Procedure Guides
One of the most essential parts of my ADHD toolkit is procedure guides or procedure docs.
Because ADHD affects working memory and memory recollection, it’s really easy to miss important steps when completing recurring tasks. Sometimes the missed stuff results in minor inconveniences. Other times, it can have big, big downstream effects.
A procedure guide or procedure doc is a checklist for a recurring task.
I have a special folder for these in my Obsidian notebook, with a special filter to keep them from showing up in my regular list of todos (my Obsidian boilerplate will teach you how to do this).
I use them for any task I repeat periodically, whether it’s something I do every week, or just once a year. I have procedure guides for…
- Packing for a vacation
- Kicking off a coaching session
- Opening the pool for the season
- Closing the pool for the season
- Setting up my camper at a campsite
- Breaking down my camper at a campsite
- Winterizing my camper
- Running my holiday sale
- Migrating code from one server to another
- And on and on…
For example, here’s my procedure guide for coaching…
- [ ] Turn on automated captions
- [ ] Read the intro/greeting
- [ ] Update date of next session in the student portal
- [ ] Schedule announcements for day before and 1 hour before next session
I also include the text of the intro, so I don’t forget it.
You may find over time that you automatically do most of the stuff in a procedure guide without even looking at it. That’s great!
It’s still a good idea to go through and look at it anyways, just to make sure you didn’t miss anything important.