Why Standard Planners Work Poorly For People With ADD

Everyone believes that people with ADD are "organizationally challenged." The truth is that about one in three (33%) of ADD people have difficultly converting short-term memory to long-term memory - their "working memory" doesn't retain information as well as most people's working memory does. (About 12% of non-ADD people also have this difficulty.) And so ADD people constantly look for tools to help us be better organized, even though the tools often don't work as well for us as for most people without ADD. One reason is that most organizers and planners are developed by and for linear thinkers. Many ADD people (and creative people in general) are non-linear/holistic thinkers. The difference is that linear thinkers can (and need to) block out other areas of a project while they work on one piece and look ahead to the next. Planners designed for linear thinkers rely heavily on prioritized lists.

In contrast, non-linear/holistic thinkers don't block out the peripherals. We can (and need to) see all the pieces of a project and the relationships between them. We need to be able to start anywhere and go anywhere, in any order. This is why a project tree view - as in ADD Planner - is so effective for non-linear thinkers (and also why a project tree looks complicated to linear thinkers). Another reason why the project tree view is extremely valuable for ADD people is that it provides a place to hold all the information related to a project. In effect, it acts like an external working memory.