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Anyone can be messy or have those days where they just forget to pack their lunch or inexplicably find their keys in the freezer. With ADHD, though, disorganization reaches a new level. It’s chronic and pervasive, often in spite of our best effort to stay organized. Even if we manage to appear organized outwardly, it takes monumental effort to maintain the image—and we still end up slipping now and again.

How Disorganization Manifests in ADHD

Despite how much it can impact your life; it can also be hard to define exactly what disorganization means or what it looks like because it appears in different ways for different people. It can show up everywhere, too: in our physical environment, our thinking and planning, and even the way we speak. Here are some of the different signs you can look for.

In your physical environment, disorganization looks like:

In thinking and planning, disorganization looks like:

In speaking, disorganization looks like:

Why Are People with ADHD Disorganized?

The short answer: it’s probably due to abnormalities in the frontal cortex. Many of the most common and disruptive symptoms of ADHD are related to cognitive functions that happen in that region of the brain.

In one large-scale study where researchers scanned the brains of over 2,200 subjects with ADHD and 1,900 without, they found significant structural differences in the frontal cortex of the subjects with ADHD.

When you combine that with the tendency to just drop a thing where it is when you’re done using it, instead of putting it back where it should go, the result is a very cluttered space.

While the person who created the mess can navigate it better than others, it can still lead to problems. Visual cues don’t work as well if the objects you intentionally put out get buried under objects you just left out because you were done with them.

In work or school, this can lead to a scatter of half-completed projects and difficulty keeping track of your work.

How to Cope with Disorganization

When looking for ways to stay organized as someone with ADHD, an important first step is managing your expectations. A little bit of messiness, both in your environment and in your daily life, comes with the territory. The goal is to find strategies that help minimize the negative consequences of disorganization, without demanding perfection or wasting your energy “fixing” things that are more of a quirk than a problem.

Make Your Own Planner

If you have ADHD, you’ve no doubt heard the “use a planner” line more times than you can count. You’ve probably also tried to start using one more times than you can count. In my experience, it takes a lot of trial and error to figure out a method that works for you and there’s no one right way to do it.

With that in mind, here are some things that work for me:

Use Mind Maps Instead of Outlines

When you start writing, write about whichever one of those pieces strikes you first. Jump around. You can pull it all together in the end and use your editing time to make sure it’s coherent and flows smoothly.

For non-writing projects, this can be your way of breaking down an overwhelming task into more manageable chunks and it gives you dozens of doors into the project so you can start wherever your brain wants to start.

Get Rid of Excess Clutter

Keeping objects out to act as visual cues can be helpful. But if your home is piled with things that you just haven’t put away, that kind of clutter can make it difficult to find things. If the thought of cleaning it all up is too overwhelming, just start with one task. Toss out the junk mail or put the dirty dishes in the sink. Do one thing to make the space slightly less cluttered.

Once you get your space free of the clutter, do your best to maintain it. Set some time aside in your planner for decluttering.

Simplify Your Possessions

You can apply this logic to everything in your home. If you live alone or with just one or two others, you don’t really need 12 of every dish. That doesn’t mean you have to give up things you love, though. Don’t ditch your clothes if you love fashion, for example. Just try to get rid of things you don’t actually use or things you don’t need as much of.

Use Notes as Visual Cues

If you have a habit of leaving the house without remembering to bring everything you need, tape a note at eye level on your front door with a checklist of things you should make sure you have before you go. You can also stick Post-it notes on your fridge or bathroom mirror for short term reminders, like remembering to bring your insurance card with you to your doctor’s appointment or to bring that pie you baked for family dinner this weekend.

Dissociation in ADHD

2 SourcesVerywell Mind uses only high-quality sources, including peer-reviewed studies, to support the facts within our articles. Read oureditorial processto learn more about how we fact-check and keep our content accurate, reliable, and trustworthy.Jepsen IB, Hougaard E, Matthiesen ST, Lambek R.A systematic review and meta-analysis of narrative language abilities in children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.Res Child Adolesc Psychopathol. Published online November 22, 2021.Hoogman M, Muetzel R, Guimaraes JP, et al.Brain imaging of the cortex in ADHD: a coordinated analysis of large-scale clinical and population-based samples.AJP. 2019;176(7):531-542.

2 Sources

Verywell Mind uses only high-quality sources, including peer-reviewed studies, to support the facts within our articles. Read oureditorial processto learn more about how we fact-check and keep our content accurate, reliable, and trustworthy.Jepsen IB, Hougaard E, Matthiesen ST, Lambek R.A systematic review and meta-analysis of narrative language abilities in children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.Res Child Adolesc Psychopathol. Published online November 22, 2021.Hoogman M, Muetzel R, Guimaraes JP, et al.Brain imaging of the cortex in ADHD: a coordinated analysis of large-scale clinical and population-based samples.AJP. 2019;176(7):531-542.

Verywell Mind uses only high-quality sources, including peer-reviewed studies, to support the facts within our articles. Read oureditorial processto learn more about how we fact-check and keep our content accurate, reliable, and trustworthy.

Jepsen IB, Hougaard E, Matthiesen ST, Lambek R.A systematic review and meta-analysis of narrative language abilities in children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.Res Child Adolesc Psychopathol. Published online November 22, 2021.Hoogman M, Muetzel R, Guimaraes JP, et al.Brain imaging of the cortex in ADHD: a coordinated analysis of large-scale clinical and population-based samples.AJP. 2019;176(7):531-542.

Jepsen IB, Hougaard E, Matthiesen ST, Lambek R.A systematic review and meta-analysis of narrative language abilities in children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.Res Child Adolesc Psychopathol. Published online November 22, 2021.

Hoogman M, Muetzel R, Guimaraes JP, et al.Brain imaging of the cortex in ADHD: a coordinated analysis of large-scale clinical and population-based samples.AJP. 2019;176(7):531-542.

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