059. 6 Science-Backed ADHD Organization Hacks for Home & Work

More than 23 million U.S. adults are living with ADHD in 2025, and even more of us share homes or offices with someone who is. In this episode, I share six science-backed hacks that make daily life flow easier for ADHD brains (and everyone else who juggles work, family, and clutter).

What you’ll learn 🎧

1. Cognitive off-loading: turn sticky-notes and “outboxes” into an external brain
2. Micro-checklists: the 3-item list that builds self-trust in 2 minutes a night
3. Visible timer + 25-minute blocks: defeat time-blindness with a $5 kitchen timer
4. 60-second declutter sprint: how clearing your visual field calms your cortex
5. Movement bursts: a 30-second energy reset that boosts executive function
6. The Two-Step Rule: slash steps ➜ slash friction ➜ slash abandoned tasks

Free resource

🗓️ Free class → Painlessly Declutter Your Kitchen in Just a Weekend
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Transcript

More than 23 million adults in the US are living with ADHD in 2025. Millions more share homes and offices with them. If those numbers are hitting close to home for you, keep listening. Because in this episode, you’ll hear six science‑backed organizing hacks that turn daily friction into better flow for ADHD brains.
Hey, welcome to Organizing for Beautiful Living, the podcast for working moms and entrepreneur moms that provides sustainable organizing tips for your home, work and life.

I’m Zee Siman, Professional Organizer and Productivity Consultant, and I’m here to share simple ideas that don’t take a lot of time so you can love your home, excel at work, and have the time to enjoy both without stress or overwhelm. 

Ready to get beautifully organized? Let’s make it happen!
One of the things organizers notice with ADHD clients is “friction overload.” I use the word friction because that’s exactly what it feels like. Tiny barriers getting in the way of getting things done at home or at work. 
Visual cues are hidden, there are too many steps to take to get one task done, or there’s time blindness, meaning you don’t realize how much time is passing, how long you’ve been on a task, or even what time of day it is, and these frictions can balloon into tasks getting abandoned and into persistent clutter.
Today we are dismantling that friction, one hack at a time.

Hack number one is what scientists call cognitive off‑loading. I call it parking your brain outside your head. When you’re dealing with ADHD, you’re often carrying so much in your brain, so much you’re trying to remember, that you can’t make sense of it or focus on the one, next thing you need to do. Well, researchers found that when we place cues right where the action happens, we remember them far more reliably. Makes sense, right?

And so that’s what this first hack is about. Get what’s in your brain out into the open. When you have a thought about what you need to do or to get done, whether it’s today or 6 months from now, write it down!

You can use your phone’s notes app for this, but it’s also just as simple to have a notebook in a bunch of different rooms in your house to jot things down so you don’t forget your thought. 

For me, it’s almost inevitable that I think of things to do while I’m brushing my teeth! If that’s you, too, well then you pause and write it down in your phone, or yes, keep a notebook and pen in the top drawer of your bathroom.

And wherever those notebooks are, keep some post-it notes there too. Cause if it’s something that you need to remember right away, or when you wake up tomorrow morning, it would be cool to see that post-it right on your bathroom mirror, wouldn’t it?

And you remember to do that task right away.

So the post-it note is a visual cue that reminds you loud and clear that you need to do this thing now. It gets the task out of your brain and in front of your eyes. 

And if you’re doing this in multiple areas of your house, like you have a notebook and post-its in the kitchen, and you do the same at your office at work, you will see the visual cue, the post-it, where the action needs to take place.

You need to take the trash out? Well put the post-it on the lid of the trash can, or on the cabinet door where your trash can is, so that as you pass by next time, you remember to take that trash out.

You need to buy more toothpaste? Put the post-it on your bathroom mirror at night, and in the morning, you add “toothpaste” to your shopping list.

There are other visual cues you can use. You don’t need to plaster your house or office with post-its, not at all. 

The idea is to create a visual cue at the exact spot where the task begins. 

Something that trips up a lot of people, even those of us without ADHD, is remembering to take papers where they need to go. Like getting tax forms to the post office by a particular date (I am guilty of that one), or health forms to the pediatrician’s office before sports try-outs. Well a great visual cue to remember those things is a basket or tray near the front door. Or actually  maybe it’s in the kitchen, because honestly, near the front door can be kind of crowded sometimes, yeah? So a tray or basket marked “Outbox” on the kitchen counter is your visual cue, and you check it every morning before anyone heads out the door. And that way, tomorrow’s letters can’t hide under last week’s homework in your office, right? Instead they’re staring you in the face as you make breakfast, giving you time to place them in your bag, or in your kids’ backpacks.

Why does this matter for ADHD? Well a 2023 study showed that adults with ADHD complete more tasks that they intended to do when the visual cue is in plain sight. So off‑loading the thoughts from within your brain frees your mental bandwidth for your creativity and for parenting instead of trying to play memory gymnastics every single day, which is what it feels like to me sometimes.

Hack two is the micro‑checklist. In a 2025 study, adults who used a three‑item daily checklist plus a 20‑minute weekend reset improved their organization more than participants who used only medication.

We’re talking about a micro-checklist here of only 3 important things that you’re sure you’ll complete and check off. 

So each evening, go ahead and jot down tomorrow’s 3 things: one home task, like wipe off the kitchen counter before going to bed, one work task, like make 1 client follow-up call today, and one self-care task like drink one bottle of water, or schedule one social connection. You want to place that list where you can’t ignore it in the morning: maybe it’s on the fridge door, or on your phone’s lock‑screen, or even stuck on your coffee mug.

Consistency beats length here. You want only 3 checkboxes that you always check off, or cross off, to build trust in yourself, and it only takes two minutes of your night, maximum, to create that list. 

It might be the exact same list every single day. It’s the act of crossing off the list each day that creates confidence and momentum and then that spreads out to other tasks of your day, helping you on the road to being organized in every part of your life. 

And this 3-item micro-checklist is supported by a 20-minute weekend reset. That could be resetting your physical space at home, like clearing off surfaces in your kitchen and your living room, or it could also be resetting your week by creating a weekly plan. 

I tend to do this reset on Friday afternoons, at the start of my weekend rather than at the end of it, because it feels better to me that way. But you need to choose which day is best for you. A lot of people like Sunday night. I just find that if I try to reset on Sunday night, my anxiety levels jump way up because I’m actively thinking about Monday morning and then I don’t have a restful end to my weekend. Whereas if I’ve already dealt with all of that on Friday, I tend to enjoy my Sunday evenings more.

Next, for Hack number 3, we’re going to borrow from Cognitive‑Behavioral Therapy for ADHD and something called the Swedish Living SMART study. So hack number 3 is to use a visible countdown timer. 

Shorter timespans work better for people with ADHD to focus on one task. So try 15 to 25-minute sessions, and then a 5 minute break.

You want to place a big visible countdown timer, and this can be just you know using your phone’s timer, or you can use a kitchen timer or whatever you’ve got for this. But it’s important to place that timer within your line of sight, and then work in these shorter, 15 to 25‑minute, bursts.

During that window of time, you’re going to work on only the task you choose, could be  from your micro-checklist. When the alarm rings, stand up, sip water, stretch during a 5 minute break, and then either reset the timer and continue for another 15 to 25-minute session until that task is done and you check it off, or switch tasks if you need to.

The science here is that the external time cues handles the clock so your brain can stay present on your task. And only having that one task in mind because you know you’ll be reminded when 15 minutes or 25 minutes is up, means that your brain isn’t constantly worried about, hey, how much time has passed? What time is it anyway? Am I going to be late picking the kids up from school? Am I going to be late to that meeting? Nope. You don’t worry about that. You only work on trying to get your task done.

Now, I said get your micro-checklist done, well great, and those, of course, won’t take you all day. So the idea is that beyond your micro-checklist, you develop a list of your Top 3 tasks for the day or for the week for each of the categories we talked about: home, work and self care. And these 3 tasks are ones that will move you forward in each of those areas, right?

This way, when your micro-checklist is checked off, you can continue on to your Top 3 tasks, knowing that if you get nothing else done, except these 3 things today or this week, you’re still moving forward. But start with a micro checklist.

OK, Hack 4 is a personal favorite because it’s quick and it feels like magic: it’s a one‑minute declutter sprint before focused work. 

A 2024 study showed that visual clutter literally scrambles information flow in our primary visual cortex. Guys, that means that you’re getting visual input, but you can’t make sense of it, also you don’t know what’s important, and you can’t focus on a task!

How do you unscramble the information? Well, you need to get rid of the visual clutter. A quick and easy way to do this is to set that same timer for 60 seconds. Then you’re going to do a speed tidy-up: Scoop up all your stray pens and put them in your pen jar, close the craft‑drawer, gather the files all over your desk and place them in a neat pile, recycle all the post-its you already took care of. Leave only what supports the task at hand. You’ll feel your shoulders literally relax as the visual noise in front of you disappears. I promise.

And then you can actually focus on your tasks, one thing at a time.

All right, Hack 5 taps into your body’s own executive‑function booster. A 2025 analysis of a bunch of randomized trials found that short, moderate‑intensity exercise improves working memory and flexible thinking in ADHD.

So when you sense some mental fog happening, pause for a moment and start to move. I joke with my sister that when her 25 minute task-block is up, she should go to the hallway outside her office and lunge-walk down towards the bathroom. She works in a public place, and she will never do that! 

But if you’re at home, you could dance to one upbeat song with the kids. If you’re at work, try jogging in place for 30 seconds, or doing some jumping jacks, or quickly go up and down a flight of stairs. You’ll return to your desk clearer and probably kinder to yourself, too.

And think about stacking this short burst of movement onto your 5-minute timer breaks in between worksessions. It’ll make the routine seamless.

And the final hack, Hack number 6, is to keep organizing tasks to 2-steps or fewer, as much as possible. 

This hack comes from classic behavior‑analysis research on something called response effort. OK, put on your engineering hat for a second: In this case, the quality of the response was inversely proportional to the amount of effort required to complete the task. In other words, the quality of a behavior drops as the number of physical steps increase to get that task done.

Let’s think about something we already mentioned today, like one of the micro-tasks was to wipe down the kitchen counter before going to bed. So what are the actual steps you need to do that task? Well, you need to open the cabinet and grab your cleaning spray and cloth. That’s 2 steps: open the cabinet is step one, and take out the cleaning spray and cloth is step 2. Great! But imagine that you keep your cleaning spray in a lazy susan turntable along with 15 other sprays and cleaners under the sink, and your cleaning cloths are in a basket in a cabinet in the laundry room. So now how many steps is it going to take to get that task done? One: Open the kitchen cabinet, 2: turn the turntable until you find the cleaning spray, 3: take out the cleaning spray, 4: go to the laundry room, 5: open the cabinet, 6: take out a cleaning cloth. 

6 steps versus 2. You need so much more effort to clean the kitchen counter when your spray is kept with all those other sprays in the lazy susan and cleaning cloths are in the laundry room. And that might just be why you put it off every night, right? Like, you take out the cleaning spray, but you leave it there and tell yourself, “Ah! I’ll do it in the morning.I’ll go to the laundry room in the morning and get a cloth,” But it probably won't get done.

So the Two‑Step Rule is simple: whittle down the number of steps it takes you to do tasks that are important, that you need to do often, and that are a pain in the neck for you. As few steps as possible is what you want! I say 2 steps. That’s kind of a sweet spot if you can get there. 

In our example of wiping down the kitchen counters, then, I would take that kitchen spray out of the lazy susan (or actually, I would get rid of a bunch of those other sprays because we often have way more cleaning supplies than we actually need), and I would put it right up front in the cabinet, and stack a bunch of cleaning cloths in a basket next to it. 2 steps, then: open cabinet, take out cleaner and cloth.

So as you go about your daily tasks this week, take note of especially the repetitive chores and the ones that are the biggest pains to you - things like filing, putting away laundry, tracking your finances, things like that - and design repetitive chores to require no more than two steps, if you can manage it. I mean, of course, some things just cannot be done in 2 steps, but we’re shooting for as close to 2 as possible, or fewer.

And to make that happen, you might need, and want, to do some kind of unconventional things. Maybe you don’t file your paperwork into file folders and things like that, but instead, you pile your paperwork, in very broad categories, into bins or baskets. This is totally doable, and just because the conventional thinking is that we need to have file cabinets or file boxes and vertical file folders that are each labeled and separated, well that’s not the only way to keep your paperwork organized. 

When I work with clients, we really explore this unconventionality that could work best for them, whether they have ADHD or not. 

As an example, I recently worked with a client on her main closet, and you know, she started moving her things very conventionally, putting all her tops in one drawer, hanging all her pants in one section, but pretty soon, she got to one pair of pants and she was kind of waffling about where to put it. She first put it with her other pants, but then she said, “Well, you know, actually, I wear this only on special occasions. Can I have a special occasions section?” Well, of course she could, but I had a feeling that that wasn’t exactly it. So I kept asking her questions, and we quickly found that she preferred to organize her clothes by outfit: so one top matched with one bottom, whether it was hanging or in a drawer. Now for me, I would never be able to find anything if my closet was set up like that. But to her, it took one step away in the mornings when she’s getting ready: She didn’t have to go to one section to take a top, then to another section to find a bottom that matches it. She just grabbed the entire outfit and took it to the bathroom to shower and get dressed. One step.

You know, one of the simplest things you can do if you want to reduce one step is to get rid of lids on things. For kids’ spaces, especially, I try to remove lids to make taking toys out and putting them away is one step easier for everyone in the house. So if you’d like to try the 2-step rule, think about what lids can I get rid of?

OK so quick review of the 6 Science-Backed ADHD Organization Hacks for Home & Work:

Visual cues to allow for cognitive offloading, or parking your brain outside your head by getting your ideas and your to-dos out of your head and into a notebook or post-it note, and placing visual cues in the places where the action is going to happen.

Micro‑checklists, which is 3 tiny, consistent tasks that you can cross off every day to build trust in yourself.

A Visible timer & 15 to 25‑minute time blocks, which externalizes the clock so your brain doesn’t worry about time anymore and you can focus on the task instead

A One‑minute declutter sprint, which silences the visual noise fast so you can make sense of what you’re experiencing and you can focus better.

Movement bursts, where you exercise for an executive‑function reboot, and even 30 seconds of movement can help, and you can build those in during your 5 minute breaks between 25-minute worksessions, and

The Two‑Step Rule, because when you slash steps, you slash friction that prevents you from doing things.

So remember, less friction equals consistent follow‑through, especially for ADHD brains that are already managing decision fatigue.

So here’s a gentle challenge for you: After this episode, pick one annoying chore, count the steps, and then redesign it until you hit two or fewer. And then share that with me. You can send me a DM on Instagram @fireflybridgeorganizing.

And here’s another reminder that I’m going to be giving a free class at the start of the summer to show you how to Painlessly Declutter Your Kitchen in Just a Weekend (and So The Clutter Doesn’t Come Back).
 
If you want to be on the list to be notified when that class is happening, please go to fireflybridge.com/update and sign up to be updated, ok? I’ll put the link into the show notes for you.
 
Thank you for spending part of your day with me. I’ll see you on the next episode!