Organization in the Workplace for ADD / ADHD

Organization in the Workplace

Organization means many things to many people and sometimes when you have ADHD this means chaos. However, organization is paramount to your success in the workplace, so when we think about organization there are a number of simple strategies we can use to be more effective.

We can ask for help in prioritizing tasks. This is a request I hear often in the workplace from many workers who may or may not have ADD/ADHD. The simplest way to achieve this is for one to ask one’s boss “Hey, I have all these projects on my list and I want to do the best job I can for you. Could you help me by telling me what your priorities are for these projects and perhaps tell me the sequence you prefer I do them in.” With this approach you are accomplishing two things, telling your boss that you want to do good work for him/her and telling them that you want to align your work with their priorities. Both of these things are music to a boss’s ear. However in some situations, going to your boss may be overwhelming or unproductive. If requesting that help from your boss doesn’t seem like a good option for now, perhaps you can ask a trusted co-worker or a family member or friend to help you.

When it comes to tracking progress and what needs to be completed; I use large, colorful and visual calendars to help me. For example if I have six key projects that I am working on, I may assign a different color to each of the projects. My assistant and I map out or assign time to work on each of the projects by their assigned color and at the same time blend our filing system folders/pages to be in the same color. My virtual assistant has taught me to go a step further in that if the assigned color is yellow, the folder is yellow and the working papers (post its, index cards, copy paper) are also yellow to make sure all papers stay together with the project. We also post all projects on large calendars in our offices which are also color coded so all pertinent dates of the project are in yellow. This approach makes it easy to pull an entire project out of the file drawer at once or look up at the calendar to understand what is on my plate at one time. Also if a random paper is left on my desk I know exactly what project it goes with and exactly where to file it just by the color.

Having some of these structures in place can even make responding to requests (in person, email or phone) easy if someone wishes to talk about the yellow project we can look at the calendar board and be able to meet within the time frame of the project.

By implementing either of these simple tools is a way to start your project of organization at the workplace. Both strategies will help you to keep your focus on the priorities at hand and completing the projects you have on your plate. Remember as we implement any key strategy or tool, our fieldwork is to notice what works and doesn’t work so we can continue to evolve and improve our systems to find what works best for us.