A well-crafted ADHD tool to boost your productivity
Hi everyone,
After hundreds of calls with ADHDers across the globe and having a founder who has ADHD, we saw a painful problem: Managing information and staying productive can be especially challenging for people with ADHD.
- How often do we find ourselves drowning in information?
- Struggling to find the notes we need?
- Wasting hours synthesizing insights from scattered notes only to still forget key points?
- Not to mention the frustration of a long, overwhelming to-do list staring at us all the time.
Tools designed for the general population, like Notion and Evernote, seemed promising initially.
However, as ADHDers delved deeper into these tools, they found that these apps only added chaos to the chaos, requiring a huge effort to learn and maintain the system.
Seeing their struggle and attempts to duct-tape multiple scattered tools to manage their work and life, we believe there should be a better way—a crafted method, tool, or approach to allow people with ADHD to thrive and stay on top of their lives.
I. What do people with ADHD Need?
We divide the productivity process into two phases:
- Information Management: This phase involves capturing, organizing, retrieving, and creating new content.
- Getting Things Done: This phase covers starting tasks to complete them.
Based on the insights we gathered, each phase needs to meet specific criteria to be productive for people with ADHD.
1. Information Management
For ADHDers, information management involves constant overwhelm and frequent context switching to capture and manage information effectively.
Here’s a common scenario:
- Imagine needing to go through five different steps just to jot something down—it’s such a hassle that we often decide not to do it at all.
- Then, we have to break our concentration to decide on appropriate tags for those notes (insane!).
- That’s to make finding notes easier, but gosh we still wasted a lot of time for it.
- Finally, switching tabs constantly to take notes while reading or brainstorming with AI further disrupts our workflow.
That’s why here’s what we need to be effective in this phase
- Easy Input: As our mind is a whirlwind of ideas, thoughts, and tasks, with ADHD, capturing these thoughts quickly is crucial. But most tools make taking a simple into a complex process!
- Fast Retrieval: Accessing saved information should be seamless. Because we get distracted easily, we need to get information without the extra steps of scrolling through numerous notes. But now, we feel like we always need to spend lots of time to find what we need
- Memory Aids: Remembering what we saved is tough, because we saved a lot! So we need to be suggested with relevant context, and information right when we possibly need them
- Content Creation: Creating new ideas from existing thoughts needs to happen in an environment without context switching. This means having everything we need in one place to avoid distractions and maintain your creative flow.
2. Getting Things Done
We struggle to get important things done and keep track of work.
- Often, we feel overwhelmed, not knowing where to start or what to prioritize. This confusion can lead to distraction and falling behind on deadlines.
- Procrastination becomes common, adding stress as we rush to complete tasks at the last minute. While hyperfocus might help us meet deadlines, the quality of our work may suffer due to time constraints.
- Worse, in some cases, we might completely forget about certain tasks, letting ourselves and others down.
That’s why here’s what we need for our todo list:
- Smallest – Next step Identification: We were often overwhelmed by the sheer volume of tasks. Identifying what needs to be done was just the beginning. Specifically, we need to identify the smallest possible steps, but honestly, this is not an easy task when we are already overwhelmed by the bigger picture.
- Prioritization: Tasks must be prioritized based on urgency and importance, then integrated into your schedule with deadlines. However, this felt like an insurmountable challenge, especially when we had too many tasks and urgency and importance blurred together.
- Task Execution: Easily accessing task context when needed, having an accountability partner for motivation, and receiving reminders to stay on task is essential. Flexibility to delay tasks during hyperfocus, while ensuring important tasks get done, is also crucial.
II. The Limitations of General Solutions
General solutions like Notion, Evernote, Obdisian, or Google Keep often fall short because they:
- Become Overly Complicated: As the amount of information scales, these tools can become overwhelming and difficult to manage.
- Lack of Context Switching Reduction: They don’t reduce context switching, making it harder to stay focused and efficient.
- Not ADHD-focus: They don’t show they take into account the problem of ADHD in their development
For ADHD users this means a less-than-optimal solution for their lives
III. The future empowered by a well-crafted ADHD tool
What if there was another way—a tool crafted specifically for us, rather than having to piece together scattered solutions?
We believe that with the right supportive tool, people with ADHD can take a significant step toward mastering their work and life, experiencing peace of mind instead of chaos.
- Imagine saving hours of tedious work each day and using that time for more value-creating tasks
- Imagine feeling in control, knowing exactly what’s going on and what needs to be done next. Picture yourself working efficiently, staying in your focus flow, and producing high-quality work every single day.
- Imagine turning in your tasks ahead of deadlines, surprising your boss, and satisfying everyone involved.
- Every morning, you wake up motivated and confident, knowing precisely what to tackle. You also feel peaceful and clear-minded during the day.
- At each night, imagine looking back and realizing you’ve accomplished the most important tasks, moving the needle forward.
How much better would your life be? This is what we believe will happen when your needs are met 😀
III. That tool is coming
Saner.ai was born with that vision in mind.
We aim to create a tool that assists you in both work and life, making everything easier and more effective.
That’s why we’ve incorporated features like information management with voice notes, mobile shortcuts, auto-tagging, a personal AI assistant with natural language search, and AI alongside notes to help you work easier
We will also offer task breakdowns, prioritization with interactive AI, and reminders soon
With Saner.ai, you can effortlessly manage information, tasks, and eventually, your life.
Starting is simple. You can import thousands of notes from your current app instantly, and our user-friendly interface ensures you know where to start and what to do right away.
Our ultimate purpose is to make your life with Saner.ai one of ease, focus, and achievement.
