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How to actually use a todo list when you have ADHD

If you have ADHD, you've probably tried a todo list at some point. Maybe several. Maybe you've tried Reminders, Todoist, Notion, a bullet journal, sticky notes on the monitor, a whiteboard, and that one app someone on Reddit swore by. And maybe, after a few days or weeks of genuine effort, each one quietly died.

The common assumption is that you lacked discipline. That you just need to try harder, or find the right app, or watch one more YouTube video about productivity systems. But the real problem is usually much simpler than that, and it has almost nothing to do with willpower.

You're not lazy… You're forgetting.

Fernando Borretti, a software engineer with ADHD, describes the todo list not as a productivity tool but as a "cognitive prosthesis." An augmentation for broken long-term memory. That framing changes everything.

There's a type of memory called prospective memory, which is your ability to remember to do something in the future. Not remembering what happened yesterday, but remembering that you need to call the dentist tomorrow, or pick up milk on the way home, or reply to that email after lunch. A 2019 study found that adults with ADHD have significant deficits in prospective memory, and that this deficit actually mediates the link between ADHD symptoms and procrastination. In other words, a lot of what looks like procrastination is actually forgetting.

Think about how many projects you've abandoned not because you lost interest, but because you simply forgot you'd started them. You begin reading a book, leave it on a table where it's out of sight for most of the day, and three weeks later you notice it with the bookmark still on page 20. You didn't decide to stop reading. You just forgot it was something you were doing.

This is the core problem that a todo list solves, and it's worth stating clearly: the todo list remembers things so your brain doesn't have to. That's it. Everything else, the prioritisation, the scheduling, the satisfying little checkmarks, all of that is secondary. The primary function is memory.

The one habit to rule them all

Borretti makes a point that I think is underappreciated. A todo list turns many habits into one habit.

Without one, forming habits means remembering each commitment individually. "I will make my bed every day." "I will floss every night." "I will take vitamin D in the morning." You might manage one of these for a few days. By the third day, you've forgotten at least one of them. Not because you're careless, but because your prospective memory simply dropped it.

With a todo list that has recurring tasks, you don't need to remember any of those individual commitments. You only need one habit: checking the list. The list remembers everything else. It's a remarkably elegant compression of cognitive load, and for ADHD brains it can be the difference between building new habits and perpetually failing to.

What a good setup looks like

Borretti describes a structure that reveals something important about how ADHD brains need information organised. The specifics will vary depending on what tool you use, but the principles are universal.

The first thing is that ad-hoc tasks, your chores, errands, one-off items, need to live somewhere with a date attached. If a task doesn't have a date, it's a wish, not a commitment.

Then there's a place for half-formed intentions. "Learn how to use a slide rule." "Write a journalling app." "Go penguin watching." These need to exist somewhere outside your head so they stop circling around your working memory, but they shouldn't sit alongside today's tasks or they'll just create noise. In Fabric, you might capture these as quick notes or voice memos and let them live in your library until you're ready to promote one into a real project.

Recurring tasks are where things get powerful. Daily, weekly, monthly reminders for the small things you want to become habits: take vitamin D, clear your inboxes, meditate. These are the commitments that your prospective memory will absolutely drop within 72 hours if left to its own devices.

And then there are your active projects, which need to be visible. Not buried in a subfolder or nested three levels deep, but somewhere you'll actually see them every time you open the app. Borretti keeps his in the sidebar of his todo list for exactly this reason. In Fabric, your projects, files, and notes all live in a searchable workspace where they can't quietly disappear on you. Out of sight is out of mind, and for ADHD brains those two things are essentially identical.

The hidden cost of staying organised

Here's where it gets tricky. Maintaining a productivity system is itself an executive function task. Filing things in the right place, tagging them correctly, keeping the todo list clean and current, all of this requires exactly the kind of sustained organisational effort that ADHD makes difficult.

There's something researchers describe as the cognitive overhead of compensatory strategies. Adults with ADHD who appear organised from the outside are often spending enormous effort maintaining the system itself, effort that runs continuously in the background and eats into the bandwidth they need for actual work. The person who looks like they have it together is sometimes barely holding on.

This is the paradox of productivity tools for ADHD. You need a system because your brain can't self-organise. But maintaining the system also requires your brain to self-organise. You can see where this goes.

Borretti is honest about this tension. He describes spending time adding emoji icons to his tasks (🧼 for chores, ✉️ for emails) because it makes the list more pleasant to use, even though it adds friction. For him the tradeoff is worth it because enjoying the system means he actually uses it. But he also warns against the opposite extreme: the person with five todo list apps and everything categorised and indexed, whose material output is zero. A hundred tasks completed daily, and when you look closely they're all "brush my teeth" and "reorganise my bookshelf."

There's a spectrum here and it's important to know where you fall on it.

What if the system maintained itself?

This is the question I find most interesting. What if instead of you organising the list, the list organised itself?

Most todo lists and note-taking tools assume that you'll do the filing. You create the folder structure, you assign the tags, you decide where things go. For a neurotypical brain that's fine. For an ADHD brain it's an ongoing tax that often kills the system entirely.

The alternative is a tool that handles the organisation for you. You dump everything in, ideas and tasks and bookmarks and notes and voice memos, and AI does the tagging and connecting. You find things later by searching for what they mean rather than remembering where you filed them. The cognitive prosthesis becomes a little more autonomous, which means the executive function cost of maintaining it drops, which means you're more likely to actually keep using it.

This matters because the graveyard of abandoned productivity systems isn't filled with bad tools. It's filled with tools that required more maintenance than the person could sustain. The best system for ADHD isn't necessarily the most powerful one. It's the one whose upkeep demands the least from you.

The real measure

You'll know your system is working when you stop thinking about it. When checking the list in the morning is as automatic as making coffee. When you capture an idea without deliberating about where it should go. When a project you started three months ago is still visible, still tracked, still moving forward, even if slowly.

The point was never to become a productivity guru. The point was to stop forgetting.

Inspired by Fernando Borretti's Notes on Managing ADHD.