I quite like Dana K. White’s system for this. When putting something away she asks “if I were looking for this item where would I look for it first?” And wherever that place is is where the item goes. Now I keep all my Sharpie markers in the silverware drawer and I can always find one.

Dana White doesn’t write specifically for the adhd crowd, but I swear she’s the first organizer that has ever made sense to me. There’s more to her system than this, obviously, but not much, and it almost never involves buying more bins.

Priorities!

As someone who once put some tortillas on the griddle, turned to the fridge to get cheese, and…walked right out of the room and back to my desk, I 100% agree. I sometimes feel dumb that I am literally setting 1 or 2 minute timers, but it’s better than burning stuff. I don’t always need them, but they are really helpful during times of stress when I’m especially preoccupied with other things.

Ha, it’s no big secret - just my compulsion to respond to the little ? in the corner of a photo in the photos app that indicates someone in the photo is unknown. So my People album is my family & friends plus so many LOTR characters, Molly the American Girl doll, Kim K, Billy Joel looking like Anakin Skywalker, Joseph from the Old Testament, and so many more.

I was going to say they are really inexpensive, but I just had a look and the current prices are at least double what I paid. I wish I’d stocked up.

That’s great! I have a little pill bottle cap that has a digital timer in it. Every time the bottle is opened the timer starts over. It has helped me out many times.

So first off, I can 100% commiserate. I could have written basically the same thing you did about your preferred sleep schedule and sometimes just giving up and staying awake. Clearly you already know that is not sustainable (and I’ll say as someone a decade-ish older that I feel the impact of sleep-deprivation even more now than I did when I was 27). I have had to cancel appointments when I’ve had nights like those and I know I’m not good to drive. I also know that my meds are not very effective when I’m sleep-deprived.

The fact that things changed suddenly after 3 months is probably something to bring up with your doctor. I don’t know what it would be, but they may have some idea. They may also be able to prescribe something for sleep, but I can’t speak much to that.

Having a plan for changes is good, but it also looks to me like you are just doing too much, and you can’t schedule your way out of that. You may have to really look at what you’re doing and decide where your priorities are (and one of those priorities should be some downtime). I do think it’s good to put some boundaries in place for yourself about screentime, etc, but I’d warn against being too rigid, as that is something that has just added to my anxiety in the past, which then means that I lie awake even later, etc. I do better when I set up little rewards for myself instead (sadly I am very motivated by a weekend dessert, haha).

Obviously I don’t know your specific work situation and your vocab doesn’t sound US, so you can take or leave this, but from the outside I’m seeing a few things:

• if you taking off a day or two will truly be a catastrophe for the other employees then the company is poorly-managed. Does no one ever take any time off?
• Are you salaried (so all this overtime is unpaid?) Are you doing it because you feel obligated/guilty? Have you slipped into prioritizing your coworkers over your actual family/girlfriend? I know you said your work is very important to you, but is this the only place you could do that type of work?
• If you are coming in an hour late every day anyway, would it be possible to make that your official start time? That could take off some of the pressure of being “late”.

This made me laugh and cry

112 for me. I think a lot of them are dead and I go through and purge periodically. I really wish there was a way to organize your subscriptions in YouTube. I want a folder with the ones I actually watch and another with all the channels I subscribed to so I wouldn’t forget about them, or when I was briefly really into the history of barcodes (or whatever). I guess I could do two accounts, but I’d never keep up with it.

It is hard and I don’t have a great answer, but one thing I try to do for myself is to always have something scheduled that I am looking forward to. It can be something big (like a concert) or small (weekend donuts). It really helps me to feel like I am not spending my whole life working.