673 The courageous thing to do is ask for help.

So, I can’t give all my secrets away on my blog, but…  There are three things we need to manage to be successful human beings. As ADHDers we may struggle with all three. They are Tasks, Time & Stuff. I’ll speak to managing task for a minute now. The best way I have found to manage tasks for us to a “simple” To Do List. However that list is not so simple. By my count there are 10 specific aspect to a really great and useful TDL. I’ll talk a little about one today.  The idea is to have one master list for things to get done in your personal life and one master list of things to get done at work I usually talk to clients for about 10 minutes about this aspect of the List and explore it pretty good depth. However, today I’m going to talk about the exception to the rule.  When we have one huge project with many moving parts or many sub-tasks it is usually better to create a side list. (The is the advanced lesson for most, once they TDL basics are mostly mastered.) I thought to mention this today, because I have a big project in my house. Since our second was born in April, the basement has been a $#!% storm of old baby stuff, new baby stuff, hand me downs, donations, etc. Not to mention my tools… As a professional organizer, it is the one place in my life, I’d be afraid to let a client see. And it really bugs me because the ease of finding what I need has decreased radically.  I went down the other day to game plan. I will admit I was overwhelmed. So, I picked one small aspect of the room and tackled that, then another small…

If you or your child takes a generic type of Concerta you need to read this: FDA generic Concerta update If you don’t know what generics are, please check out two posts ago for the basics.

Many ADHD children struggle with getting up to speed in terms of executing regular every day correctly. I find this particularly applies to handling the morning and evening routines. I don’t know if my five year old has ADHD or not, but I often realize that I am teaching him things in a way that would work for me. (I think there is an older post about how I give our weekend structure by letting him know what’s coming next.) Another way that I realize I have taught him something by giving it structure is getting dressed independently in the morning. As soon as he was old enough to get dressed on his own (with supervision,) I started laying his clothes out the way you see in the picture. That taught him the right order of putting stuff on. Now (on his cooperative days) he can go in to his room pick out his outfit and get dressed completely on his own. Of course this isn’t every day and sometime it seems to take him 3 hours to do it. But we haven’t had any days where he comes down with his undies on the outside on not wearing any at all. I’d say that’s pretty good!

If you are not familiar with how generic medications work, here are the basics: It often cost hundreds of millions of dollars to develop a new drug. As a result, new drugs are protected from competition for a period of time after development. (Currently 12 years.) They are the only game in town and the company who owns the patent can charge top dollar to make back the investment they made developing the drug. Once that period of time expires other companies are permitted to offer competing “generic” drugs that are deemed equivalent to the original.  Those generic drugs are required to have the same active ingredients and be “bioequivilent” to the original, meaning that that active ingredient is delivered and works in the same way. I will tell you from personal experience that this is not always exactly true. I respond differently to some generics versus the name brand original and in some cases I respond differently to the generics made by different companies. This can present a problem for many of us.  The insurance companies don’t recognize that the generics don’t always work the same. In fact, pharmacies are mandated to substitute a generic when available unless the doctor specifically writes “no substitution” on the prescription. In the larger picture this makes sense and helps keep our healthcare cost down. Though, in many cases, even with the doctors authorization the name brand will be prohibitively more expensive. In fact, there is one medication that I take to counteract stimulant induced insomnia that the insurance won’t cover at all, even at a tier 3 price. Luckily there is one generic that works pretty well and I can have my pharmacist get it. So, you’re not necessarily crazy if you think your generic doesn’t quite feel like the original, or you don’t think it is working quite the same since it “changed” shape…

NAPO New England Tips. Check out this link. I am often featured with a tip of the month… and the other organizers have good stuff too.

If you had told me, when I was 14, that you had a magic lamp with a powerful genie and that he (or she) would let me change one thing about myself I would not have hesitated a second. I would have wished away my ADHD without a second thought. School was hard… harder than it should have been knowing how smart I was. Being organized was nearly impossible. Impulsivity was still sometimes an issue. And I didn’t feel awesome about myself.  Over time I taught myself strategies to compensate. I learned to be successful. I survived school and found things I was good at. Eventually, I learned to like myself and recognize all the great qualities that I have, even if there hadn’t been any credit for those things in school. Not coincidentally, I found a great partner in my wife once I learned to love myself.  Now I recognize that me and my ADHD are one and the same. I think of them like a sapling growing through a chainlink fence. Eventually they become inseparable. I know now that I wouldn’t be the me that I am with my ADHD and all that comes with it, both good and bad. My empathy, love, creativity, problem solving, passion, sense of humor are all intertwined with my ADHD. So in that sense, I am thankful for my ADHD. It has shaped who I am. And who I am is pretty great, if you ask me. On this Thanksgiving, it is my hope that we can all be thankful for out total packages, ADHD and all. Happy Thanksgiving to all.

Clients and parents often ask me if I can feel the medication work. I can’t remember if I’ve posted about this before or not. Here’s the short answer: I don’t feel like a switch has been flicked, but there is a noticeable change in how I feel and my behavior. My Concerta takes 41 – 44 minutes to kick in. (No guff! It is that precise.) I’ve a sluggish morning… not really. I’ve already had one client, sorted laundry and run two load, and done the dishes. But after my client when my alarm for my pills went off, I wasn’t feeling doing more work. I crashed on the couch to watch a little Walking Dead. (Don’t tell me what happens. I’m a few episodes behind on the DVR.) I said to myself that I would watch few segments until I “felt like” working. Despite not being able to see the clock in the living room, when I got up to come back in the office and start working, it read 11:41. (41 minutes post-Concerta.) Coincidence? I think not.  In addition to the fact that the medication does allow me to concentrate, I think the most important take away is that I wasn’t exactly sitting at my desk “not concentrating” until I was able to concentrate. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to concentrate. So I didn’t even try. Call it a break if you want. But, it wan’t avoidance or procrastination. From outside it might have looked like those things. The point is that if you are always avoiding sitting down to do your concentration heavy stuff… it’s probably because you know you can’t concentrate. Attention it self is probably the issue.  I”m not going to edit this. No time! I hope is makes sense…

So, I always tell my clients that they will, inevitably, regret getting rid of between 1 and 5 items after their organizational purge. My last two postings about getting rid of my T-Shirts and organizing dry storage reminded me that I have been meaning to post on this. When I was organizing “Dry Storage” I wished I still had extra fish boxes that I recently got rid of. Fish boxes are the plastic containers that are labeled with masking tape in the picture. I was annoyed that I got rid of them after years of keeping them in the basement just recently.  But, we have to weight the possibility that we won’t have something that we might need against the net positives that are brought to our life by getting rid of what we don’t need. That’s just part of life. We can not be infinitely prepared for all possibilities. To try to be is a fools errand. Live your life being prepared for now and having what you need for now, and you will always have the opportunity to adapt in the moment. If you life your life for the “what if’s” you miss the moment you are in and rob yourself of the life you could be living now. By the way… by the time I got rid of the stuff I didn’t need, I actually had an extra fish box that I could use to fill another need somewhere else in the house. Witness the power of the purge!

One thing that I feel the need to impress upon my organizing clients is that organizing is not a one time thing. As much time and energy we as we put in to the initial organizing project to get your home where it needs to be, that is not the end of it. Any system needs upkeep. You don’t expect to buy a car or a house and never have to fix anything, right? Well, you organization is the same way. Lives change, needs change, better systems evolve or are discovered. And, at the very least, we need to do some upkeep on our system. Now, if any system needs to be reorganized every few weeks, it’s probably not the best system. But the best systems need to be “touched” once in a while. Some systems work best when that system is… systematized in terms of how often you do. Most function best when we find the time to spruce them up when they need it. I’ll give you some examples of both from my life. I actually put on my calendar (schedule with myself!) every January to go through my files in my office. I weed out the old, make files for new categories that have been born in the last year, and gather all of my tax documents to be ready for that favorite time of year. I go through my receipts and save the ones that I need to keep for larger ticket items and toss the rest. When I started doing this, I was in the habit of keeping too much stuff, so it took a long time. Now, even with my personal and business stuff it takes less than half a day in the office of listening to my punk rock favorites and sorting papers.…