Stop Relying on Your Memory: What Actually Works for ADHD Productivity with Alexis Haselberger
Memory is not a system. It never was. And for ADHD brains, treating it like one is where everything falls apart.
Alexis Haselberger has built her entire coaching practice around this idea. She is a time management and productivity coach with ADHD herself, and she has taught over 240,000 people, including teams at Google, Lyft, and Workday, to stop fighting their brains and start designing around them.
I had her on the podcast, and she is one of those guests who gives you something actionable before she even introduces herself.
The quick win: write everything down, every time.
Alexis is direct about this. Memory is not an option. Do not even pretend it is.
If a text comes in and you cannot respond right now, you write “respond to Julie” on your task list. If a thought surfaces in the shower, you get it out of your head and into a system the moment you can. If a LinkedIn message catches your eye, it goes on the list, or it disappears.
This sounds almost insultingly simple. But the reason most ADHD task systems collapse is not because the system is wrong. It is because we keep asking our brains to hold things they were never designed to hold.
The moment you stop negotiating with memory and just write everything down, the cognitive load drops.
Your brain is not a storage device. Stop using it like one.
The four-part framework she uses with everyone.
Alexis works with her clients through four areas:
Knowing yourself
Task management
Prioritization
Planning
In that order, for a reason.
Knowing yourself means getting honest about your chronotype, your energy patterns, and how you actually respond to expectations. A lot of her clients come to her wanting to become morning people. Her response is warm and direct: waking up has been the hardest part of her day since she was five. She has built her life around that reality, not against it. She can be at her desk ten minutes after her alarm because everything else is already set up. The morning routine is not a battle she fights. It is a problem she solved.
Task management means getting everything out of your head and into an external system. Not because ADHD brains are broken. Because no brain, not a neurotypical one, not anyone’s, is reliable for remembering everything that needs to happen.
Prioritization does not mean labeling things high, medium, or low. Those labels become meaningless fast. Everything ends up urgent. What actually works is asking: when am I going to do the next step on this? Assign a date. Make the next action small enough that it is stupider not to do it than to do it. That is the bar.
Planning means expanding your horizon so you are not rethinking the same task every day. It also means being honest about what actually fits. If you have time for five things tomorrow, put five things on the list. Not twenty-five. When you put twenty-five things on a list and do five of them, you end the day feeling behind even though you did exactly what was possible. Put five things on the list, do five things, and the day closes differently.
The Someday/Maybe list.
I love this one. Alexis talks about separating aspiration from obligation, and most productive people struggle with it because everything feels important.
The Someday/Maybe list is where aspirational ideas live when they are real but not current. Not this week, not allocated time yet, not something you have committed to. You move it there with a paired recurring task to review it every few weeks.
This does two things. It gets the idea out of your working system, where it is adding pressure without producing results. And it protects you from forgetting it entirely, because the review task brings it back. When you do the review, you will often find you already did some of them on a whim. Others will feel irrelevant. A few will graduate to real commitments. Most will stay where they are, and that is fine.
Alexis keeps a Someday/Maybe list with over 500 items on it. And she is completely at peace with the fact that most of them will never happen. What matters is that she did not forget them, and she did not let them clutter her actual priorities.
Keep your goals visible.
One of the most practical things Alexis does is keep her current goals in two places: repeating daily in her task system, and as all-day events across the top of her calendar week.
Looking at your calendar to figure out your day, you see your goals sitting there. It changes what you say yes to. When someone asks for a meeting, or a new project lands, you can ask whether it supports what you said was important this week. If it does not, it is a lot easier to say no or not right now when the reason is literally visible.
She also does flexible time blocking, squishy time blocking, she calls it. Not every task locked to every hour, but a realistic shape for the week. Things will shift. That is expected. The point is starting with an honest picture of what can actually fit.
Expect your systems to stop working.
Your systems will stop working. Not because you failed. Not because the system was wrong. Because ADHD brains crave novelty, a system that worked eventually stops generating enough friction and interest to keep running.
Alexis reframes this as normal experimentation. You try something, it works for a while, it stops working, you adjust. Sometimes the adjustment period is fast, lots of changes over a few weeks. Sometimes you hit something that lasts years. When you hit one that lasts, she says, you should feel genuinely lucky and celebrate it. It is not the default. It is a gift.
This mindset removes the demoralization from the cycle. You are not starting over. You are iterating. There is a difference.
Good enough is not settling.
There is no perfect system. Once something is delivering around 80 to 85 percent of what you need, adopt it and work around the edges. The time spent chasing perfection in a productivity system is time not spent on the actual work, or on rest.
She uses a pass/fail test framing: if you only needed a passing grade and you scored 71 percent, you studied too hard. With limited time and limited energy, the question is always where to put your effort so it actually moves things forward. Not every area of life requires your best. Most of it requires your presence and your reasonable effort, and that is enough.
The structure is what creates freedom.
She said the structure is what gives you the freedom to follow your squirrel brain sometimes. When the systems are in place, you are not fighting yourself to remember what needs to happen. You are not carrying the mental load of tracking everything.
You have room to wonder, to daydream, to follow the thing that caught your attention, because the important things are taken care of.
This is not about doing more. It is about designing a structure that fits who you are, so you are not spending your energy fighting it.
Find Alexis at alexishaselberger.com. She has a free distraction action plan specifically for ADHD, a weekly blog she has published consistently for eight years, and a podcast called Do More Stress Less.
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Listen to my conversation with Alexis Haselberger - podcast episode below - be sure to subscribe to the show - we would LOVE for you to join us!!
